Marc Andreessen on productivity, scheduling, reading habits, work
a16z.com
a16z.com
My day is about 40% calendar-based, and at the end of every week I feel like I've gotten nearly zero done. I've tried to cut out all the meetings I can, but still. Between must-attend review meetings, 1:1s, "planning sessions"... and then it's brutally difficult to make the 1-hour breaks between meetings to be actually productive.
Anyone doing better than me at this, or do I need to just accept the feeling of non-productivity?
Except... I need to have 1:1s with team, and I need to attend my manager's staff meeting, and his 1:1, and his weekly status review, and my own reviews, and my director's weekly meeting, and our division's weekly all-hands, and standups.
Holy fucking shit. Maybe it's just time to send my own management a note on how much overhead we're drowning in.
My solution was to get really pushy with meeting organisers to (a) cut the default time from an hour to 30 minutes; (b) schedule them back-to-back (if not, I'd decline and ask them to be rescheduled); (c) merge similar meetings; (d) tell each program manager I'd attend max 1 weekly meeting and one monthly steering committee, and everything else would be async; (e) drop off any call that didn't have a clear agenda and deliverables.
Before doing this, I told each of the programs' execs and dev leads what I was doing, making it clear it was the only way I could balance my roles as team lead, workstream lead and individual contributor.
The other thing is to drop any feeling of guilt for dropping off calls that aren't productive.
"If, by the end of the week, it feels as if we've completed what we expected to do in one day, then we should consider it a successful week".
Otherwise... endless frustration.
On top of that, your or my results may vary. What if his "tools" made you, your family and/or manager miserable? Is that "success."
I'm an older white male and even I'm troubled by the old white male paradigm of success. That system works well for some. But it's less and less so for the rest of us. I'm not saying it's wrong per se. Only that we'd all be wise to think outside that paradigm. To consider optimizing for things other than the usual suspects.
If we take two of the most well known, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca is well known to have been quite hypocritical. He apparently lived quit a hedonistic life. And reading the Meditations, I see Marcus Aurelius constantly admonishing, himslef for his failings to stick to the stoic principles; or reminding himself to do so.[0]
I personally think that those that seek out specific philosophies are often those that need them the most; not those that fit them the best. I'm extremely drawn to stoic philosophy, but am definitely not stoic in character! Personal philosophies especially. It reminds me of this scene in Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson goes meditating with Chris Treger, and says the following afterwards: "All told we were in there about 6 hour, and no I was not meditating. I just stood there quietly breathing. There were no thougths in my head whatsoever. My mind was blank. I don’t know what the hell these other crack pots are doing". The irony being that he's so good at meditation that he sees no value in the practice.
[0] Nietszche might well say that this means the stoic life was too unnatural to be followed without failure; if it's most well known proponents couldn't even stick to it. I certainly disagree there.
If the meetings themselves bother you, and not some imagined "lack of productivity" then start sabotaging your value in meetings. If you keep being useful, you will keep being invited. Only allow yourself to be perceived as "useful" doing the things you want to do.
What I do is force the decision on those who are there to make this sort of decision: management.
That is, all my estimates include my honest assessment of all the time I will spend on meetings, etc. Then I can suggest that this could be shortened if I could skip this meeting and that meeting if they are deemed less important.
That way I'm being useful while skipping meetings. In fact, I'm so useful that the time I can spare on meetings is very limited ;)
Now, on the other hand, if the decision is made that the meetings are more important then when the dev. schedule slips it has nothing to do with me.
If yes, then do you consider others individual success as part of your own productivity? If you do consider your team's work as part of your productiveness, why do you feel like you are unproductive? If you don't, you probably need to look at longer time horizons and letting go of being as much of an IC.
If your team doesn't meet its goals, then I agree you are not as 'productive' as one would desire. Generally best to re-prioritize.
For a few weeks, send out reminders to other teams you collaborate with that "X is no meeting day for the team, we'd appreciate your understanding". If anyone schedules something on X day, politely ask for it to be rescheduled to a different day.
For the first few weeks it'll be hard, esp. because there'll be a lot of last minute meetings, or planned meetings with members from different teams but after the initial hiccups you more or less have an entire day every week to focus on what you want to focus on and that is a crazy productivity multiplier. A nice side-effect is that it has led to better asynchronous processes as well (eg. people write much more instead of making decisions during a meeting with the whole team etc.)
In my team, we initially started it off with "No team meetings on Wednesdays", but pretty soon team members realized how freeing it is to have no meetings at all for an entire day, so we started avoiding even personal meetings on Wednesday. Fairly soon, other teams saw the productivity gains we were getting and also started observing the same on Wednesdays.
Slowly, we're considering to having no meetings on 2 days a week (Wednesday was an easy choice because of it's location in the week, finding the second day is harder), esp now that other teams also adopted Wednesday.
With Covid, specifically for people working at companies like mine which thrived in a non-remote environment, the need for everything to be done/decided in meetings and an unsubstantiated FOMO has crept into most of our lives. And we really need to start trying to fix that through process rather than pushing everyone into a trench of non-productive but up-to-speed.
I know, I know, I sound like a douche already. I used to hate early mornings. Then I met my partner, and she’d get up early, and slowly it just happened. Now it’s me that sets the alarm.
Here’s the schedule: 5am wake up. Take a full hour to drink tea and read the news and eat some cereal or whatever. Go slow. Don’t go to the gym, that’s barbaric.
6am. Stretch a bit. 6:30am, sit down, start work. Ideally already have an idea of what you want to do – plan it the night before. DO NOT JUST OPEN YOUR EMAIL. By the time everyone else has settled in at 9:30am, you’ve already done all of the productive stuff.
It helps if you can block out your calendar until 11am, which I do, and it’s mostly respected. So I get from ~6am until 11am to myself. Magic.
On the topic of planning your day the day before, I can thoroughly recommend that as well. Check out the app Sorted3 (that’s a superscript for ‘cubed’) for iOS, that’s changed my life.
Oh, and of course if you’re up at 5am you need to be in bed early too. It’s 20:39 here in Canberra and I’m already tucked in. Night night. x
When do you see friends? When do you exercise? When do you go out to eat? Watch a film? Play video games?
Seems like that entire routine is about maximising your time working.
I'd rather be somewhat inefficient at work if it means I can have a balance which means I enjoy my life.
I wake at 430a and work-out first thing. I start working around 730a. I'm usually in bed around 9. If I'm in a creative mode, I can shorten the workout a bit and grab an extra hour in the mornings to write, etc.
I am usually done with job-work around 4p. My family and I, if we go out go out early. We joke we have an "early empty restaurant" habit. We usually watch a show or two each night (or Youtube playlists, movies). Our family things are running, hiking, working out, dog outings.
I see "friends" maybe once/month. That's all I need (should be said -- most people have a cancellation rate on "plans" -- so I'll make plans, but only have to show up periodically because people end up with conflicts; don't know how other people manage this, but it does make me reluctant to increase the "planning" requests from other people).
I do stuff with my son most days (gym, disc golf, pickle/raquetball, tennis), but he also goes to his mother's half-time. My partner goes out of her way to see her friends a few times/month (book club, girls group, happy hours).
Thing is, we don't drink. Not never-ever, but almost-never. One night out.. a few drinks.. upends our flow for a few days. I don't wake up wanting to get at things. Weekends we tend to do MORE of the list above (gym workout in the morning, disc golf in the afternoon, pickle ball in the evening, etc).
Video games? I've never played them. My son plays Minecraft/KSP 60-90 minutes/night, before bed.
And yes, I'm old enough to have a teenage son and I WFH.
We do drink (weekends, a nice cocktail on the front porch), we don’t play video games (I used to when I was younger, but have no desire now), and we typically watch one episode of something with dinner. That’s all the TV I need. I have plenty of time that I could be watching more TV, we just choose not to.
Like, I have a ton of time to read and do my hobby projects. A ton.
I also do them through the day, because I work flexibly and can do things like cycle to the shops for the groceries at 11am just because I want to.
See my sibling comment here about fitness, and also not working Monday.
If it seems depressing I failed in my description. I apologise. It’s actually incredibly relaxing. My partner and I often joke that it feels like we’re already retired. I’m 44 and I work 36-40 hours/week for a large IT integrator!
Edit: I just realised another thing. No kids. We don’t want them. My god I don’t know how you people fit kids in. So, that helps a lot.
Yesterday (I don’t work Mondays - getting up at 5am means I fit 36-40 hours in to Tue-Fri) we cycled to then walked up the hill after breakfast. That plus a couple of walks to town and back did me right.
Today it’ll probably be walks and perhaps a cycle to the shops which are a bit further away. I’m not a gym type, never have been. My physiology lets me get away with it.
Top tip for keeping fit: don’t own a car. :-)
Sleep deprivation is the worst thing you can do to increase productivity, long-term.
Actually, let me give this single, most important piece of advice: try to sleep 8 hours a day.
Think about it this way: instead of getting up at 7am and going to bed at 11pm – a perfectly socially acceptable schedule – I shift it forward 2 hours.
It really isn’t that radical of an idea.
You've prompted me to try again. Cheers mate!
You also need to keep a very open mind on what means to be productive. Does your participation in the review meetings, 1:1s, planning sessions help the team(s)/projects move forward? If yes, then you where productive, if not, then not. You need to fully engage in any activity you end up doing, or you won't feel you were productive. Any halfassed thing you do is not going to feel productive (or even be for that matter).
I need at least 3 days of continuous uninterrupted immersion to make any progress.
You could try working elsewhere 1 day/week. Shift all meetings.
Executives back in the day had secret offices elsewhere that they'd go to each morning for a few hours before showing up at work. Same hours. Some in silence. Then the rest of the day was wasted.
Some wake up earlier, as though they are still in high school. 6 am. After going to bed at 10 pm. Work from home. Before day begins. Unless they have kids. Then they are just up at 6 am. Heh.
Some plan or prepare for their next day each night. Then they sleep on it, wake up earlier, get it moving a bit (after meditating, repeating their affirmations and what they are grateful for, exercising or yoga posing, and taking their supplements/cocktail/smoothie), and then sit back in the swamp/blackhole.
For example, if I don't need to ride bicycle anywhere, spending my weekend repairing my bicycle will leave me with a sense of having wasted a weekend. So when I was looking through my stale TODO list entries, I had hard time figuring out which need a bicycle repair would contribute to, and this was itself an indication of the problem ("why I never do that despite having thought of it so long ago").
In someone's words, "focus on activities which move the needle of your work".
I believe graph-based task manager is the right tool to address this.
This one is good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22591311
My take on this is: https://github.com/andrey-utkin/taskdb/wiki/Live-demo#task-d... (also i have such graph for all of my personal needs, in Maslow's theory terms).
For many, they don't want to sacrifice this. For example, I won't, even if I _really_ want to. So if I want to succeed, I need to optimize the heck out of the free time I _do_ have.
Bill Gates famously took weeks away in a cabin to get work done. Ruth Bader Ginsburg would work like crazy during the week while spending some time with her young child during that time, only to sleep the entire weekend to catch up.
I'm kind of the opinion that there is no such thing as optimizing your time, only the way you distribute your energy and focus.
Allocating time to do something is meaningless if you've already spent all your mental energy on other tasks.
For most people, free time = a break. So if you're already using 100% of your energy on other things and also expect to be productive in your free time... I'm don't think it adds up.
This. People constantly say they only have 24 hours, I felt I have ample of time. But my energy doesn't replenish as quickly. Human are not machine, you have to optimise your energy usage. Try to play a game of Go for hours and you have absolutely zero energy left for the rest of the day to think about anything. May be their are super human that can do that. I certainly cant.
My guess is that it is similar to that some people are very good at long distance running. While I prefer to sprint, walk, run, and sprint again. Where walk = resting.
To me stories like that just play into the dangerous idea of magical voluntarism in our current culture
If it was just pure hard work alone that determined success, the women of Subsaharan Africa would all be billionaires. Necessary but not sufficient. (Side note: Africa will become rich by the end of the century.)
That means either divorce or alienated wife that is with you solely for money/livestyle long before the have time part happens. And even if not, if you spent all the time in work for years, adjusting to something different is hard.
They have round the clock nannies and tutors so they never have to deal with the kids. Sometimes they might see the kids at dinner or on weekends, but really it's the nannies that raise the child.
I'm not saying Marc is that kind of person, but he might be. Or maybe his spouse does most of the child rearing.
In Marc's defense, the schedule presented here is pretty family compatible. He has lots of free time in the evenings.
For anyone wanting their children to be a legacy of themselves, the (blatantly obvious) irony in the above is that the less time a parent spends with their child, the less actual legacy they're leaving of themselves. Having other people raise your children means the legacy being left is that of the nannies or tutors or grandparents or teachers or the child's friend's parents.
If they don't see who you are and how you conduct yourself, they won't be filling your shoes.
But reverse-ironically, they'll probably be just as absent for their children, so there's a little inevitable legacy that will be passed on.
Yeah I've found that many people have a weird hangup about this. I guess it's because of how they learned to study in school. You're "supposed to" finish the book.
In my mind, the point of reading is learning/retention/permanent change, not "completionism" in finishing the book. I just get a bunch of books from the library, and read the PARTS of the ones I feel like reading, that I feel have some relevance. I get 5 books for every one I finish, and I don't feel bad about it.
Often when I get to a "bad part" (and most books are filled with bad parts), I just read the first sentence of every paragraph, and nothing is lost. Paradoxically, you may get more retention that way! The bad parts have low information density.
But there has to be some retention, and I have a couple tactics for that:
- I take notes on every book I read. Key point: it's not a lot of notes. It's not page-by-page notes, and I don't do it while I read. It can be 4 sentences for some entire books. If you can't remember the notes you want to write after 24 hours, then the book might not be that good.
- I take notes in a wiki and use hyperlinks. If what you read doesn't cause you to think of some other book you read, or something someone said, then you probably didn't learn anything. Everything is related, and different authors say the same thing in different ways. If you're not recognizing that, then you're probably reading the material without understanding it.
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Related:
http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html
What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?
I can’t stand where a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is spent on trying to convince me to read the book, extolling the benefits I’ll get from reading it. I don’t need to be sold on it, I already wasted the money for the book, now all I want to do is avoid also wasting time on filler.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469292
If you use it, tell us how it is :)
Actually I had a conversation with someone on HN who had made notes over a similar time period (16 years now for me), and some of the topics even overlapped (CS, programming, etc.) They are hyperlinked as well.
So you could simulate the experience by reading some of these notes, which are published in a raw form:
https://gitlab.com/kragen/dercuano
Personally I found it compelling enough to browse through about 20 notes over an hour or three, but no more than that. It didn't hold my interest -- not because the topics aren't interesting or they're not good notes, but because of the "shorthand problem". Notes to yourself have a lot of shorthand that doesn't need to be expanded, which makes it hard to read for others.
If you actually spend a lot of time reading those notes, I'd be surprised and interested to hear it :)
Life experience as art.
- Pre-screening
- Making travel arrangements based on known preferences
- Setting up meetings with other people who are hard to reach and also have busy schedules
- Following up on various things
And so forth. Not that I'm at that level but my understanding is that executive assistants can be incredibly helpful.
If you can afford it, you can start doing it before you get too busy. In fact you can do it as a means of staying less busy (at least work/chore-wise).
(Even when I was a summer intern, I shared an admin who gave me leverage: she played phone tag, tracked down pricing and availability from vendors, and told everyone who was not explicitly whitelisted that I was "in a meeting." But we also had offices with doors back then too, so maybe it was a different world?)
This advice is great for people looking to maximize productivity. If that’s not your thing, that’s fine too.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...
Basically few hours of sleep, plus a lot of business meetings in a rigid schedule!
His working days are arguably packed working on the cutting-edge of business and technology, working with the individuals from 0.001% of the world's most talented/lucky/interesting/educated/resourced/entrepreneurial/hardworking people.
+ vacations and weekends almost entirely free.
I definitely wouldn't want to trade with him, but it's because I'd burn out and have no real passion for the life of a VC, not because my life is so any more interesting.
Where as a nun perhaps doesn’t have wealth but has power over their time.
Knowing how big part of your day will play out is a very powerful thing. It removes so much stress and uncertainty.
In the end of the day it's a question of balance. It's probably unhealthy to plan every single hour of your life in advance (which Marc does not do), and the same goes with allowing too much spontaneity.
I disagree that his life is boring. He is influencing directly and non-directly the decisions that shape the future of humanity. What is boring about that?
The way these systems are assembled now is the more miserable failure, not the past.
Those institutions that remain successful are noticeably those that were actually built in the past, and worked even better until demand outstripped supply.
Working people can't afford that kind of thing or standard of living any more, so companies that want to survive can't afford to sell to or build things for average working people.
We just have to continue getting by on the remaining wealth left over from a time when greed, dishonesty, and predatory behavior were not as acceptable or prevalent.
I never really had a lunch break when I worked there, I just ate through my noon meeting.
If, for one day, i would follow a similar schedule i would be actually very surprised. In my actual life, i work more hours (but not crazy non-sense 60h week like tech people often say), need to have lunch and dinner breaks, take a shower, breakfast, take care of kids and play with them, find time to go to grocery, help with the usual homework, find sometime for myself to watch netflix or play some game in my PC, go outside and then at the end of the day find sometime to sleep. On weekends plan something with family, take longer breaks for lunch/dinner, etc...
So yeah, i guess thats how life is.
You guys know that they work together right?
Ben literally has a book, and it literally sounds like he has a high quality of life. They pretty much have the same job, and you can infer that they prob have the same quality of life
Anyways, his workout schedule and his reading schedule doesnt really look efficient (unless if he is training to compete or includes shower time / sauna). It looks very inefficient. He has a lot of money, i wonder why he hasnt consider optimizing those instead and have more time on his hands
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23516890
- Original 2007 Pmarca guide to productivity far more useful to Hacker audience; Updated 2020 Pmarca guide to productivity is better for the executive.
- a16z is more about inputs and process vs. John Doerr / Kleiner Perkins is more on OKRs whereby you quantify results objectively
-Barbell Strategy to Book reading "I basically read things that are either up to this minute or things that are timeless"
-Lindy Effect to find key signals, Pmarca avoids "all the commentary and all the interpretation"
-"Strong views weakly held" going from zero to one in a new space.
The whole glory of work thing is so droll. Outcomes are what matter imo.
I feels sorry for Andressen because though his assistant seems to manage his weekend and evening schedule, I'll bet $100 his wife does even more so.