How do you add an hour to your day with only one small change?
You need to remove access.
Close the doors, lock the windows, answer the bell.
The only two modes your brain actually has and how to use them
John Cleese, cofounder of Monty Python, knows a few things about removing access. Freeing your brain from the tyranny of “busy.” He is famous for removing access and creating space in his life. What was the effect? Oh, not much. Just scoring Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations and being in more than a hundred movies all the way into his seventies.
As John described it in a speech to the organization Video Arts, we are in closed mode “most of the time when we’re at work. We have inside us a feeling that there’s lots to be done and we have to get on with it if we’re going to get through it all. It’s an active, probably slightly anxious mode, although the anxiety can be exciting and pleasurable . . . It’s a mode in which we’re very purposeful and it’s a mode in which we can get very stressed and even a bit manic.”
What’s the opposite of this? John calls it open mode. That’s where your brain is free and playful and capable of achieving greatness. Sound slightly counterintuitive? Maybe. But by closing off access to your brain . . . you’re opening up your mind.
“By contrast,” John says, “the open mode is a relaxed, expansive, less purposeful mode in which we’re probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor . . . and consequently, more playful. It’s a mode in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.”
How do you get yourself into open mode? How do you block access?
“Let’s take space,” he says. “You can’t become playful and therefore creative if you’re under your usual pressures, because to cope with them you’ve got to be in the closed mode, right? So you have to create some space for yourself away from those demands. And that means sealing yourself off. You must make a quiet space for yourself where you will be undisturbed.”
You must make a quiet space for yourself where you will be undisturbed.
One of the hardest and most important things you will ever do at work
How do you actually eliminate other outside disturbances? How do you cut off access . . . to yourself? Without building a shack in the middle of the forest.
It’s not easy.
While working as Director of Leadership Development at Walmart, I counted six distinct ways people could communicate with me: email, voicemail, instant message, texting, written notes, and walking up to my desk. Every interruption took time because I suddenly had to do three things:
Bookmark
Prioritize
Switch
“People in a work setting,” says psychologist David Meyer of the University of Michigan, “who are banging away on word processors at the same time they have to answer phones and talk to their co-workers or bosses—they’re doing switches all the time. Not being able to concentrate for, say, tens of minutes at a time may mean it’s costing a company as much as twenty to forty percent in terms of potential efficiency lost, or the ‘time cost’ of switching, as these researchers call it. In effect, you’ve got writer’s block briefly as you go from one task to another. You’ve got to (a) want to switch tasks, you’ve got to (b) make the switch, and then you’ve got to (c) get warmed back up on what you’re doing.”
René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, has done a study showing the brain exhibits a “response selection bottleneck.” I like that! When someone calls me at the same time as an email comes in and a person walks up to my desk—what happens? Response selection bottleneck. Picture saying that in a robot voice. “Error. Response. Selection. Bottleneck.” In other words, I get jammed up.
Another study from Harvard Business School is called “Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity” by Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino, and Bradley R. Staats. They show that bad weather reduces our options of what we can do and increases our productivity. Less access to outside? More work done inside.
One day at work I decided to block off as much access to myself as possible. Close the doors. Lock the windows. But answer the bell. (For me the bell is emails from my boss.)
First, I logged in to my voicemail and permanently set it to “vacation mode” where it didn’t allow callers to leave a voicemail. There was no beep. There would be no red light on my machine. I just left a message asking people to email me instead and then spelled out my email address really slowly a couple times.
Next, I deleted our office instant-messaging software and deleted my profile in the texting application we all used on our work phones. Coworkers used these to send messages because they came with the illusion of parallelism. But it was a red herring. Bookmark, prioritize, switch. No. I would never be in “away mode” anymore. I flat-out deleted it.
Last, I disabled all notifications from my email. No dings. No pop-ups. No reminders telling me an email arrived. With no voicemail, no text messages, no instant messages, and no email reminders, what happened? I created focus. And if I needed space from my own desk, I could go work in the cafeteria.
By cutting off access to myself, I was able to choose what to focus on, aim my brain at that task, and then nail it.
How do you add an hour to your day with only one small change?
Remove access. Close the doors. Lock the windows. And pick the bell you will answer and focus on. Delete and remove all access to yourself except for that one. Watch as your productivity spikes, your days become more productive, and you create beautiful space.
7
“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”
Why are we so busy?
Because we’ve run out of space.
And we don’t always value space enough in our lives.
Visit http://bit.ly/1P93zNH for a larger version of this image.
What’s the secret step we can take to never be busy again? Create space. Build it in. Make sure you always have it. Space in your day, space in your week, space in your month. Allowing ideas to percolate, relationships to bake, and years to fully blossom into long and happy lives.
Creating space is the secret step to freeing yourself from the oppression of your busy life.
Let’s remember the three ways to create space: the 3 Removals.
Remember the dark caped crusaders with menacing masks holding big, sharp scythes? They hack at parts of your life so you’re free to do other things. Space comes from this hacking. Space in your life comes from hacking at choice, time, and access.
How to make every decision at twice the speed? Remove choice.
What’s the counterintuitive way to having more time? Remove time.
How to add an hour to the day with only one small change? Remove access.
What do we get by creating space? Tim Kreider wrote “The ‘Busy’ Trap” in The New York Times, where he says: “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”