Life of (f)Utility: Hacking the Human Race

Instant Productivity Hack: Put on Your Gameface

When I used to play football in high school, I remember the moments before the game. It was a very serious time. If coach ever saw you goofing off or even smiling, he’d yell at you. This was a time to focus.

Fast-forward 16 years later. I’m sitting in my cube. I’ve got 30 mins to lunch time and I’m faced with a decision: do I take an early lunch, or do I dig in and get those nagging to-do’s out of the way. How do I overcome the temptation to goof off? I put on my gameface. Despite how silly this is, it works for me. With my gameface on, it makes it harder for me to then go read slashdot or whatever. It kind of puts me in the right frame of mind.

Here’s me with my gameface:

(it’s actually a little meaner than this, but this is the only picture I have handy. Afterall, I’m too busy to take a picture when I have my real gameface on.)

Often, my gameface will just naturally show up when I’m getting down to business. What I’m talking about here is consciously turning it on to avoid distraction, both internally and externally.

Acknowledgements: Coach Eskue

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Behind the Scenes at Blogrlab

I’ve got a three day weekend starting today. I’m hoping to make some progress on two other experiments (#2 and #3). I’ve got a 10′oclock meeting at Starbucks to make $65 for experiment #1.

Experiment #2 will be an online mistakes database. I’m hoping for everyone around the world to pour in their life’s goofs where my team will apply emotionless, scientific analysis of these mistakes, life regrets, and failure modes so that we, as a human race, can get smarter. Ridiculous idea? It’s a whopper, allright.

Experiment #3 will need to be kept under wraps for a while. The leg-work required for Experiment #3 is huge. Please don’t ask me about it, because I really don’t want to elaborate on it right now. Lemme just say that it’s an invention. I’ve done the patent search for it. Though it looks promising, I’m not ruling out that prior-art will be a show-stopper; so I’m cautiously marching on. I’m 99% sure that if I told you what it was, you’d be un-impressed. Aside from intellectual property concerns, I think that might be why I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t need any discouragement!

On my way home from work a month ago, I picked up some off the shelf items at Target and The Container Store to kludge together to make a prototype. I need to go to Home Depot today to rent some tools. Once I get the prototype together, I can start testing it and see if my idea has legs.

Is this guy, for real, or what? Is he serious?

I’m as serious as a heart attack. I feel that I’ve got about 4-5 years to make something happen in my life. After that, my motivation for doing stuff like this will dramatically deteriorate, I suspect. My vision is for one of these experiments to take off. There will obviously be failures, so that’s why I’m trying multiple things. Experiment 1 already has positive cash flow for the other experiments, but obviously - experiment #1 is just a stepping stone.

In all my previous posts, I’ve laid out for you the mind-hacks and analytical techniques which drive me forward, albeit at a plodding pace. You will notice, however, that I have yet to post much in my ‘Results’ section of this blog. Ultimately, this will reflect the effectiveness of these techniques, at least for my case. I should add that this is what irks me about blogs, in general. There’s all this advice that is given, but no feed-back loop that indicates if any of it is worth anything. Many of the ideas that I present, admittedly, are in ‘beta’. I have no idea if they will be useful and actually derive results. I know they get results in my profession as an engineer on the manufacturing line, but can they be used to systematically drive entrepreneurial efforts?

Acknowledgements

Much thanks to Sam Crockett for introducing me to Drupal, which appears to be an optimal platform for the Online Mistakes Database. One of Drupal’s taglines is ‘Community Plumbing’. True story: my dream job as a child was to become a plumber. As a chemical engineer, I’m already a high-tech plumber, of sorts. Maybe this is a sign.

Much thanks to all readers, especially Alik Levin, whose blog I stumbled on months ago. Upon reading just a few of his posts, I said to myself: this is a guy who gets stuff done.

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If this ain’t useful, I don’t know what is: GrandCentral

As a novice web micro-entrepreneur, I consider this service a must. In fact, I just received a voicemail from a potential craigslist customer on my grandcentral number.

Here’s a short list of what you can do:

• Know who’s calling and screen unknown callers
• One number that rings different phones based on who’s calling
• Record calls on the fly and access recordings online
• Receive voicemail notifications via email or SMS

The list of features goes on.
I remember reading about other websites offering a similar service, but I haven’t tried them. If anyone else has, I’d appreciate a comment letting me know what you think of them - and what the url is. GrandCentral was bought out by Google so that’s definitely a strong endorsement. I suspect that the service will not remain free, but I will enjoy it while it lasts. Depending on the rates, I would definitely pay for this service. Using GrandCentral has allowed me to post a phone number online which, I think, improves ‘conversion rate’ to an actual transaction.

Another thing that I think is really cool about GrandCentral is that they help the homeless or those without phones stay in touch with people. Based on their outstanding service, innovation and commitment to contribute to society, this company definitely gets the blogrdoc stamp of approval.

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Simple Mind Trick for Empowerment

Whenever I’m feeling low in enthusiasm or motivation, I always bring up this simple line of reasoning to get me back on track:

• Is life affecting me or am I affecting life?
• Am I going through the motions or am I putting things in motion?
• Am I at the mercy of my distractions; or have I tuned them out and am I focused?
• Am I being re-active or proactive?
• Am I letting my environment get the best of me, getting tossed in the waves, so to speak; or am I imposing my will on my environment?

All of these questions draw a clear line between the self and the surroundings. When the surroundings dominate the self, the feelings of despair set in.

Clearly, the environment imposes constraints, in the form of conservation of various consumables or correlation of certain variables, but from these constraints, like solving for ‘X’, we define the solution.

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Gift Shopping Hack

Gift exchange during the holidays is a big deal in my family and for that reason, I’ve come up with this shopping tip. I do realize that I may have to revoke my ‘man’ -card with this post, but that’s okay, I’m very secure in my manliness.

The Problem with Buying Gifts At the Last Minute (especially for the holidays)

• You will likely make an unwise impulse purchase
• Selection will be low
• Prices will be high
• You waste time, energy, gas driving around looking for that ‘perfect gift’ or good deals

The root cause* in all of this is lack of planning and not giving yourself enough time.

My Gift Shopping ‘Hack’

Always have an eye out (year round) for good deals for people you will likely buy a gift for.

By doing this, you can usually solve all the problems listed above. When it comes time to give your gift, you can be confident that you haven’t wasted your money on a gift that won’t get used and it will actually be appreciated. If you are the kind of person that just doesn’t go to shopping malls, I’m not saying to go out of your way to do this. I’m just saying to keep an eye open in the case that you happen to see it. Once you make it a habit, it becomes a mental-microautomation that you don’t even have to think about.

Gift Shopping Hack Example

Today we went to Costco to buy some household stuff, but a couple items grabbed my attention. One was a Nautica long-sleeve dress shirt (picture above) and the other was an Armani ’synthetic’ fabric type navy blue short sleeve shirt. I bought 2 of the Nauticas and 2 of the Armanis. There were all at $9.97 each.** Though the price is low, this is not a ‘cheap’ gift since it’s actually really good quality and pretty stylin’. Moreover, my dad and uncle would probably appreciate the fact that I was thinking of them (albeit for the sake of saving money, but hey - give me a break - I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed!) As another example, I’ve had my sister’s B-day present ready for a couple months now, leaving me plenty of time to put it in the mail so it gets there on time.

*Note that ‘root cause’ is yet another engineering phrase that will crop up in this blog. As engineers, we often seek to find root cause of our problems to prevent them from happening again. (e.g.: David’s white board was always dirty with month-old notes and chicken scratch drawings. Root cause: there was no easily accessible eraser.)

**The lady working there claimed that the Armani’s were marked down from $60. I jokingly accused her of inflating the mark-down price. She was not amused. oops!

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Feedburner analysis to Determine Real # of Subscribers

I’m a web newbie, but I’m no stranger to interpreting data. If someone who *knows better* can tell me that what I’m about to say is complete BS, please let me know. (I should add that this goes for all my posts.)

One thing I noticed about feedburner is that you can’t trust the number of subscribers that it reports. So I setup a fake website with no content and let feedburner track it. Sure enough, it reports a dozen or so ’subscribers’. To determine my real number of subscribers, I simply subtract this number from my # of subscribers.

So here is the “equation”:
# of real subscribers = (# subscribers of real blog) - (# subscribers of fake blog)

This is probably only applicable/useful for small-time bloggers like me. If you’ve got hundreds or more subscribers, you obviously don’t need to worry about this.

I should add that this is an application of my theory of applying variation where it counts. In engineering/scientific experimentation, we call these ’splits’.

So, if I wanted to be fancy, I’d say,
I ran splits on my feedburner feeds to determine the “signal” from my blog.

In the life-sciences, they call these ‘treatments’.

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Taking Public Transportation - Just try it!

These are some pics I took on the bus ride to work. I don’t make it every day, but I enjoy it when I can.

Gathering Up the “Courage”

It took me a while to finally try public transportation. I grew up in Texas, so driving everywhere was perfectly normal. I suppose gas prices have had a role in my consideration of taking public transportation, but I can honestly say also that I really hate driving. I used to commute 100mi (round trip) every day for 5 years and I am sick of being behind the wheel. The traffic drives me mad and I can’t stand sitting behind the wheel for 1 -1.5 hours in bumper to bumper traffic.

The Advantages of Taking Public Transportation to Work

Once the weather improves, I’ll start riding my bike more and this should cut down on the number of transfers I have to make. Round trip, the bus/train fare is $3.50. Here’s a list of advantages:

• I’m saving a little money in gas, but more importantly, I’m able to convert all that driving time to resting/relaxing/productive time on the train/bus.
• Taking the bus also forces me to get my stuff done on time at work.
• If I keep it up, I can lower my insurance premiums
• Lastly - it’s a very sensible way to travel and it’s good for the environment!

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Conservation Laws

I’ve discussed topics of variation, correlation and now - perhaps my favorite topic since it is so simple and powerful: conservation.

Food is just one of the things that we consume for which we have to watch our diet. Here’s a list of other critical consumables which we can also have “junk food” equivalents:

1. Time
2. Relationships
3. Your personal energy
4. Money

Theory

Time and relationships cannot be replaced nor accumulated. The irreplaceableness of time is self-evident. As for relationships, yes you can have more than one child, and I suppose, in certain cultures, more than one spouse. But - if you believe, as I do, that every person is unique and infinitely valuable, I do not consider people “interchangeable”.

I list item #3 as ‘your personal energy’ to distinguish it from, say - the energy generated from a power plant or the sun.

My point here is that if we keep in mind that these critical consumables are in fact… consumable - we should place ourselves on a ‘diet’ of these things just as we would food.

‘Parkinson’s Law’ as Tim Ferriss has drawn attention to recently (also known as the ‘80/20′ law), in my view, is simply a re-expression of placing yourself on a time/energy diet. Many personal finance blogs are a re-expression of placing yourself on a financial diet. Seek out the ‘vegetable’ equivalents in these critical consumables. They may be unpleasant, but they will reap returns. One of the mantra’s of this blog is to ‘run lean’ and by that, I don’t just mean the ‘traditional’ diet.

Topics for discussion:

1. What are some time-veggies you can think of?
Ans: Planning. Daily reflection.
2. What are some money-veggies you can think of?
Ans: Dollar-cost averaging. Extra credit answer: Value averaging (i’ve heard of this and heard that it is *better* than Dollar cost averaging, but I have no idea what it is)
3. What are some relationship-veggies you can think of?
Ans: Making the first move on calling a friend you haven’t talked to in a while. Unconditional love, etc…

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The Minimalist Home Gym

I’m about to buy an elliptical trainer. The last time I bought fitness equipment was 7 years ago when I bought this thing for $100:

That was some of the best $100 I’ve ever spent. Thanks to this simple piece of equipment, I’ve maintained the upper body strength I obtained when I played high school football. Pull ups and dips are both very hard. When you are starting out, it’s tough to do just one. Focusing on form is the key.

I used to go jogging, but my knees started to hurt. I like the idea of the elliptical trainer because you get the same range of motion, but none of the pounding on the joints. When I was in college, and even grad school, I didn’t care about such things. I just went out there and made my body do all kinds of things. Not now.

Once I get the elliptical trainer, I will have a complete home gym. Strength training and cardio. All under my roof. No need to drive to the gym. It’s ridiculous to spend 10 mins driving there and 10 mins back to go for a 30 min workout. Saves gas and time! Then all I’ll need is a hot tub :)

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Controlling your Output: The Concept of Correlation

In my last post, I suggested that nature is the best thing you can rely on. The world can be thought of in terms of input and output. You give the input, you perceive the output. (e.g. I go to bed early, I wake up refreshed and avoid traffic. I give tweet updates; my productivity goes down.)

A Mental Sledgehammer

Often, when you find some behavior that causes a reproducible relationship between the input and output, that correlation can serve as a sledgehammer in your hands that you can use to smash through any barrier you come up against. How do you know when you’ve found the correlation: when you can control the output. We know we’ve finally grokked* the problem when we can turn the problem on and off at will. This process is extremely self-empowering and will propel you forward to reach your goals.


I’m using colorful language here to drive home my point, but let me show you an example.

Starting late July is the time when I first found how strong the correlation was between eating habits and weight. Then in late Dec, I turned the weight gain on and off.

Correlations:Mapping the Brain to the Desired Output

I do not rely on discipline to maintain my eating habits. I rely on this chart. This chart, which reflects the nature of my body which cannot change, tells me what will happen for a given input. Then, it’s no longer just me deciding whether or not I want a double cheeseburger, I am deciding whether or not I want to gain pounds and increase my blood pressure. Mapping the brain to the output variables instead of only the input variables is the trick. In mathematics, we call this a transfer function. One of the reasons I love math is that it allows you to recast problems in a different, more tractable way. Knowing and accepting the correlation is key.


* To have a thorough understanding of a subject.

Acknowledgements

Patricia Snyder, my high school calculus teacher that encouraged me to stick with AP Calculus when I asked her if I could quit. Later that year, she sent me to the state high school calculus competition, where I was crushed.

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