But there is a secret. A secret to removing choice and making every decision at twice the speed.
After studying personal leadership traits among successful Ivy League grads, Fortune 500 CEOs, and bestselling authors, I slowly discovered the most successful people use the same secret to rid their brains of all the extra weight of hundreds of decisions a day.
It’s simple.
The Just Do It Scribble.
There it is. That simple. Every decision you make sits somewhere in this box.
It takes a little time . . . or a lot! It’s not very important . . . or it’s a big deal!
Here, let me fill it in for you.
Automate—Buying toilet paper and detergent. Paying the phone bill. Deciding your route to work. Picking your workout routine. If it’s low in time and low in importance, your goal is to automate. Outsource your brain completely and don’t think about it again. Set online refills to ship toilet paper and detergent monthly. Set up auto bill payments from your bank account. Download a traffic-maps app and mindlessly follow the best route to work. And set a workout schedule and follow it. Free your brain. Just don’t mistake these smaller decisions for the more important decisions in which they reside. Deciding to work out every day is important. Picking which dumbbell to lift next is not.
Effectuate—Grabbing the kids from day care. Eating dinner with the family every night. Saying hi to your team every morning. Effectuate is a big word with a simple meaning: Git ’er done. Nail it. Just do it. If it’s low in time but high in importance, your goal is to just do it. There is no decision to make. Simply effectuate.
Regulate—Checking email. Managing your calendar. Doing chores. If it’s high in time and low in importance, your goal is to regulate. Make rules and follow them. Set an email window. A single calendar review meeting. A chores blitz every Sunday morning instead of painfully doing one or two a day.
Debate—Buying a house. Picking a spouse. Applying for a job. Moving. High-importance, high-time decisions are the ones to spend the most time on. Debate in your head, call trusted friends, list the pros and cons. Slow the decision down to molasses so you can engage in a proper debate. These are the ones that matter.
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Automate, Regulate, and Effectuate all remove decisions from your head.
What are you left with?
Debate.
Deep thinking, questioning, wondering.
Weighing big decisions that matter in order to avoid making bad ones.
Every now and then, thinking about the decisions in your life and writing them down in this box will help sort out for yourself what matters and what doesn’t. What can you Automate so you never think about it again? What can you Regulate so you do it in set times and windows? What can you Effectuate as something you simply just do? And what can you Debate—what big thoughts can you chew on to make sure you’re doing the right thing?
Over time you will do this automatically, without thinking about it. You will have developed the muscle to automatically chunk out your decisions.
Now, the secret isn’t perfect. Sometimes small decisions will leak out and become big deals in your head. But that’s okay. The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is just to be better than before. Automating, regulating, and effectuating free your mind and free your time.
Your aching brain will thank you.
5
Removal #2: The counterintuitive way to have more time
When I was fourteen years old, I got my first job in a nepotism-riddled scandal. My cousin Anita let me work as a pharmacy technician in her tiny six-hundred-square-foot pharmacy in small-town Ontario. It was the size of a large closet and located at the front door of a busy medical building with a walk-in clinic with lineups of coughing children streaming out the door all day. Even though it was tiny, the pharmacy filled hundreds of prescriptions a day, in a nonstop, adrenaline-rushing assembly-line atmosphere. Prescriptions were dropped off, pills counted, and advice dispensed, sometimes in less than a minute. Screaming babies, snotty toddlers, and drugged-out moms were crammed together in a sardine tin of throat infections.
I started in a white lab coat with a three-hour Friday-night shift. Backbreaking. Anita figured I couldn’t do much damage on the slowest time of the week, so I was given a chance to perfect my pill counting with slightly shorter lines. Every Friday I worked those three hours, got a ride in my dad’s station wagon to Subway for a salami sub on white bread, then went home to watch Scully and Mulder do their thing on The X-Files.
Now, when you have only six hundred square feet of space, you only have six hundred square feet of space. Elbows touched and hips bumped all day, and cold sandwiches were eaten on dirty footstools in the corner. Pill bottles were stashed above and below the counter, a tiny fridge and microwave wedged above the tiny sink, and you had to walk through the accountant’s paperwork piles to get to the bathroom—which was stuffed with coats and boots. And try not to pee on the pyramids of ginger ale cases stacked on both sides of the toilet.
The place did well, so my cousin teamed up with my dad to open a second location twenty minutes away. “This time,” they said, “we’ll actually have room to move.” So they built the second store three times the size of the first. There was enough shelf space to actually have greeting cards and sunblock and bandages, and the staff could move freely, like ballet dancers at the Met. Lots of air, shelves everywhere.
I turned sixteen and started working at the second store as my summer job. I had perfected counting pills now and had worked up the courage to talk to customers. I had also grown a wispy mustache, so I no longer looked like an eleven-year-old in Coke-bottle glasses behind the counter. Now I looked thirteen.
I noticed immediately that the second store was worse than the first in almost every way.
First off, there was no extra storage space. Where was the extra storage space? Every shelf was full and boxes were stuffed above and below the counter. Because there were more items on the shelves, there was more overstock of more items, so now you had to watch so you didn’t pee onto canes or greeting cards beside the toilet.
Communication was more difficult, too. Messages were passed on paper and notebooks instead of the tiny staff just talking amongst themselves. There was room for two computers now, which led to nice-looking drop-off and pickup stations instead of just one spot. But that meant customer confusion and time lost moving everything between two spots. The extra distance also meant customers sometimes felt nobody was around when they wanted to drop off a prescription. And when their pills were ready you now had to call them or find them down an aisle. So the pharmacist took more time giving out prescriptions. Prescriptions took longer to fill. Everybody was working as fast as they could, but it felt slow to customers.
What happened?
Work expands to fill the space available and the result is lower quality.
Although this story seems like it’s about having more space, it’s actually about having more time. With longer counters, twice the drop-offs, and more room for customers to walk around, the new store offered more time to fill prescriptions. So it took more time. Have you ever got a prescription filled in the middle of a gigantic warehouse store? Takes a while, doesn’t it?
The single law that determines how long anything takes to do
In November 1955 a strange article appeared in The Economist by an unknown writer named C. Northcote Parkinson. Readers who started skimming the article, titled “Parkinson’s Law,” were met with sarcastic, biting paragraphs poking sharp holes in government bureaucracy and mocking ever-expanding corporate structures. It was searing criticism masked as an information piece. It began innocently enough with the following paragraph: