Weekly Wisdom #277 - Parkinson's Law, Working 3 Hours A Day, Attracting Luck, Pounding the Rock & Daily Writing Templates

Parkinson's Law, Working 3 Hours A Day, Attracting Luck, Pounding the Rock & Daily Writing Templates

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Happy Monday!

The last few weeks have been a strange start to summer here in Canada—lots of rain, following the forest fires, and all of a sudden it's July.

There have been some long weekends in there as well, and I'm left wondering: where did the time go?

It reminds me that Parkinson's Law is in full effect.

Parkinson's Law: any task will expand to the time allotted to it.

In other words, when I plan what to do on the weekend, precisely because I know I have more time, things take more time.

It's a strange dynamic that everyone has experienced at some point.

A list of things to do isn't enough to overcome it; the list needs to have clear deliverables, with a specific time schedule for each. And that schedule must be respected.

And if you want to relax, you might need to plan some time for that too.

Time to relax in the summer is important, but if you're like me, you also need to get some things done to feel satisfied.

Make sure those things don't expand to take up all your free time.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📖 How I work 3 hours a day - Life's A Game - Amanda Goetz - I enjoyed Amanda's new newsletter this week, in which Parkinson's Law also plays a role.

She goes over 4 time management/productivity tips for how she maximizes the amount of time she has in her day.

📖 Mastery of the basics - HubermanLab - As I read through Peter Attia's Outlive and was thinking about longevity and health, Andrew Huberman popped up in some of the references.

He also runs a health-focused podcast that I've listened to before, but I found this summary of many of the podcast insights to be very useful:

7-9 hours of sleep in a dark, cool room

Exercise frequently, at a low intensity, with some bouts of high intensity sprinkled in

Eat varied, mostly unprocessed foods

Avoid addictive behaviors

​This interview is also a good overview of him and his work.

📖 3 Ways to Attract More Luck Into Your Life - The Profile/George Mack - "Increasing luck" isn't something we always think about, but more of us should. It's a large reason why I think it's so beneficial to create things on the internet: there's so much upside.

My favourite of the tips from this article: have a "luck razor"—a rule where when given a choice, you try and always choose the option with the most "luck" attached (ex: going to a party instead of staying in).

Quote I'm Thinking About

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before."—Jacob Riis

This quote came up in two separate contexts this week. First, Max Homa said this was the quote he had stapled in his locker as he put in years of work dropping in and out of the PGA Tour before finally making it to the top 10 in recent years.

The other was in Peter Attia's book, in the section where he's talking about the work he did on his own emotional and mental health.

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