A Few Hours

The first time I read Tim Urban's article The Tail End, I was close to tears by the end. Go read it if you haven't - his way of thinking and articulating heavy subject matter in a simple, accessible way makes it worth the read. The gist of this particular article is that by the time you reach your 30s, you've likely spent 95+% of all the time you'll ever spend with your parents. I had to run the numbers for myself. 

Age 3.5 = 21.85% (daughter's current age)
Age 5.5 = 34.33% (son's current age)
Age 12 = 74.91%
Age 18 = 96.64%

Since becoming a parent I've heard the cliche "the days are long but the years are short" a number of times, and now here it was laid out like a mathematical proof.  

The new world of social distancing and self-isolation changes the numbers. My wife and I are working from home and splitting the our day into 5 hour shifts of childcare and uninterrupted work. Now our prior estimate for any weekday of 4 hours a day (1.5 in the morning and 2.5 in the evening) increases by an extra 5 hours per weekday to 9 hours per weekday. This may not seem like much. Or it might seem like way too much if you also have kids, but let's recalculate the next few weeks. An extra 5 hours per weekday 5 days a week is 100 hours per month, or 0.24% of my total estimated lifetime hours with my kids. A quarter of a percent per month! The number can seem like so little and also so much. I won't be able to ask for any extra hours at the end, so I'm going to do my best to cherish these extra ones and treat them like the gift they are. 

This One is Different

I was 15 and a sophomore in high school on September 11th. I had weight training first period (so jacked bro), so I didn't learn of the first plane hitting the tower until late in the morning. I showered in the field house and walked up the bleachers back toward the main school building, when I ran into John Ross. "A plane just hit the World Trade Center" was all he said. 

I don't remember much else from that day. I think I remember them sending everyone to homeroom and watching the news silently in class. I don't remember if we were watching when the second plane hit, or if we were watching when the towers fell. It's hard to separate real memories from the retelling of the story over the years. I don't even remember my feelings then, but I doubt my adolescent brain would have been able to put it into words the way I could if it happened today. 

Impact: We still wade through the after effects of the War on Terror every day, but largely 9/11 was a singular event, with its epicenter in New York City. Most people in the country outside of NYC didn't directly know someone who lost their life either in the tragedy or from the hazardous conditions of the attempted rescue and cleanup missions.

Blame: The perpetrators were a small (on a global scale), homogeneous group of people. A "them." 


In 2008, I was wrapping up my last two semesters at Georgia Tech. I was fortunate to get a job in March during the Spring career fair, so I was on autopilot for the second half of Spring semester semester. I had banked most of my "easy" classes for the summer, so even with 15 hours of classes I was poised for a fairly carefree summer. Commencement was on a Friday in early August, and I started work the next Monday. Six weeks of training in Chicago followed, and then I was back in Atlanta, eager to start selling some machine vision systems. My territory would primarily consist of automotive manufacturers in a small sliver of Georgia and the entire states of Alabama and Mississippi. Lehman Brothers collapsed four weeks later, the banks and the auto industry got bailouts just to stay afloat, and for a long time, no one was buying what I was selling (literally - I didn't sell anything for a full year). 

The damage came in waves over the next months. My primary source of news was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the more people he lampooned, the more it just seemed like everyone was responsible. In the years following the recession, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera wrote All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, which cemented my distrust for anything related to finance. 

Impact: Seemingly everyone was either directly impacted or knew someone who was, but few people died as a direct result of the financial crisis. A lot of people and institutions lost a lot of money. My parents' retirement was gutted. People were forced from their homes. A decade later the country was aggressively riding a bull market to new highs, but many neighborhoods, towns, and cities never fully recovered. 

Blame: There is no way to really attribute blame in such a complex system, so I'll just list people who had a hand in it. Corrupt subprime lenders. Financial organizations like the banks and ratings agencies that put market share and profits ahead of clients. Paralyzed and powerless regulators. Vulnerable (and some may argue irresponsible) mortgage borrowers. There were villains, victims, and villains that thought they were the victims. 


COVID-19 is a different kind of crisis. It started as a "China problem" and it wasn't a big deal (according to our government leaders and the media). At least not until it was a Big Deal. Capital B, capital D, Big Deal. Most people like me are about to start their second week with mandatory work from home policies in place. We've left the house a handful of times for groceries, twice to pick up drive through orders from Target (kid toys, toiletry essentials), and once to take the car (and kids) through an automatic car wash; with a three and a five year old you'll take whatever cheap thrill will get you by. Estimates for how long life will be like this range from 30 days to many months. If people continue to stay home we can flatten the curve, and as long the internet doesn't break from the increased sustained load, most people will be ok. 

Impact: Likely. Every. Single. Person. In. The. World. Think about that. We are barely into this event, and as of this writing on March 22 there are ~328k confirmed cases. The sheer scale of an event that impacts 7.5B people is not something easy to comprehend. In the US it will get worse before it gets better. For Americans, this won't be like 9/11, where maybe you kind of knew someone whose cousin's mother-in-law went to synagogue with a lady whose grandson was killed in the attack. COVID-19 will kill people you've met before. Maybe not your parents, but a neighbor. People who are young and single may never meet grandmother or grandfather of their future spouse. Potentially their mother or father. Businesses will close permanently. Some industries may never recover. The economy will grind to a halt, and people will be scared to leave their houses for months to come. The societal scars of COVID-19 will be visible for a long time.

Blame: No one? Everyone? Do we blame the bats in the live animal markets in China? Do we blame ourselves for invading nature and creating the demand for exotic animals that lets those markets exist? Do we blame anti-vaxxers and others steeped in denial, who call this a conspiracy and continue to send their kids to gymnastics camp and soccer practice? How about the young people who just don't fucking get it, or are just too selfish and immature to care? Many more eloquent words will be written about this than I can write. For now, stay home, keep paying the people you would normally pay even when they aren't performing their services (like house cleaners and hair cutters), support healthcare workers however you can, and say important things to the people you love the most.

Put a label on it

Jim* sat at the end of the conference table, arms folded firmly across his chest. "Jim, what do you think? You're been at this the longest, what should we do?" Our bids to engage him did little to move him. It was the fourth meeting to review the recommendation on the path forward, and it seemed like we were doomed to continue spinning in circles. Jim was the most knowledgeable, but after repeated rejections of his ideas early on, he had resigned himself to giving the team the silent treatment. 

"Jim, it seems like you think we aren't going to listen to what you have to say." 

BOOM, the floodgates opened. "It's not that. I'm frustrated because we're spinning in circles when we know the right answer but no one wants to just make the decision and move on." 

"How do you think we should move forward?" 

"Well I would start by..." and we were back on our way to a resolution.

This story highlights the power of a technique called "labeling," which I first learned about when I read Never Split the Difference (coincidentally one of the most practical books on human psychology I've ever read). The formula is pretty simple: 

It [seems / sounds / looks] like [observation or guess about what is happening]. 

This phrase taps into a powerful psychological principle - it's much less threatening to talk about something when it is detached from our sense of self. If we had asked Jim, "Are you ignoring us because you think we won't listen to you?" it would have immediately put him on the defensive because of the accusation that he's ignoring the team. By making the conversation about the observation, Jim feels much safer to engage. Because you're not asserting anything but rather describing your perception, it is also reduces the likelihood of escalating the tension.

This technique is one of the most versatile verbal techniques you can use to have better conversations. I plan on revisiting some of the more nuanced uses of labeling in the future, so I will end with some "starter labels" you can try:  
  • It looks like you have more to say about this
  • It seems like I'm missing the mark here
  • It sounds like this is really important to you

*Jim is not his real name. It's James. 

Interstitial Journaling

I've long envied journalers because I consider journaling to be a meta-habit. The benefits spill over from the act itself to many other areas of life. It's not (always) just a bland, narcissistic record of the minutiae of your life. At infrequent intervals I've used it to increase self awareness, help with mood regulation, and to clarify my thinking on complicated topics. It takes many forms (from Morning Pages to The 5 Minute Journal, Contentment Journal, and beyond) but there's no special formula - the key is just to write what matters most and do it consistently. Like any additive habit (versus a subtractive or simplifying habit), the benefit needs to far outweigh the cost of taking the extra time to do it. 

Many of the most prolific thinkers across history like Charles Darwin were unrelenting journalers. They filled tome after tome with every thought that ever occurred to them, leaving behind a phenomenal record of a lifetime of thinking. I've tried to pick up journaling in the past, and have failed at making the habit last beyond a few weeks. This made me wonder if I simply was not capable of being a journaler, until I was listening to Penn Jillette's description of his OCD in his episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. Some part of a successful journaling practice may be  attributable to degrees of obsessive compulsive behavior that I just don't possess (interestingly OCD also helps explain people with perfect memories). Should I just give up? 

Enter the Interstitial Journaling technique. I first read about it here on Medium. If you don't want to take the 15 minutes to read the original article, here's the crux of it: start a text file (or Evernote note), and every time you switch from one activity to another write a sentence or two about what you were doing and a few about what you plan to do next. Here's two recent examples:
  • 3-2-2020 | 11:32 AM: Feeling pretty good about what I've accomplished so far this morning. I started shaping the project Microsoft Teams site for [project x], and designed a bad ass ultra clear meeting agenda using a technique from the HBR Ideacast episode I listened to yesterday (Why Meetings Go Wrong and How to Fix Them). I framed the agenda as a series of questions so we can check in periodically to make sure we know we are making progress. Hopefully it will help keeps us on track and potentially even end the meeting early if we get the questions answered. 
    Next up: I'm going to sketch out the next steps and timeline for [project x] and have some lunch.
  • 3-3-2020 | 5:05 PM: The meeting with the key stakeholders for [project y] was pretty rigid. I don't think we are really doing a good job of landing our purpose and objective for each meeting with these important people. I think that in the future if we aren't totally ready we should just cancel and reschedule the meeting because people appreciate their time back, not having it wasted.  
    Next up: Go home and unplug for the day
It took 4-5 minutes to write each of these, including grabbing the link for the podcast episode, and this habit pulls a lot of weight: 
  1. It forces "in the moment" reflection that provides a vivid record of what I do all week, which makes writing a weekly update much easier at the end of the week. Recording as I go also makes me much less susceptible to hindsight bias when trying to recall something later.
  2. It helps me keep track of progress on the experiments I'm running, like with techniques for running better meetings (see below for more about that). 
  3. Context switching can be a major drain on productivity, and writing the journal entry provides a clear off ramp from one activity and on ramp to the next. It also serves as a signal of how frequently I'm going through major context shifts.
  4. Creates space for reflection, and increases my awareness of my emotional states as I move through my day.
I'm a few weeks into the habit, and I've found it to be easy to integrate into my workflow, even if I don't record at every transition. The true test will be if I'm able to continue to prioritize it even when things become more hectic.