(Don’t want to buy the whole book and read it? Read this excerpt by Geoff Colvin.)

This book explaines that excellent performance is the fruit of years and years of practice, not the result of inborn talents or inherated abilities.

Photo courtesy of capn madd matt

This is something we all know: you can only gain a certain level of mastery in one of the sports, arts or crafts after serious numbers of repetitive exercises, carefully chosen to add to your previous experience. Do you want to be an excellent computer programmer? It takes hours of training, attacking programming challenges, before you see any progress in your programming speed or insight.

Colvins arguments are compelling. He describes the lives of two people whom the public consider to be exceptionally talented: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Tiger Woods. If we study the life stories of these two men, we see that both have been practising hundreds of hours per year since they were young children. Both were trained by their fathers, who proved to be very good teachers. (See this article by Cal Newport about what makes teachers great.) These people do not have a God-given talent. There is no ‘golf’-gene or ‘composing’-gene, so why should the talent be innate?

But there is an extra dimension. The number of hours practised explain for amount the success of the performance, but it is not sufficient to explain for the people who perform exceptionally great. What is it in the way they practise that is different from the people that only perform ‘very good’ in a certain art or craft? It shows that the oustanding performers design their practice hours to be 200% effective, here is how:

The 5 aspects of Deliberate Practice

1. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance.
   The best practice is tailored to be exactly so hard that you have to do your very best to just be able to do it once or twice, but not too hard so that you get discouraged.
2. Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot.
   The mind needs a lot of repetition to create new neural pathways that stay, or, so it turns out, pathways that are routed in strong, myelin-insulated fibers. So if you want to learn a new behavior, you have to repeat the practice over and over again, untill you can perform it sleeping.
3. Feedback on results is continuously available.
   To enforce certain ways of working, you have to know if the task is performed right.
4. It’s highly demanding mentally.
   The most effective practice is not recreational, but strenuous effort. Although I think this is a bit calvinistic aspect of the thinking about DP, I agree that to gain the most effect, the training has to be as challenging as possible, otherwise it could turn out to be a waste of time.
5. It’s hard.
   Tough practice is not pleasant. Because of this, the research about why outstanding performers practice is interesting. (More about this maybe later.)

The study of Deliberate Practice started after the publication of the scientific article by Ericcson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer in 1992 titled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance (pdf, 5.5 MB). This text is not easy to read and is written for a scientific audience.

Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh), our teacher, was in great shape, despite his 83 years. Listening to his Dharmatalks gave me some new insights because Thay explaines the subjects a bit differently every time.

One day we hiked in the country and woods for a couple of hours and picnicked in the back yard of a small farm house. Of course, the hike was in silence and concentration.

The main building of the (EIAB) is being renovated, therefore the big meditation room was located a tent and the buffets for food and drinks were also in tents. All the (vegan) meals during the retreat were enjoyed in silence.

I know a number of the people of the Dutch Sangha who were there and I also met people from other retreats, which was very nice. I held many conversations that warmed my heart.

Every day, I shared my experiences with a ‘family’ group of about 24 people. The sharing of the group members was deep and intense and gave me some more insights.

All in all I am very gratefull for this experience. (Fotos will follow shortly)

Image courtesy of ~Oryctes~

A lot of computer desktops present the user with a large number of distractions. Our attention spans seem to suffer from this multitasking and short ‘byte size’ texts. A good viral video should have a length of 3 minutes or visitors of the page will not finish watching it.

The book The Art of Concentration covers the subject of focusing on the here and now and thereby delivering more quality.

If you can read Dutch, I can recommend the book Op Informatiedieet by Guus Pijpers.

Here are some of my personal tips:

• Keep a notepad close to your work area. When you get an idea about something unrelated while you are working on a certain task, like “that reminds me, I should e-mail John”, write it down on the paper page. I find that a simple notepad with a pencil works best for me.
• Eliminate sound distractions, like background music. It is possible to block the sounds, but when you do this, you might notice that this ‘filter’ consumes energy.
• Sit in a place where people cannot find you easily.
• Meditation practise definitely lengthens your attention span, and so is reading books.
• I set a timer for 25 minutes and after that, reward myself with a 5 minutes pause. This is further described as the Pomodoro Technique.
• If you have trouble getting into your task: simply start and do not work too fast, take your time!

Internet usage definitely is addicting. A quote from the Times article:

Yet it takes, on average, 15 minutes to refocus after an interruption. Email is addictive because it brings reward: an invitation, a joke, some attention — simple lab-rat science. If I ate food, say, like I checked my digital portals, I’d think I had a serious problem.

Have We Forgotten How to Concentrate?

The Great Bell Chant from R Smittenaar on Vimeo.

The blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich features an excellent article by Cal Newport. Cal is a very successfull computer scientist and in this blogpost he reveals the secrets of his astonishing high productivity rate:

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Put another way: I’m no slacker. But with only a few exceptions, all of this work took place between 8:30 and 5:30, only on weekdays. (My exercise, which I do every day, is also included in this block, as is an hour of dog walking. I really like my post-5:30 free time to be completely free.)

Here are some of Cal’s tips:

• Be ruthlessly results oriented. Analyse everything that comes on your path to see wether it will help you achieve results.
• Be very clear when people you deal with can expect results and keep your promises
• Refuse all potential projects if you queue is too crowded
• Don’t be afraid to drop a project when it turns out to be a drain on your time and energy or strays from your goals.
• Try to be less visible or available to others, for instance by working in less visible places, like a corner of a library.
• Batch and habitatize, try to create a habit of regularly occuring tasks by performing them on a fixed time of day.
• Start early on projects.
• Stick to your schedule if it works and do not appologize to people when they demand more access.

What I like about this post is that although the author quits working at 5.30 PM and never works on weekends, he is very productive. So apparently, there is a paradox: limiting yourself, you will perform better.

Last year, I studied the Rule of Benedict and how it can be applied to time management. See this book if you want to learn more. I use it often to create my own time boxes: I set a timer to 60 minutes and focus myself to keep on working on the same task for this period. But when the timer is ended and the hour is over, I immediately stop. Then I pauze for 15 minutes before I start another sequence, often a very different task. It’s a bit like time box management.

Here is a link to the complete article:
Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers and finishes by 5:30pm | I Will Teach You To Be Rich

See also the site charterforcompassion.org

After the announcement on the blog Zen Habits in January, I decided to order a copy of the book. Amazon however did not have enough stock and when I tried six months later, I could finally obtain it.

In The Power of Less, a number of chapters deal with changing the way you do things step by step. We get a prescription on how to install new habits and how to eradicate unhealthy ones. Important hereby is, to limit yourself to changing one habit at the time and setting achievable, easy goals, in order to keep motivation and the sense of progression.

Another important aspect of this guide is simplifying everything you do. This reminded me of Edward de Bono’s simplicity principles, although Leo Babauta does not use references to other books. The easy way we can simplify is:
1. Identify the essential
2. Eliminate the rest

Six easy principles for enhancing productivity
The productivity system in The Power of Less is easy to implement and removes all the complexity that we know from other systems like Getting Thing Done. Focus on the essential and eliminating distractions are the key elements. Like Leo sums it up:
1. Set limitations
2. Choose the essential
3. Simplify
4. Focus
5. Create Habits
6. Start Small

I liked the book very much. It is very easy to read and motivating; you want to start implementing the tips immediately!

The Power of Less at Amazon

Hi,

I am studying for the LPI Level II certificate. I have just passed the exam LPI 201 last Friday and I have created a Freemind mindmap, to help me remind of the topics of the next exam, LPI 202. I based this mindmap on the topics of April 2009 (beware: only for the 202 exam). I used the great tool text-to-freemind for this.

I thought it would be nice to share it with you. You can download the mindmap here. (Right-click and choose ’save target as’.)

Damian ended his masterclass by showing us this little film:

Maybe you know it, since it was published in 2008, but to me this film shows that there are people all over the world who just want to have fun. It moved me and brought a big smile to my face.

Where the hell is matt?

The short summary of the letter from Seneca is: do not waste your time. Seneca in this text does not explain extensively which activities would not constitute time-wasting. In stead, he devotes a large number of paragraphs to explain why he thinks a great number of people are spending too much time on chasing money, power, fame or easy sensual pleasure.

I have to make an income, so I work. Would Seneca consider this a senseless activity? To me, it is a necessity.

Seneca argues that if you do not give in to distractions, your life seems longer. I agree with this completely. It is what my zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls: “Achieving more by doing less”. For me, this means: do not waste too much time with zapping the television or chatting (as I did) with a number of people on the Internet. What I find remarkable is that if you are zapping TV channels or senselessly surfing the Internet, time seems to fly by and at the end of the evening, I used to ask myself: “where did the time go?”

Picture courtesy of Uwe Eischens

Once you stop with things like that, other, more meaningful opportunities open.

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.

In the letter of Seneca, the author stresses that you should not let others claim your time too much. The example that Tim Ferriss gives is that if somebody would ask you to give him $ 100,-, you would kindly decline, but when somebody invites you to a 2 hour meeting that has no interest to you personally, you would be much more reluctant to decline.

This is definitely something I can relate to. As a young IT specialist, I was known within my family and friends as the guy they could call if they had some problem with their computer. This has cost me a lot of time back then, and I also found out that people would take my help largely for granted. Then one day, I decided that I would stop playing the free help desk, helping nobody anymore, save a few close relatives. I also like the T-shirt that says: “No, I will not fix your computer!” and I think that if you are a physician, people would also ask you medical details during birthday parties or receptions and you would also have to maintain the “no help-policy” for your own protection.

But what, according to Seneca, constitutes the beneficial ways to spend your time? I know from Googling about his work, that this would be a life in reflection, practicing philosophy and reading books of wisdom. This is what I miss in this letter, because here, Seneca does not write much about why these activities are good for you.

As a practicing Buddhist, I believe in mindfulness (being attentive to what you do), concentration (focus on one thing) and insight (that comes when you practice mindfulness and concentration). Focus on the essentials, daily meditation and keeping your balance give a feeling of calmness and having more patience with others. I do not know if this has any resemblance to the ideal activities in Seneca’s mind, though!