Do you ever take a nap and wake up exhausted?  I recently was given two unscientific, but still useful tips for avoiding post-nap exhaustion.

1. Don’t nap for more than 20 minutes at a time.
2. Nap with a spoon in your right hand.

For the first tip, I’m sure to get a bunch of comments that say the actual number should be 30 or 45, or 13 minutes.  I don’t really care.  Twenty has been a useful number for me, so I’m offering it.

The second tip needs a little explanation.  If you sleep with a spoon in your hand, it’s important to make sure that hand is off the bed (or couch, chair, futon or whatever your napping hideout is).  Then, if you slip into deeper sleep, you’ll drop the spoon and wake up.  This helps you avoid slipping into the deeper phases of sleep which seem to contribute to post-nap fatigue if you interrupt them early.

Of course, this raises the questions of whether naps are even useful to begin with.  I’m a fan of regular 8-hour sleep and emergency-only napping.  Thomas Edison, however, believed in sleeping only a few hours each night and chronic napping.

How do you know when to relax?  There are two typical answers to this question, and I’m here to say that both are wrong.  If you thought the question was silly and the answer was obvious, you probably picked one of the two.

The two common answers are:

1. When you’ve finished your work.
2. When you’re tired.

Why the “Rest When Finished” Approach Fails…

This is the more macho, self-disciplined approach to work through fatigue.  It works great, assuming you have a light to medium workload.  It’s the approach I use built into my Weekly/Daily Goals system, because it’s simple and most of the time it does it’s job.

Where this approach fails, however, is when you have a really intense schedule.  When the amount of work you have to do is nearing or currently exceeding your “burnout” threshold, this formula is dangerous.  When “working until you’re finished” means working non-stop for 72 hours, you will run out of energy far before you pass out from exhaustion.

Energy management is the principle that the energy and focus you can bring to your work matters more than the time put in.  And when your schedule is threatening to kill you, strategic breaking can help you survive.  Not only that, but it can boost your energy so you actually accomplish more in a smaller amount of time.

Where the “Rest When Finished” Works

If you have:

• A light to medium schedule.  (Definition: you’re able to get 8 hours of sleep, and you aren’t skipping meals to do work…)
• An intense schedule, but for less than three days.  (If you can collapse and sleep for an entire weekend once you meet your big deadline, just endure the insanity.)

…then the “rest when finished” approach is a good rule of thumb.

Why the “Rest When I Feel Like It” Approach Sucks…

The alternate strategy of resting when I feel like it works great when:

• You have so much passion/enthusiasm for what you’re doing you are likely to become a workaholic.
• You never have problems with procrastination or laziness.

If you’re a regular person, like me, those two above probably don’t apply to you.  I’m passionate about what I do, but I still need to focus myself in order to work.  I also have bouts of laziness and procrastination like the rest of us.  If I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be very good at writing articles for overcoming those problems.

The “rest when tired” approach fails because it is hard to separate genuine resting with procrastination.  You might be tired, and an energy boost could improve performance.  Or you might just be lying to yourself in order to put off work.  It’s a thin line.

Strategic Resting for Improved Performance

The above two approaches can work as a rule of thumb.  But they both have their weaknesses, and times when they break down.  Strategic resting works better when the “rest when finished” approach is driving you insane, but the “rest when tired” approach just means procrastination.

On a short time span, there are really only two kinds of breaks you can take:

1. Short breaks to rest during the day.
2. Breaks that finish a day and begin the next morning.

When to Take a Short Break

Here’s my rule for taking short breaks:

Whenever I hit a roadblock in my energy and can’t accomplish anything, I set myself a timer for 15-30 minutes.  My goal is to keep working throughout this time.  Once the timer is done, I see if I’ve made any progress.  If I haven’t, I know it’s time to take a break.

This rule helps because it prevents you from quitting whenever you hit a small obstacle.  However, it also gives you permission to take a break when you’ve hit a huge wall and can’t push through it from your current direction.  In those cases, a small break can give you some space to figure out the problem.

When to Quit for the Day

Quitting for the day is the best rest you can get.  However, it’s costly, so don’t use it when:

1. Your deadline is tomorrow (or tonight).
2. You’re still early in the day.  (Take a short break instead)
3. You can rework your daily to-do list.

The last point deserves mention.  Sometimes you can burn yourself out by setting your goals too high for what you want to accomplish.  If your to-do list is impossible, that will kill your motivation and energy.

When that happens, it’s best to rework your to-do list.  Make it achievable by the end of the day.  Don’t remove items off your to-do list until you’ve given serious effort towards it.  However, if you’ve misjudged what you can do in one day, it’s better to change your list than give up.

If it’s later in the day, you’ve taken short breaks and still can’t recover your energy and your deadline isn’t for a few days, that’s a better time to call it quits.

Don’t Waste Day-Ending Breaks

If you’re going to quit for the day, rest fully.  Set a big to-do list for the next day and plan to start early again.  You’ve postponed work to rest strategically.  That will only be successful if you actually regain your energy.  Here are a few tips:

1. Go to sleep early.
2. Be in a relaxing environment.  Don’t just sit in a state of passive stress.
3. Spend time outlining your plan of attack for tomorrow.  Planning your next day gives you better odds you’ll have energy to accomplish it.

Strategic resting is the plan to use when simpler rules fail.  When those simple rules for productivity fail, a more well-thought approach to breaking can save you.

A Brief Guide to World Domination - One of my favorite blogs is Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Nonconformity.  Here is his free manifesto for starting empire (or just living an original life).  Like his blog, it’s a well-written attack on mediocrity and the pitfalls of thinking with the masses.

Dr. Rob Bell’s Motivation Blog - I recently got a link to this blog through the mail.  Although there are a lot of motivational blogs (myself included…), Rob’s blog is well written and goes back almost two years into the archives, a staying power rare in the blogosphere.

Make Your Site Sell - I’m sure everyone who is interested in online business has already heard of this guide, but it’s now completely free.  With close to 1500 pages of content, it’s a guide to selling that isn’t afraid to go into detail.

From the Archives

Don’t Pay Yourself By The Hour - Just because paying by the hour is easier for the accounting department of a big firm, doesn’t mean it’s best for your projects.  Always pay yourself for results.

From the Shelf

Cat’s Cradle - This is my second book from Vonnegut, after Slaughterhouse-Five.  It’s an interesting story critiquing the arms race and offering many observations about life along the way.  My favorite passage from the book:

    ‘You scientists think too much,’ blurted out Miss Pefko.  She laughed idiotically.  Dr. Breed’s friendliness had blown every fuse in her nervous system.  She was no longer responsible. ‘You all think too much.’
A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said.  She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach.  She hated people who thought too much.  At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for all mankind. [emphasis mine]

What if you don’t have any passions?

I’m sure everyone on this planet has interests.  But that’s not the same thing.  Enjoying playing video games isn’t the same as spending thousands of hours designing your own.  Your passion has to be something you would work exceptionally hard for.

So what do you do, if there is nothing you feel that engaged about?

The Way to Start Isn’t With a Survey…

A lot of career guidance involves measuring your current skills and personality, and then deciding what you would be most suited for.  I don’t like this approach because people are complex.  And any test will ultimately be a gross simplification of what’s important to you and what you like to do.

I once heard a story about a wealthy woman who was looking for a husband.  She invested over $20,000 on a series of psychological surveys to match her with potential candidates.  She met individually with the dozen candidates that were her best match.  After all that money and effort, she decided she didn’t like any of them.

Six months later, she was engaged to someone she had met randomly at a bar.  Moral: people don’t know what they want until they see it (and surveys aren’t much better).

The truth is, I don’t think any questionnaire can tell you what you’re going to be really engaged about.  I’d rather experiment with dozens of wildly different activities, than limit my scope, just because a test said I wouldn’t like it.

How to Find Your Passions

The better approach to finding your passions is actually fairly simple:

1.     Try a lot of different things
2.     See what you enjoy

The biggest obstacle to overcome is a narrow vision of what you can do.  If I wasn’t passionately interested in anything, I’d try to cast a wide net to look at dozens of different activities.  Staying safe and familiar is the reason I’m bored, so now is the time to experiment.

Dabbling is key to the art of finding what drives you.  Dabbling means committing to something for 3-6 months.  This amount of time isn’t enough to become really good at anything.  But it is enough time to get over the sharp learning curve in the beginning.

I didn’t enjoy programming for the first few months I worked on it.  I didn’t know enough, and it was too frustrating to continue.  But once I got over the frustration barrier, I found that programming is an activity I really enjoy.

If you don’t have any project that makes you want to wake up early and sacrifice leisure for, you should start dabbling.  Find new activities completely outside your comfort zone you can do for a few hours a week, and commit for at least two months.

Sometimes You Need a Spark…

Sometimes the problem with a passion isn’t the activity, but the goal.  I enjoyed working on small self-made projects.  But it wasn’t until I saw that people actually made self-run businesses out of those efforts that I became really engaged.  Until that point, my goal was just to dabble in something fun.  After that point, I realized there was room for a challenging goal I hadn’t considered before.

Equally important to dabbling in activities is to dabble in experiences.  Meet people from weird and unique backgrounds.  Read books that don’t normally appear on your shelf.  Randomness increases the chance that one of your interests will be sparked into something more.

Always Look for More

Dabbling is a continuous process.  Committing yourself to one goal is good.  But that should still leave time for brief experiments.  If you’re always dabbling, you have a large base of passions you can do interesting work from.  Don’t tolerate boredom.

Run a timelog and count up the minutes.  In my experience, most people are horribly disillusioned with where their time goes.  It’s easier to lie to yourself than to be productive.  I’d rather trust my watch and a spreadsheet than a subjective evaluation.

Now for the big question: If most of your time is spent maintaining the life you have, how will you reach the lifestyle you want?

I’ve already talked about why time is a poor indicator of productivity.  However it’s the easiest to measure.  All else being equal, the guy spending 8 hours a day on his #1 goal will have better odds of reaching it than the person who spends fifteen minutes.

Becoming a workaholic isn’t the point.  The point is to delete all the middling important commitments that steal time away from the #1.  Because, if your priorities don’t match how you spend your time, then you don’t really have priorities.

In his book, Stephen Covey split the seven habits of highly effective people into two categories: personal and interpersonal habits.  He felt that the personal skills came first.  Communicating goals with another person isn’t useful unless you have the discipline to act on those goals.  Personal excellence comes first.

I think this a point that is too often understated.  Many people try to tackle the branches of problems (relationships with friends, financial success, etc.) without looking at the personal skills that make the root.  If you don’t have mastery over yourself, how can you expect to succeed in mastering anything else?

What is Personal Excellence?

Personal excellence isn’t just one skill.  It’s all the mental resources that go together to help you handle problems.  Here are a few questions you can use to measure yourself:

• Do you procrastinate?
• When you make a commitment, do you stick with it?
• How hard is it to motivate yourself?
• Could you give up something you enjoy for one month?
• Could you give up something permanently if it conflicted with your goals?
• Could you halve your spending if forced to?
• Are you able to do what is most important first?
• Does your emotional state frequently prevent you from getting work done?
• Can you handle stress?

Personal excellence is extremely important to me because I feel it reflects on everything I try to do.  If I’m weak with a personal skill, any other goal will be difficult to tackle.  External problems can usually be avoided by someone with personal excellence.  But almost nothing can be done if you aren’t in control of yourself.

I once heard that most lottery winners have spent the entirety of their winnings in five years.  I think this proves that wealth isn’t about money: it’s about personal excellence.  Unless you’ve built wealth on the inside, any money you find will probably slip through your fingers.

Dimensions of Personal Excellence

I try to always be pushing myself in at least one dimension of personal excellence.  It’s like a muscle, so if I’m not improving, I’m probably growing weak.

Discipline

Discipline is at the core of personal excellence.  About half of the questions I asked at the beginning of this article are rooted in discipline.  If you don’t know how to push yourself through temporary discomfort, you’ll be derailed every time there is a bump in the road.

The best way to improve discipline is to face difficult, but manageable, situations.  Exercising is a good way to push your discipline levels up.  Thirty day trials are also a good test of your self discipline.  I know I’m letting this dimension weaken if I have trouble getting through thirty consecutive days of a new habit.

Discipline is important for personal excellence, but it should be the last skill to use, not the first.  If you’re constantly having to drag yourself to do everything, you won’t last long.  That’s why it’s important to build the other aspects of personal skill.

Emotional Control

Emotional control does not mean you should strive to be stoic and unfeeling.  Strong emotions are important for personal excellence too.  Being able to motivate yourself and build enthusiasm are components of emotional control.

Emotional control comes in two aspects: self-awareness of what emotional state is appropriate and the ability to change that state.  Building emotional control starts with building self-awareness.  Realize when you’re lazy, angry, energetic or depressed and ask yourself whether it’s the best perspective for dealing with a problem.

Once you have self-awareness, you can find the triggers you need to change your state.  People change moods all the time, you just need to realize what causes you to change states and activate it when you need it.  When I’m trying to motivate myself, a big help is being organized.  Decluttering is a tool I use to motivate myself to do other things.

Attitude

A positive attitude does not mean you think things are going great all the time.  That’s being stupid.  When things are going poorly, you need to be able to recognize and fix what’s happening immediately.

A positive attitude, in the realm of personal excellence, means that you don’t let negative information shut you down.  Someone with a positive attitude can take verbal abuse from someone, and turn it into fuel for improvement.  Alchemy is the heart of a great attitude, being able to transmute the negative feedback from your environment into new solutions.

Courage

Fear is your friend.  Fear tells you to work when others are lazy.  Fear tells you secure yourself when others are gambling.  The first way to overcome your fears is to realize they serve a very good purpose in focusing you.

Courage, of course, isn’t the lack of fear.  It’s being able to realize your terrified but stand up anyways.  People with personal excellence know how to make their fears work for them.  Fear can be a powerful motivating force if you know how to channel it, and are able to override it when necessary.

Calmness

The best sign of personal excellence is that a person has grace when handling problems.  If regular stresses cause a nervous breakdown, you don’t have personal excellence.  The scaffolding that supports your inner mental life, should be strong enough that when a hurricane comes through it, you don’t collapse.

I’ve found that knowing what to focus on in situations makes a big difference to your mental calmness.  Stress usually results, not from the actual workload or pressures (although exhaustion can happen), but from the way you focus on that information.  A huge to-do list can be handled one item at a time, not as an impossible mountain of tasks.

Building Personal Excellence First

Trying to fix external problems without building personal excellence is like putting a band-aid over a leaky pipe.  You might stop the water for a few minutes, but you’ve only masked the real problem.

Personal excellence is similar to athletic training.  Although you might get some conditioning just by playing the game, the best athletes practice.  Here are some ways to start building personal excellence:

1. Get in shape.  If you aren’t already eating healthy and exercising, start.  The problem isn’t having enough time, it’s having enough discipline.
2. Give up television.  Switch to entertainment that requires more effort, and read a book instead of watching reruns.  There is value in books, and there is also value in doing something more difficult, but more rewarding.
3. Wake up earlier.  Yes, I like to sleep in too.  But every day you can push yourself to wake up earlier, you earn more control to do other things that are important to you.
4. Speak in public.  Get booed a few times too.  A good test of personal excellence is to be able to swallow the unfiltered, face-to-face reactions of a few dozen people and still keep going.
5. Follow a budget.  Try cutting your spending for a month, and following a strict budget.  The exercise isn’t just to save money, it’s to test yourself to see the limits of what you’re able to do.

You’re square one.  If you start there, the rest is easy.

Pick the Brain is offering The Little Book of Productivity for just over seven dollars.  Peter also has a great, in-depth review of the book if you want to know more about it.  The book is a collection of 99 mini-articles, each offering one idea for improving your productivity.  Many of the ideas I haven’t previously written on this website.  You better hurry though, because after November 6th, the price will return to normal.

Zen Habits is also offering a package deal for Learn More, Study Less.  You can opt to get Learn More, Study Less for half price, or you can get both Learn More, Study Less and The Little Book of Productivity for under twenty-five dollars.  This offer will end in two weeks.

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting formula to value a start-up: “For every full-time engineer, add $500 000.  For every full-time MBA, subtract $250 000.” The statement raises an interesting point, do the highly analytical skills offered through an MBA actually hinder the creative process needed for entrepreneurship?

And an even broader question: does reading about something make you worse at actually doing it?

I can’t say how having an MBA impacts your entrepreneurial ability.  I believe it would depend more on your goals and personality than your education.  But I think the broader question is worth a good look.  Analysis and action are two completely different things, and I think there are circumstances where learning too much can actually hurt you.

From Boxless Thinking to Doctrine

When you have few opinions about a subject, you also don’t have any wrong opinions.  The fresh perspective of a beginner does have an advantage: it doesn’t come with the baggage of bad advice.

Rob Warren, a professor I have for an entrepreneurship class, made an off-hand comment that our studying probably hinders our ability to be great entrepreneurs.  “You come in here with an open perspective, and we push you into a narrower set of thinking.”

Some areas of life, theoretical knowledge is extremely useful.  I’d rather trust an electrical engineer’s description of how a circuit board works than my own assumptions based on using electricity.  These tend to be areas of life that are highly general, and where obtaining a large enough set of experiences is difficult.  Science usually fits both of these criteria.

But there are some areas where experience trumps theories.  I’d rather listen to my own experiences running a business, than an MBA student who has never worked in my industry.  This is because what works for me might not work for you, randomness is everywhere and ideas are often too complicated to put into a big theory.

In the latter case, spending a lot of time learning theories, without practical experience can be deadly.  Why?  Because for every nine or ten correct ideas you learn, you pick up one or two false ones.  They may not be false for everyone, but in your case they are dead wrong.

At first glance, this may not seem like a problem.  One error for every several pieces of good advice isn’t that bad.  However, any programmer will tell you that if you introduce one bug for every 10 lines of code, you shouldn’t be allowed near a computer.  It’s far harder to unlearn a wrong idea than it is to learn one.

    One Book per One Hundred Hours of Practice

I think there is a way you can prevent this: always have your experience match your reading.  That is,  you should have roughly one hundred hours of real experience for every book you read on the topic.

This is a completely made-up rule, but I think the numbers are in the right ballpark.

Keeping theory balanced with experience keeps you from introducing buggy ideas into your brain.  I do enough writing that when I see a bad idea about writing style, I can safely ignore it.  Even if I didn’t ignore it, the idea would quickly reveal flaws when I started practicing it in my writing.  I’m far from the best writer, but I do get a lot of practice.

What does this rule apply to?  Anything that fits the second category of skill I mentioned earlier: where experience trumps theory.  The more specific, subjective, random and complex the topic, the less useful theories are.  Here are a few that would make my list:

• Writing
• Entrepreneurship
• Design
• Music
• Dating
• Self-Improvement
• Leadership
• Productivity

There are also even more areas that fall in the gray zone between science and intuition.  Exercising has some simple and highly general rules that should be followed.  However, building the discipline to exercise regularly and enjoy it is highly specific and needs experience.  Most of life is a bit of both.

Should You Read Less?

Unless you spend 15 hours of your day locked in your room reading, I’d say the answer is no.  Most people don’t read enough, not too much.  Change what you read, not the volume.  Even for creative fields, books can be useful, as long as they are matched with some real-world insights.

If you read a lot about a topic, but aren’t spending at least 3x that much time actually practicing it, you should stop reading that topic.  If you’re spending three hours a day reading dating advice columns on the internet, you should be spending at least nine hours a day meeting people to justify that.  If you’re library is filled with self-help books, but you haven’t written down any goals and invested several hours a week to accomplish them, you need to stop buying more of those books.

Reading also can make you feel like you’re making improvements.  However, unless it’s applied intelligently, it’s just procrastinating.  Nothing is stopping you from meeting people, starting a business, writing a short story, building software, networking or setting goals, don’t let books and blogs get in the way.

Working from Anywhere in the World - Chris Guillebeau has a great entry on living a digital lifestyle.  He shares some upsides and downsides.  I don’t think the best way to approach your goals is to glamorize them needlessly, but be willing to accept the benefits and costs of the lifestyle they create.

Interview with Study Hacks - Blogging friends Ben Casnocha and Cal Newport (author of the blog Study Hacks) share an interview.  Great ideas follow.  One excerpt:

Cal: What about the big question of “what should I do with my life?” As you know, my approach is sort of “there is no wrong answer, choose something and focus on it so you’ll start reaping rewards, you can always change later.”

Ben:  Your approach is similar to that great Andy Grove quote, “Act on your temporary convictions as if they were real ones, and when you realize you are wrong, change course very quickly.” The problem with what you said is “…you can always change later” is very, very hard. People have problems with sunk costs and inertia. That’s why I’m not a fan of “focus on something and start reaping the rewards.”

Cal:  Do you worry that on the other hand people get too hung up searching for some “right” path that doesn’t actually exist. Getting scared every time anything seems a little boring or annoying.

Ben: Maybe some search for the “right” path that doesn’t exist, sure. But the second thing you said, no. I think people tolerate waaaay too much boredom in their lives.

From the Archives

Stop Trying to Impress People - “Someone once told me that, “Integrity is being the same person in your house that you are on the street.” More than just integrity, I think that consistency has a huge effect on your self-image. How can you be comfortable with yourself if you feel the need to impress other people?”

From the Shelf

The Art of the Start - I recently got a chance to read this popular business book by Guy Kawasaki.  Although the focus of the book is on people starting up new companies, I think much of the advice he has can apply to people who want to work on any project.  I really enjoyed his points on giving presentations.  As I’m sure many other students can attest, the quality of most Powerpoint presentations is slightly less than zero.  Kawasaki suggests following the 10-20-30 rule: 10 slides, 20 words, 30 pt font.  Too bad most people do it the other way around with 30 slides and 10 pt font…