So how do you create space?
How do you free your mind like Newton, Bohr, or Archimedes? How do you open your brain to receive insights worthy of NASA, Hitchcock, or Katsuras? How do you clear your thoughts so you have space to come up with innovative ideas that challenge your business? Is it as simple as jogging on Sunday mornings?
No. It’s not. You might not have time for that jog. You could be weighed down mentally while racing down the street. You may have too much going on. Big meetings, busy days.
You know the Space Scribble. You know you need to get there. But rather than just saying “Go on vacation more, dummy!” I want to share three specific and tangible ways you can create space.
I want to introduce the 3 Removals. Think of them as caped crusaders in menacing black masks holding big, sharp scythes. Ready to hack parts of your life away so you’re free to do other things. Space comes from hacking. Space in dense jungles comes from hacking at vines. Space in calendars comes from hacking at meetings. Space in your life comes from hacking at choice, time, and access.
4
Removal #1: How to make every decision at twice the speed
We duck out of the tiny six-seat plane and step carefully down the metal stairs. Deep blue skies hang like wallpaper over the world as we stare at empty yellow fields all around us. I am the official tour guide for Peter Aston, a European clothing chain CEO, on a trip over the ocean visiting big-box discount stores. We are three days into flights over Great Lakes, jagged rocks, and thick boreal forests.
Fifteen minutes later we get out of a cab, walk into a store, and start walking around. He asks questions and takes photos and I make notes and follow-ups for him. We are walking around the store when we get to the clothing section and Peter suddenly stops. He looks stunned. Eyes popping open, he reaches for his phone and starts snapping pictures. He is excited. “Look how busy the department is,” he says. “Customers are swarming over this section more than the last few like this. Notice how the last two stores are struggling to offer clear choices—mixed styles, colors smeared across the rainbow, inconsistent brands and labels. They were treasure hunts.”
I nod. Same chain but a different look. And much busier.
“This clothing department looks completely different. Somebody has taken the clothes shipped by the head office, ditched most of them, and created their own offering with a consistent style, theme, and colors. Shirts on one side, pants on the other, dresses at the back. All the same three colors. This is one of the best clothing departments I’ve seen. Beats a lot of stores they have overseas.”
Back on the plane to see a couple new stores in another town, I ask Peter what was so exciting about the display.
“Customers get the opinion of a trusted source. Someone you trust has made picks so you don’t have to. Nobody has time to wade through foggy seas of endless decisions. They give up. Or make bad choices. That display says here’s the color, here’s the style, here’s what you want. Take it or leave it. There are less decisions so you feel confident and trust the opinion.
“Early in my career I worked a summer job helping a buyer for fish in an American supermarket chain,” he continues. “We had every kind of fish. We had every kind of seasoning. It was all fresh. It was priced well. But nobody bought it. We couldn’t figure it out. Finally we realized customers were scared of buying fresh fish. Which one tastes best? How do you season it? How do you cook it? Too many decisions. So we changed our section. We only carried three kinds of fish at a time. Not ten, not fifteen, three. And we had one kind of seasoning for each. So you suddenly only had one choice to make. Cajun trout, teriyaki salmon, or lemon sole? Once you made your pick, the fishmonger dipped your fish in the seasoning and the label printed off the instructions on how to cook it.”
What happened?
“Sales were up over five hundred percent.”
I realized fewer choices means faster decisions. Our brains don’t need to mentally step into each new option and stretch out inside them, picturing them, evaluating them, holding them in our heads while we step into the next option.
Fewer choices means faster decisions.
How do the President of the United States and the CEO of Facebook make every decision at twice the speed?
Less time spent on decisions means more time for everything else.
What does President Obama tell us about making every decision at twice the speed? “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said in a 2012 Vanity Fair article. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.
What about Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook?
“I own maybe twenty identical gray T-shirts. I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right?” he said in a Today interview.
Mark’s not turning heads on the runway, but he doesn’t care. His goal is building the world’s largest social media company. A minute more a day picking a T-shirt is a minute less a day he’s thinking about his company.
The curious case of Benjamin Lee
Cutting decisions, chopping decisions, cutting them out.
It takes me back to my first office job many years ago. I was twenty-two years old and had just graduated from university. Procter & Gamble hired me as assistant brand manager for Cover Girl and Max Factor makeup, and I started in the summer.
Benjamin Lee was the first person I met on my first day.
Chinese, in his midtwenties, Ben had thin, jumpy eyes, close-cropped hair, and wore tight dark clothes. I assumed he was a Zen Master because his desk had no pictures, no artwork, and no office work on it—just a tiny bowl of rocks punctured with three bamboo shoots.
Ben’s desk was right beside mine, and after a few weeks of working together I started noticing his style. Black shoes, black socks, black pants, brightly colored shirt. He looked good. Simple style. Everything fit.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked him one night while working late. “Where do you get your clothes?”
He laughed. “You won’t believe it. Once a year I buy thirty white boxers, thirty identical pairs of black socks, fifteen custom-fitted dress shirts, and five pairs of black pants. I do laundry once a month. I never match socks, I never shop on weekends, I never spend any time thinking about what I’m wearing. It’s always the next thing in my closet. You’ll probably see this blue shirt again in a couple weeks.”
I thought back to a couple months prior, when I’d spent an entire Sunday shopping for what to wear on my first day at work. And a couple minutes every morning picking clothes. Laundry every weekend. And forget ever matching socks from the dryer.
“I calculated that never thinking about what to wear, doing laundry once a month, and going shopping once a year saves me fifteen minutes a day on average,” Ben continued. “Maybe more because I don’t lose any ‘frictional time’ jumping between thoughts. So I get eight to ten hours back every month. That’s an extra week of waking hours each year. Do you know how much I can get done in an extra week?”
I knew how much Ben could get done in an extra week.
He was on the fast track, delivering results, well liked by peers and bosses. Although he worked long hours like everyone else, he wasn’t working more hours than everyone else. He simply made better decisions, by making fewer decisions, by reserving his decision-making energy for things that mattered.