Lose 11 lbs in 6 months with the Apple Vision Pro!
And other miscellaneous productivity hacks...
11
“These go to 11!”
One of my favorite movie quotes is “These go to 11”—for when you need that extra push. This scene is from the 1984 cult classic This is Spinal Tap, a rockumentary about a touring English rock band.
Of course, the scene is satirical and funny. Still, the underlying question is actually pretty important—if you want to improve and achieve that extra bit of performance, money, promotion, whatever, what do you do?
The idea of pushing the edge is not just theoretical. In his book Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham made an incredibly important observation on superlinear returns. The basic idea is that being the best at something yields disproportionate returns, regardless of the field.
In professional basketball, for example, the lowest-paid player, Javon Freeman-Liberty, made a salary of $289,542, while the highest-paid player, Stephen Curry, made $51,915,615. Is Stephen 179 times better than Javon? 179 times taller? 179 times faster? Clearly not.
Similarly, in the arts, the median income for writers is $6080. JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame is now a billionaire! Are the Harry Potter books really 164,000 times better written than the median book?
If you look around, you’ll see similar examples on a smaller scale. For example, Seattle has a famous shopping mall: Pikes Place Market. One of the fish vendors has a schtick of throwing fish.
Very entertaining and fun, particularly if you are hosting visitors to our city! But economically, they make over ten times the revenue of other fish merchants in the market, even though they have a relatively small shop. The book Big Little Legends has a number of fabulous examples of what happens when small businesses take that extra push to stand out in what they are doing.
Bottom line, it doesn’t really matter what field or market you are in; being the best at it can yield tremendous returns, even if best just means selling the same fish as everybody else but throwing it around instead.
Dramatic rewards can come from pushing to 11!
1440
That’s all fine and good; the practical question is how?
To be actionable, consider this in two dimensions: what you personally can do to improve yourself and increase productivity and what everyone around you is doing (e.g., the organization you are in).
Improving organizational productivity is a blog post in and of itself and perhaps a topic for another day.
For personal improvement, one of the most useful frameworks I’ve learned over the years is the Law of 1440.
I actually learned this from Bill Gates himself. As some of you may know, from 2003 to 2007, I served as Bill Gates’ Technology Advisor at Microsoft. In this role, I was essentially supposed to know everything going on both within Microsoft and in the software industry as a whole and then distill that knowledge into actionable insights for Bill.
Tremendously fun, intellectually challenging, and at least, as defined above, completely impossible!
Up to that point in my career, one of the tools I used to succeed was simply to work harder. Is a big deadline coming up? Pull an all-nighter! Extra credit project? Come in on the weekend and do it (yes, this was before remote work and ubiquitous connectivity!)
Only when I started the Technology Advisor job, it didn’t matter how many all-nighters I could pull—it simply wasn’t possible to know everything.
So I asked Bill how he did it. The answer: the Law of 1440.
There are only 1440 minutes in the day. That’s the same for me, you, Bill Gates—everyone. The question, then, is how do you spend that time?
There is no universally right or wrong answer to that question. The key, though, is to be deliberate about figuring out the answer and then holding to it. You need time for work, your health, friends, and family, and don’t forget time to relax and recharge.
Map out how you want to spend your time and then hold to it. As a public figure, Bill Gates gets his share of praise and criticism, but one thing I can attest to is that he is deliberate about how he spends his time. He was very dedicated to his children, for example. When it was time to pick them up from school he would wrap up work and go. Kids appreciate time with their parents, and have very little conceptualization of that “important” work meeting after all!
Do the same for yourself. Want to keep weekends clear for family? Do that. Want to go to the gym three times a week in the morning? Ditto. Just make a plan.
With this time allocation plan, the next step is to figure out how to use that time most effectively.
Elon Musk gave a fabulous, impromptu interview on this a few years back. It’s a short clip, but it's well worth watching.
5
As Elon describes in the video below, the five steps to improving any activity are:
Question the requirements
Remove unnecessary process steps
Optimize
Accelerate
Automate
Note that this advice applies to organizations as well!
As Elon emphasizes, the key is to do these steps in order. Why optimize something that you can skip doing altogether?
For questioning the requirements and deleting process steps, you’ve already done a good chunk of that if you’ve applied the Law of 1440. Invariably, you made some decisions about things you were NOT going to do and, similarly, things you wanted to prioritize (e.g., quality time with kids and family).
The optimization question is particularly fascinating with the recent breakthroughs in AI technology. As I’ve written about in earlier posts, I’ve seen tremendous productivity improvements personally by using AI technologies.
However, AI has not uniformly been a win across all aspects of my life.
AI Big Winners
For programming and technical work, AI has been quite simply transformative for me. I’ve never been this productive as an engineer in my entire career. Github CoPilot, ChatGPT, and Polyverse Boost have been my ‘go-to’ tools this year.
Neutral / Small Wins
I’ve seen smaller wins using AI tools like Dall-E and MidJourney for image generation. I’m not a particularly talented artist, and the AI image generation tools have let me be visually expressive in a way that I was able to before. I had to hire a designer on 99designs or a similar service if I needed artwork.
Now, it’s easy! Many of the images used in my thoughtfulbits.me blog, for instance, are AI-generated. These are one-off images meant to convey an idea or emotion; AI tools were perfect for it.
But I can’t say they’ve been transformative. I probably could have found a nice public domain image on Google search that would have done the job just as well.
Losers
However, this past year has been a total bust in using AI for other areas of my professional work, like managing email and managing my work as a salesperson (startup CEOs wear many hats!). At least for me, the CoPilot features in Outlook and elsewhere in Office weren’t that helpful.
As a side digression, I’m bullish that AI tools can help with either better-managing email or sales processes or both! If you have needs here as well, please reach out to me, I’d love to brainstorm how to solve this opportunity!
I do need to caveat my email comment with a plug for the Superhuman email client. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s an email client focused on making email processing fast and efficient.
They’ve done a brilliant job of this. The most helpful feature for me is the “hold email and send it back to me later.” Nearly every day, I’ll get an email that I can’t address right away. Maybe I’m waiting for some other data, or maybe it is simply something I can decide on or act upon later (e.g., movie tickets for the weekend). By simply hitting the ‘H’ key on my keyboard, I can have that email held and delivered later, and that, in turn, lets me get through the rest of my email inbox.
It’s amazing how much psychology is at play here; hitting inbox zero (no emails in my email inbox) weirdly makes me feel like that task is done and I can move on to more useful tasks (e.g. writing this blog!). Making it easy to be productive and efficient makes someone more efficient and productive. Wins beget wins!
11
Now to the headline feature!
As I expect most of you know, earlier this year, Apple started shipping the Vision Pro augmented reality headset. This headset lets you overlay the real world with virtual objects (e.g., a board game) and use essentially your entire field of vision as a computer monitor. Imagine having a personal IMAX theater as your computer monitor—that’s what it feels like!
If you missed all of the news, this short ad from Apple shows it off pretty well:
I originally bought this solely for the larger monitor size. I love having lots of screen real estate for when I work. My office setup has four large screens attached to my desktop computer! But when I’m on the road or otherwise away, the Vision Pro has been outstanding for providing a larger screen area for work.
However, for me personally, I expect the most significant win from the VisionPro is going to come from a very unexpected source:
Exercise!
Many health experts recommend taking at least 10,000 steps daily to help lose weight (or maintain a healthy weight). But between family commitments and work that is primarily computer-based, that can sometimes be challenging (ok, very challenging!).
Over the years, I’ve tried to multitask while getting exercise while working, but with limited success. In the past, the best I achieved regularly was making work telephone calls while going for a walk around the local park. That’s harder to do with video conferencing like Zoom these days. Similarly, I have always struggled to read while walking on treadmills or the like. I just move too much to read comfortably.
Audiobooks and podcasts were right out. Maybe I need more discipline, but I can easily be distracted while listening to a podcast. When that happens, I lose the discussion thread and need to pause and rewind. It's doable, of course, but not enjoyable.
I had pretty much given up on finding a good way to get exercise while working.
Enter the Vision Pro.
Because the display is literally on my head right in front of my eyes, it doesn’t matter as much if I’m moving around. It quickly dawned on me that I could use the Vision Pro for work while working out!
So, I pulled a spare Bluetooth keyboard out of my bin of leftover electronics and went to the gym with my Apple Vision Pro to experiment.
Within minutes, I figured out that stairmasters and treadmills were right out. They involve way too much movement to be able to read effectively, much less type.
But the stationary bike worked! I’m moving around, of course, but not as much and well within my tolerance for using the Vision Pro.
Now, every day, I’m able to do more computer-intensive work, like coding or writing, while on a stationary bike.
It’s still too new to quantify exactly how effective this setup will be, but if it helps me get to “11” on my personal health and exercise goals, I calculate I could lose an additional 11 pounds over the the six months or so (or roughly half a pound a week).
We shall see!
Of course, improving one’s productivity is a perpetual, never ending goal. There are always new things to learn, and new technologies to try. Please share your own tips and tricks in the comment section!