The Walkman Principle: Why You Could Delete Half Your Calendar.
Mostly things I wish I did and inspired from a Shane Parrish quote
I read this on FS and was inspired to write my thoughts on this subject…The original quote is pasted below:
People who get an unusual amount of work done are maniacal about removing things from their lives that others tolerate.
Guarding your time isn't rude; it's how you get stuff done.
Letting a meeting go on longer than necessary is nice to them, but unkind to yourself.
Nice is what people want from you. Kindness is what you owe yourself.
Most executives don't have a time management problem. They have a massive tolerance problem.
If I were running a business quiz today, my opening question would be this: In 1979, what “essential” feature did Akio Morita force his engineers to rip out of a modified dictaphone, utterly terrifying his own sales department?
The answer is the recording circuit.
Selling a tape machine that couldn't actually record anything seemed like a fantastic way to go bankrupt. Morita realized that ripping out the expected clutter was the only way to make the device genuinely portable.
He dumped the dead weight, and the Walkman sold 400 million units.
I spent the first decade of my career meticulously color-coding my calendar to accommodate other people's priorities. I was highly efficient at organizing my own misery.
Watch the engineers and leaders who consistently get an unusual amount of heavy lifting done. They apply the Walkman logic to their daily routines.
They are absolutely maniacal about deleting the noise the rest of us quietly accept.
They quietly excuse themselves from rambling alignment calls. They permanently mute the endless reply-all threads. They refuse to carry around recording circuits they will never actually use.
Management pioneer Peter Drucker captured this specific brand of ruthlessness beautifully.
"There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all."
Stop trying to neatly categorize the garbage on your desk. Just throw it out.
Liked the short take on calendar management, Mitesh. As I took a sip of my morning tea here in Houston, it hit me that people do exactly the same thing with their careers. They spend time and energy on the nice-to-haves and quietly skip the need-to-haves. Things that move the dial on the outcome, rather than things done for the sake of doing. The Walkman move belongs inside a career, not only on a calendar. Going to restack this with my perspective layered on top, which is what I do for the Substack pieces I most want to endorse.
I remember recieving this email from you (it was 2011 if I am not wrong) - "This thread has done nothing but added to the digital waste in our mail server infrastructure". It still sits at the top of some of the best advices I ever received. The content of the mail indeed was a whole lot of nothing, and was a poorly trying to justify "operation successful, patient dead". That day, I learned that work done for the sake of showing efforts will take me nowhere. Unfortunately, I very often see that I am clearly getting pulled into things, that is 100% someone else's work product purely to demonstrate effort and nothing more! and I try my best to frame my own version of "please don't add digital waste" and spare my calendar! Great read as always Mitesh!