U PSTREAM E FFECTS #5: Y ESTERDAY

Upstream Effects #5: Micro-Upstream

THE MICRO-UPSTREAM
 
How many philosophers, productivity experts, and Zen masters have reflected that you only get to live in the present?
 
Many; so many.
 
The first time you hear it, it’s so novel and interesting. Yes, yes indeed — you can’t live in the future. You can’t live in the past. There’s just the present moment with which to get things done.
 
If you only hear that type of thought infrequently, it’s enlightening every time you hear it. Make now work for you, instead of dreaming of far-off times, or ruminating and reminiscing over the past.
 
But here is a thought I hear less frequently — how did you get to this moment as you ?
 
Certainly, there’s all the work of your ancestors and past societies. The people who hammered out the alphabet in Phoenicia, the Romans who adopted it and spread it through the world. Gutenberg with his printing press, Mendeleev with his periodic table, Fleming with his penicillin, and ten million other inventions that let you be alive to thrive.
 
Then there’s the long chain of your ancestors, stretching back to time immemorial, scrapping and scraping and struggling brutally to get by, and to let their children survive to bring up the next generations. All those grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents of yours whose DNA and culture, care, and nurturing came down to make you.
 
Yes, there’s all of that — and it’s truly wondrous to think on and connect to a sense of history and the trajectory of mankind — but let’s focus in on the more mundane how-we-got-here-from-there.
 
***
 
HOW YOU GOT HERE FROM THERE
 
We’re talking Upstream Effects — realizing that the right now  you’ve got is almost entirely the result of what you did upstream .
 
Your decisions yesterday, and last week, and last year, and the year before — this effects what’s in your bank account, how strong or weak your muscles are, who your friends and associates are — and how trustworthy and reliable and excellent they are, your reputation, your self-conception, your skills, etc. 
 
Were we writing for a general audience, we'd now be forced to remark on the obvious and trivial reply that who your parents are effect all these things. So we’d say yes, of course, but you can’t change that, and you can start changing right now how you work, who you associate with, what you eat and how you train, how you order and organize your life. The things you start changing now will improve downstream — you’ll arrive “there” with more resources, more ability to thrive, and so on.
 
But we’re not writing for a general audience, so I doubt we’ll hear such concerns raised. We don’t have perfect agency in the world — not by any stretch of imagination — but the people who focus on what they don’t have, and constantly want to remind others of their disadvantages — well, they don’t get so far. And they’re not the people who are reading this.
 
The majority of the good and bad things in your life right now are such as a result of what you did upstream — in the past. For a child, yes, their parentage effects these things more than their own actions. The further you get from childhood, the less true this is and the more you can navigate your own trajectory and build your own life.
 
So, what to do about it?
 
***
 
THE MICRO-UPSTREAM
 
Your energy levels will oscillate today based on a certain set of natural patterns — on your circadian and ultradian rhythms, on the timing of your meals and the digestion of food, on how long you’ve been awake and how “sleep pressure” builds, on when stressful moments come up and how that affects your psychology and biochemistry.
 
Likewise, the time you fell asleep yesterday has a gigantic effect on how well or poorly today runs.
 
How well you slept last night has a gigantic effect on how well or poorly today runs.
 
We could call these the “micro-upstream” — areas that, with a small amount of different effort this evening, tomorrow morning will run better; areas that, by tuning tomorrow’s wakeup a little better, the first half of the day will run better; areas that, by tuning the first half of tomorrow better, the second half of tomorrow will run more smoothly, and so on.
 
***
 
HOURS
 
My good friend and oft-collaborator Kai Zau, when asked about time management, will frequently say this:
 
“Not all hours are created equal.”
 
I’ve heard Kai answer this question many times during a Q&A session after a talk at a university.
 
Kai’s life runs extraordinarily well, and he is thriving with all sorts of wonderful people, wonderful adventures, great health and fitness, a constant upward trajectory in his career and assets, and a lot of culture and service and interesting things mixed in with all those fundamentals.
 
“Not all hours are created equal.”
 
It was something I could never put my finger on, but there it was.
 
When elaborating, Kai would explain that he weighted a morning hour — the first 4-6 hours of the day — as around 4x more valuable than a late afternoon or evening hour.
 
From my own study and tracking, it seems about right. It’s consistently harder to do high-concept work, planning, or deep thinking 8-10 hours into the day than it is in the first few hours of the day after waking.
 
If you believe and agree with Kai’s assessment, this suggests a whole lot of actions to take.
 
The first is one that I’ve been surprised to see many top performers independently arrive at: wake up at least 3+ hours before your first appointment or obligation.
 
All of us sometimes wake up “on the wrong side of the bed”; on those mornings, it might take an hour or two of taking a shower, getting a coffee, reading or doing small things to let the mind center itself before being able to do great work.
 
Three hours before your first appointment gives you a fighting chance.
 
What do most people do, though? They wake up 30 to 60 minutes before they have to do something, take a quick shower, and are either on their first call or out the door to work. Then they get caught up in the flood of life and swept away, without necessarily doing anything very fantastic to move their life along.
 
If you agree with Kai’s assessment about morning hours being worth so much, you’d want to do whatever you can in the evening to save yourself time in the morning, to make the morning run smoother, to think it through.
 
Things like laying out your clothes and pre-deciding what you want to wear (and doing laundry if you’re lacking clean clothes), ensuring you’ve bought the things you need for the morning and breakfast so you don’t need to hit a restaurant or shop with those precious morning hours, perhaps pre-completing some mindless tasks that would otherwise need to be done in the morning.
 
***
 
THE FUNDAMENTAL LIMIT
 
If you wake up hung-over, frantically busy, dehydrated, stuff some junk in your food as you rush off to drive through traffic to do work that’s not well-defined and not particularly impactful, obviously, that’s not going to lead you to going up in life at the pace you could be.
 
Fixing these in-your-face problems goes a long way towards doing better.
 
We’ve already talked about resolving a morning time crunch — it’s almost required to have enough time and clarity in the morning to move your life forwards — and we spent an entire chapter talking about biochemistry.
 
That brings us to clarity.
 
One of the most destructive things, on a micro-level, is sitting paralyzed by too many options and not knowing what to do.
 
It’s imperative, at least monthly and ideally weekly, to know what’s the most important thing for you to be working on.
 
Then, if you haven’t moved forwards on that thing, you do that first.
 
This is supported by planning tomorrow this evening — again, the top of your list should be whatever the #1 thing is. Ideally the #1 thing is an entire project or impact area, so you can keep making accumulating progress in a single area.
 
Waking up and not knowing what to do, getting pulled in every direction, that’s a disaster.
 
So why don’t people get clarity?
 
Well, of course, some people never learned the skills of untangling their mind, or it never occurred to them to do this.
 
Fine.
 
But many more people know they should  focus their efforts somewhat to make real gains, and yet, keep flitting around from thing to thing, without much to show for it.
 
Why?
 
My best guess:
 
It’s because they don’t want to accept the downside of focusing.
 
Once you start measuring your time and paying attention to how long it takes to really complete things, you start to realize you can’t have everything.
 
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater, the most successful hedge fund of all time, wrote this in his  Principles  document —
 
"You can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.
 
"The first, most important, and typically most difficult step in the 5-Step Process is setting goals, because it forces you to decide what you really want and therefore what you can possibly get out of life. This is the step where you face the fundamental limit: life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.
 
"Some people fail at this point, afraid to reject a good alternative for fear that the loss will deprive them of some essential ingredient to their personal happiness. As a result, they pursue too many goals at the same time, achieving few or none of them.
 
"So it’s important to remember: it doesn’t really matter if some things are unavailable to you, because the selection of what IS available is so great. (That is why many people who had major losses—e.g., who lost their ability to walk, to see, etc.—and who didn’t narrow-mindedly obsess about their loss but rather open- mindedly accepted and enjoyed what remained, had equally happy lives as those who didn’t ever have these losses.)
 
"In other words, you can have an enormous amount: much, much more than what you need to have for a happy life. So don’t get discouraged by not being able to have everything you want, and for God’s sake, don’t be paralyzed by the choices. That’s nonsensical and unproductive. Get on with making your choices.
 
"Put another way,  to achieve your goals you have to prioritize, and that includes rejecting good alternatives  (so that you have the time and resources to pursue even better ones—time being probably your greatest limiting factor, though, through leverage, you can substantially reduce time’s constraints)."
 
***
 
HOLDING BACK THE FLOODS
 
Again, to the extent that you’re waking up in a frantic mess, you should fix that first. Plan the morning. Get hydrated, get your health going, get planning.
 
Put those Firebreaks and Rapid Repairs in place as we discussed last chapter. None of the best practices for having a great start of the day are particularly difficult  or require any extraordinary gifts, but they do take time, persistence, and a certain bullheadedness to repeatedly come back to until the behaviors become automatically entrained.
 
Then — and maybe this will sound odd — I’m not such a big fan of the afternoon, evening, or night.
 
We all have slightly different rhythms, so if you’re really thriving in those times, good on you.
 
But have you ever noticed that most of the bad decisions you make, you make in the later afternoon, evening, or night?
 
It’s true for almost all of us. Judgment decays throughout the day.
 
The majority of us, we’re apt to act stupider later in the day.
 
Just realizing this goes a long way to correcting it.
 
If that’s you, the right way to play the evening might be just trying to get to bed as early as you can when you start to fade, and trying to limit any damage or backsliding to other production or habits you’ve formed.
 
Certainly, I’ve had some amazing night-time production, sometimes pulling all-nighters when inspired. Yet, these days, I’d much rather try to wake up when it’s still dark out — 4AM or even earlier — if I want to capture that nighttime stillness… and then I get to watch a sunrise in the morning, fresh and alert.
 
It’s a really wonderful feeling knowing you’ve completed all the work you have to do in a day, before most people even woke up.
 
***

YOU RIGHT NOW IS CREATING YOU TOMORROW MORNING

What's the big idea here?

"You-right-now" is creating "you-tomorrow-morning."

Your reflexes will be faster or slower tomorrow. You'll have more or less clarity. You'll be healthier or less healthy. Food choices, water choices, sleep choices, planning in advance... even what you think about as you fall asleep.

So ask yourself, "What can I do now to make myself wake up and be the person I want to be tomorrow?" Handle the micro-upstream, stack the deck in your favor to hit the ground running tomorrow.