A Little Morbid Trick to Make Better Decisions
Plus a 4 step system for getting rid of dumb, shallow work
When he wasn't running the entire freaking Roman Empire, Emperor Marcus Aurelius also kept a notebook to remind him of important things.
This notebook, not actually meant for the public was published as "Meditations".
It's chock full of great advice for life, no matter whether you're a store clerk or an emperor.
In one particular entry, he observes that:
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
(I know. Kind of starting on a downer note but I promise it gets better. Well, a bit)
So! You're gonna die someday. Eventually. Definitely. And this knowledge is intensely useful and something we should mull over and remember often.
Because if we have limited time, we need to use it well.
On Saving Time in a Bottle
Unfortunately, we can't do as the inimitable Jim Croce sang.
Time is the only truly non-renewable resource we have.
Theoretically, we can get more money, more stuff, more whatever.
We can't get more Time. Once it's gone, it's gone.
That makes Time the single most valuable thing you can give away or spend.
With that in mind, how should we spend it?
Unfortunately, this is something you have to decide for yourself.
Nobody but you can decide that.
In Hesse's novel Siddhartha, the titular character has found enlightenment and is just sitting there being all enlightened.
His buddy stops by to ask for advice now that he's enlightened. He asks him how he should live his life but Siddhartha's reply is:
Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
The only way to figuring this out is some introspection and answering Life's Practical Questions:
These are:
What should I do?
What can I do?
How should I act?
....Now What
So, we're going to die and time is limited and nobody can tell us what to do.
Great. Super helpful. What now?
Well if time is limited and therefore valuable, you should be spending it on the things that give you enjoyment, that only you can do, that give back to the world in some way.
This might mean writing, sculpting, teaching, mentoring, the list goes on.
Exactly what those activities might be, make the time for them.
While doing that, here's something to consider:
You should have absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit, shallow work.
What is shallow work?
That definition changes from person to person.
To one, it might mean less spreadsheet jockeying, another might say it's less answering email.
There's no clear objective way to answer this but when it comes to jobs, the best definition I've found was in the jeremiad, Bullshit Jobs by full time anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber.
He writes mostly about jobs, but the same idea applies when applied to tasks:
[Ask yourself] What would happen were this [task] to simply disappear?
If you were to just stop doing it suddenly, would the results be catastrophic? Would life become less pleasurable?
If you can answer no to a task that you hate spending time on, it might be worth revisiting what this task means in the context of your time.
Fortunately, there's a simple four step system to getting rid of shallow work.
The Four-Step System for Eliminating Shallow Work
If you're faced with some task that could be done by an exceedingly smart iguana, you should go through a four-step process to decide what to do:
Eliminate
Delegate
Streamline
Suck it up
Let's tackle each of these in turn.
Eliminate
Never, ever accept "this is always how we did it" without a bit of investigation. Sometimes there's an inertia for tasks that have been around for a while. There may be better ways to do a process, or the process may not need that to work any longer at all.
Delegate
One person's shallow work may be another's pleasure. Some people like updating spreadsheets. I am not one of them. Find the people that actually want to do this task and have them do it instead.
Streamline
Ask yourself: What would this look like if it were easy? Can this task be automated? is there a tool that can make this quicker? How can this task be simplified, made more repeatable and therefore take less time?
Suck it up
The last, final step is to just suck it up and do it. There are few things that make it to this point. But if it does, it might just mean the task isn't as shallow as you first thought and needs to be done and is worth trading your time for. So you're essentially wasting time
You can't do everything
Using your time wisely doesn't mean you have to become a machine solely focused on productivity and work.
It's literally impossible for us to do everything we want to do.
Oliver Burkeman writes in Four Thousand Weeks:
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control
No, the goal of getting rid of shallow work is just to provide a bit of a pressure release so we're not scheduled within an inch of our life or rush from task to task to task without asking ourselves "why am I doing this?".
With the time you save, other things will fill the gap. It's just a matter of choosing the right things.
There's a song by my favorite band, Frightened Rabbit that talks about what to do.
It goes:
When it's all gone / Something carries on
And it's not morbid at all / Just that nature's had enough of you
When my blood stops / Someone else's will thaw
When my head rolls off / Someone else's will turn
And while I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth
So I ask you, Dear Reader:
What are your tiny changes going to be?