I’ve experimented quite a bit over the years with my fitness habits. Well, it might not be fair to say “over a few years”, because the first few years involved me fooling around aimlessly without any focus- you don’t really learn anything from that, except that aimless So I’ve only really been experimenting for a year- because I’ve been keeping track of things reasonably enough for me to obeserve the consequences. So far, I’ve tried working out “whenever I feel like it”, “three times a week”, “every third day”, and now “once a week”. Of all of these, the most recent is my favourite, and I’d describe it as the most effective.
Now, once a week doesn’t actually deliver the best possible results. The best results I got were when I was working out every three days. But that was kind of complicated. It’s nowhere as complicated as what professional athletes and bodybuilders put themselves through, of course, but it was to complicated for me. If fitness were my only concern, I might have made it work, but I have a broad range of interests and commitments. I had to fit everything else around it. I had to plan my workouts carefully to avoid physical and mental exhaustion, which eventually happened anyway- because of my own ignorance- after which I sort of fell off the wagon and regressed back to doing nothing.
Once a week, on the other hand, has been delivering tangible benefits on a sustainable and consistent basis. My mind and body has substantial time to recover, and every subsequent workout feels refreshing, like a treat.
Which brings me back to Tim Ferriss’s description of the Minimum Effective Dose:
The minimum effective dose (MED) is defined simply: the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome. Anything beyond the MED is wasteful. To boil water, the MED is (100°C) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it “more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive.
If you need 15 minutes in the sun to trigger a melanin response, 15 minutes is your MED for tanning. More than 15 minutes is redundant and will just result in burning and a forced break from the beach. During this forced break from the beach, let’s assume one week, someone else who heeded his natural 15-minute MED will be able to fit in four more tanning sessions. He is four shades darker, whereas you have returned to your pale pre-beach self. Sad little manatee. In biological systems, exceeding your MED can freeze progress for weeks, even months.
If, instead of your MED, you mimic a glossy magazine routine-say, an arbitrary 5 sets of 10 repetitions-it is the muscular equivalent of sitting in the sun for an hour with a 15-minute MED. Not only is this wasteful, it is a predictable path for preventing and reversing gains. The organs and glands that help repair damaged tissue have more limitations than your enthusiasm. The kidneys, as one example, can clear the blood of a finite maximum waste concentration each day (approximately 450 mmol, or millimoles per liter). If you do a marathon three-hour workout and make your bloodstream look like an LA traffic jam, you stand the real chance of hitting a biochemical bottleneck.
More is not better. Indeed, your greatest challenge will be resisting the temptation to do more. The MED not only delivers the most dramatic results, but it does so in the least time possible.
So here’s the simple insight: Good is better than perfect. The marginally better routine you manage to adopt and incorporate into your lifestyle is infinitely superior to the perfect routine that you’re unable to sustain. The problem with perfect is that it doesn’t exist, and trying persistently and enthusiastically to somehow attain it by force is damaging and counter-productive, in almost every imaginable sense.
So now that I’m starting to see this in terms of biological systems, I have to wonder- what implications does it have for my writing? And immediately, it dawns on me- I’m not following the minimum effective dose.
Here’s how my writing sessions typically happen- I haven’t written for several days, and I’m feeling edgy and frustrated. I set aside a large chunk of time and plan to do a momentous amount of writing- I sometimes plan out all the articles I’m going to write in my little notebook beforehand. I then head to Starbucks, and start up my WordPress. I write a few lines. It doesn’t seem good enough. I hop over to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, where I spend the next few hours writing long, thoughtful responses- two or three Facebook responses can often be longer than any blog entry I might have planned to write.
It becomes clear now- I’m setting aside far too much time to write when I do, which Parkinson’s Law states is a stupid idea- and I go far too long without writing when I don’t.
So here’s a simple thought- if hitting the gym with absolute focus once a week for less than an hour is doing me more good than a whole bunch of random aimless workouts or complicated scheduling that I am not yet able to effectively wrap my head around, then there’s no reason why the same shouldn’t apply to my writing. So from now on, I’m going to dedicate an hour to writing, three times a week- without any distractions whatsoever.
Let’s see how it goes.
(You could be a smartass and claim that sustainability ought to be a prerequisite of perfection. Fair enough. It’s a weasel word anyway, and should be avoided altogether because it can mean so many different things to different people.)
Applying fitness wisdom to writing: Why Good is better than Perfect
I’ve experimented quite a bit over the years with my fitness habits. Well, it might not be fair to say “over a few years”, because the first few years involved me fooling around aimlessly without any focus- you don’t really learn anything from that, except that aimless So I’ve only really been experimenting for a year- because I’ve been keeping track of things reasonably enough for me to obeserve the consequences. So far, I’ve tried working out “whenever I feel like it”, “three times a week”, “every third day”, and now “once a week”. Of all of these, the most recent is my favourite, and I’d describe it as the most effective.
Now, once a week doesn’t actually deliver the best possible results. The best results I got were when I was working out every three days. But that was kind of complicated. It’s nowhere as complicated as what professional athletes and bodybuilders put themselves through, of course, but it was to complicated for me. If fitness were my only concern, I might have made it work, but I have a broad range of interests and commitments. I had to fit everything else around it. I had to plan my workouts carefully to avoid physical and mental exhaustion, which eventually happened anyway- because of my own ignorance- after which I sort of fell off the wagon and regressed back to doing nothing.
Once a week, on the other hand, has been delivering tangible benefits on a sustainable and consistent basis. My mind and body has substantial time to recover, and every subsequent workout feels refreshing, like a treat.
Which brings me back to Tim Ferriss’s description of the Minimum Effective Dose:
So here’s the simple insight: Good is better than perfect. The marginally better routine you manage to adopt and incorporate into your lifestyle is infinitely superior to the perfect routine that you’re unable to sustain. The problem with perfect is that it doesn’t exist, and trying persistently and enthusiastically to somehow attain it by force is damaging and counter-productive, in almost every imaginable sense.
So now that I’m starting to see this in terms of biological systems, I have to wonder- what implications does it have for my writing? And immediately, it dawns on me- I’m not following the minimum effective dose.
Here’s how my writing sessions typically happen- I haven’t written for several days, and I’m feeling edgy and frustrated. I set aside a large chunk of time and plan to do a momentous amount of writing- I sometimes plan out all the articles I’m going to write in my little notebook beforehand. I then head to Starbucks, and start up my WordPress. I write a few lines. It doesn’t seem good enough. I hop over to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, where I spend the next few hours writing long, thoughtful responses- two or three Facebook responses can often be longer than any blog entry I might have planned to write.
It becomes clear now- I’m setting aside far too much time to write when I do, which Parkinson’s Law states is a stupid idea- and I go far too long without writing when I don’t.
So here’s a simple thought- if hitting the gym with absolute focus once a week for less than an hour is doing me more good than a whole bunch of random aimless workouts or complicated scheduling that I am not yet able to effectively wrap my head around, then there’s no reason why the same shouldn’t apply to my writing. So from now on, I’m going to dedicate an hour to writing, three times a week- without any distractions whatsoever.
Let’s see how it goes.
(You could be a smartass and claim that sustainability ought to be a prerequisite of perfection. Fair enough. It’s a weasel word anyway, and should be avoided altogether because it can mean so many different things to different people.)