Jim Collins 20 Miles March and Day Tracking

Audio Podcast: link

Transcript. https://www.google.com/amp/s/tim.blog/2019/02/20/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-jim-collins-361/amp/

20 mile March

Daily tracking of mood

1000 hours of creative work

And so I went to some faculty members who I greatly respect and I said, “How do the people in the academy that you most respect in yourself spend their time?” And I got a consistent answer: 50, 30, 20. 50 percent of your time in new, intellectual, creative work. 30 percent of your time in teaching. And 20 percent of your time in other stuff that just has to get done — serving on committees, whatever it happens to be that you have to do. And so I thought, “That sounds good. I’m just going to start doing that.” So I started — as I was heading out on the Thelma and Louise leap — counting my hours every day. And I would count how many hours in the day were creative, new, intellectual. And the goal was that had to be above 50 percent.

There’s a concept in Great by Choice called the 20 mile march. And so I kind of had a 20 mile march, I just didn’t know that concept yet. And the idea of it being something that you just do really consistently over time that imposes a very high level of discipline that accumulates to results.

And so I simplified it and I just simply said, “Can I just simply count the number of creative hours I get every day and then hold myself to an account?” So at the end of every single day, I open a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has three cells on a line; that’s for the day. The first thing is just a simple accounting of what happened that day. Where did my time go? What did I do? etc.

Tim Ferriss: Can you give — sorry to interrupt, but I would love…this is the stuff I love. What might a description for the day look like? Is it three sentences, four sentences, what might it look like?

Jim Collins: It sort of depends on — actually the very best days don’t have much in it at all. They are: “Got up early, two hours of really great creative work, breakfast with Joanne, five hours creative work, work out, nap, three hours of creative work, enjoyed dinner with Joanne, bed.” That’s like a great day. But other days are full of lots of other choppy things. And so what I tend to do is try to capture a bit of what happened this week, what happened with the main tasks of the day. If there were some really interesting conversations that happened or something that hit in those. I’ll notes those. They’re markers so that I can always go back and I’ll just share with you how I use those in a minute because I actually do these correlations with all of that.

And then the second cell is the number of creative hours I got that day. Now there’s no rule about how many you get in a day. Sometimes there’s zero and sometimes they can be nine or 10, which would be a huge number. But then it calculates back over the last 365 days. And the march, which I don’t think I’ve missed for well over 30 years, and I hope to hit for a lot longer now is every single 365 days cycle, every single one, every single day, if you calculate back the last 365 days, the total number of creative hours must exceed 1,000. No matter what.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sick. It doesn’t matter if there’s other stuff you’d like — 1,000 creative hours a year as a minimum baseline. Now you can be above that, that’s fine. But never once, there can’t be a single day in any 365-day cycle, January two to January two, July 22 to July 22, September nine to September nine, it doesn’t matter. Always has to be above 1,000 creative hours. And you watch it — and I put on the whiteboard here at the lab — the three-month pace. So you take the last three months multiply it times four, the six month pace. And then the current 365. And that is a way to kind of monitor. If I start seeing those numbers start to go down, I’ll change my behavior. And sometimes I have a big buffer and sometimes I don’t.

And the idea is, if you stay with that, eventually you’re going to have work. Now there’s a third cell that I put in there that most people don’t know as much about because people know about the hours thing somewhat. But all of us have dark times, difficult times. All of us have good times, right? But here’s an interesting thing I noticed, which is that if you’re kind of going through a funk, it colors your whole life. And you tend to think your whole life is a funk because you’re looking through that lens.

And so I thought, “But actually I feel like my life is really pretty good.” But when you’re in that other place, it doesn’t feel that way, right? And so what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero minus one, minus two. And the other thing I put in — and the key on all this by the way is you have to do it every day in real time. You can’t five days later look back and say, “How did I feel that day?” And what this is, is a totally subjective “How quality was the day?” A plus two is a super positive day.