The Incrementalist

To do creative, high-leverage work, you need to step back and look at the big picture. But when there are fires to put out, demands to meet, and crises to solve, it’s hard to stop and think about what’s really important. 

When we zoom out though, we find that urgency doesn’t equal a true emergency.  Many of the things we did should have waited until another day, or maybe another week. Some required more thought before action. And maybe the problem would have resolved itself. 

We often confuse active busyness with true productivity, and favor the number of tasks over the value of tasks completed.

Take strategic pauses to avoid burning yourself out. A pause doesn’t have to be that long. 

In episode 34 of The Incrementalist, you will learn: 

1) There are four types of pauses

• Recuperative
• Reflective 
• Constructive 
• Reductive

2) White space is time without an assignment. It’s the free and open time on your calendar. Although it’s negative space, it still has a purpose and holds value. 

3) A wedge is bits of time between activities: between one meeting and the next, a request and a response, feedback and reply, an impulse and action, an idea and a plan, work and life, and want and get. With a wedge in the middle, you’re not jumping immediately from one thing to the next. 

4) Ten seconds is more than enough for a strategic pause

5) White space or a strategic pause is not the same as meditation, mind wandering or mindfulness

• Meditation is like keeping your dog on the leash, and when it tries to pull away, you gently say, heal. 
• Mind wandering is like your dog slipping out of the leash when you’re distracted. By the time you look up, your dog has run all the way across the other side of the park. 
• Mindfulness is like your dog feeling the grass under his feet, listening to the birds chirping, and smelling the hot pretzel cart. It’s the closest to white space, but it’s different. 

6) Thieves of Time are overgrown assets that become risks

• Drive becomes overdrive
• Excellence becomes perfectionism
• Informed becomes information overload
• Activity becomes frenzy

7) Simplification questions to ask to disarm the thief

• Overdrive: is there anything I can let go of?
• Perfectionism: where is "good enough," good enough?
• Information overload: what do I truly need to know? 
• Frenzy: What deserves my attention?

8) A task can be one of the following three: 

• Not time sensitive - doesn’t deserve attention now
• Tactically and strategically time sensitive - speedy or immediate action is important for good results
• Emotionally time sensitive - desire or fear drives you do something or want to have something done even though there is no real urgency

9) Hallucinated Urgency is the Pavlovian pull to meet the expectation now. This builds the tendency to interrupt others to get our burning needs met while stealing time away from them. What goes around comes around. You get information overload and more interruptions when these become the norm.

10) How a strategic pause helps you to make a decision on what to do next

Resources cited:

• Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist podcast,  Ep. 10, Rest Even When You're Busy

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr: Album – Olemus; Song – La Nieve (hearnow.com)

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

Industrialization created a clock time mentality. Time is now standardized, visible in the ticking minutes, and outside our existence.  Time is a resource to make money, and a thing to be traded, maximized and optimized. So, you end up with busyness, overwhelm, and pressure. And you feel guilty when there’s margin.

This is where time management falls short. It doesn’t really answer the existential question of what really matters.

In episode 33 of The Incrementalist, you will learn:

1) How idleness aversion and the desire to be productive can interfere with the present moment and the practice of being

2) You do not really control or manage time. The more you try to do this, the more time controls or manages you. Time just is.

3) The best you can do is make time your ally. When time is on your side, you can fully attend to, actively engage in and fully experience the task at hand. Befriend time so it becomes your ally. 

4) Why it helps to embrace your human limitations and close off other options and possible alternatives

5) Principle 1 of the Incrementalist approach is to choose your top priorities and watch out for middling priorities

6) Principle 2 of the Incrementalist approach is to break down projects into manageable tasks or chunks

7) You become calmer, less stressed and more satisfied when you work within your limits and ground your expectations and goals in reality

8) How the efficiency trap or busyness trap makes you work harder and drive yourself harder, but never gives you enough time

Read the transcript. 

Resources cited:

• Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• Dyan Williams, Befriending Time: Breaking Free from Busyness or Stuckness, February 2011

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr: Album – Olemus; Song – La Nieve (hearnow.com)

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

We often get stressed and anxious when the thing we want done is not done. We want what we want now. We don’t like waiting. Patience is sometimes seen as an anti-skill that wastes time, or a sign of indecisiveness or lack of power and autonomy. But in today’s fast paced world where overwhelm is common and immediate gratification is expected, patience is a superpower.

In episode 32 of The Incrementalist, you will learn:

1) The more you exercise patience as a skill, the better you can focus, step up to challenges that require long-term commitment, and  most important, slow down as needed. 

2) Patience is an essential virtue for navigating uncertainty and embracing the unfinished. With the superpower of patience, we know when to keep going, when to pause, and when to quit. 

3) There's no point in managing time enough to get everything done. 

• You will not clear the decks no matter how diligent and deliberate you are.
• You have real limits that are not easily overcome with automation, delegation, prioritization and optimization.

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr: Album – Olemus; Song – La Nieve (hearnow.com)

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

If you want to get to the next level, you need willpower to make creative breakthroughs and steady progress. Don’t you? After all, willpower helps you to beat distractions and delay gratification to make wise choices. But willpower is limited. It gets depleted the more you use it and as the day goes on.

While you could do certain things to boost and improve willpower, you could also shape your environment so you don’t need it. Your situation and circumstances either encourage or discourage positive change.

In episode 31 of The Incrementalist show, you will learn:

1. The stages of change

• precontemplation (you deny you have a problem)
• contemplation (you acknowledge there’s a problem and weigh the pros and cons of change)
• preparation (you commit to the change)
• action (you behave and act in new ways to effect change, which is shaped by internal factors like willpower and external factors like rewards and consequences)
• maintenance (you keep the good habits and drop the bad habits)
• relapse (you slip back into old behavior)

2. Why willpower is not enough to overcome obstacles

3. The problem with decision fatigue and how to reduce it 

• Make a full, 100% commitment to make the change
• Get clear and specific on what you really want
• Define positive goals to approach instead of negative goals to avoid
• Have implementations intentions and an if-then strategy
• Choose the big three things you will do to support your priorities
• Perform a weekly review and planning session 

4. The benefits of imagining the future and future you when making decisions

• Your future self is how you want to be and show up 90 days, 1 year, and 3 years from now
• Practice strategic ignorance by blocking things that are not serving your highest goals or desired life
• Practice strategic remembering by adding reminders of your future self in your current environment
• Keep visual cues of your wins and progress

5. The importance of making your commitments public and having support networks and accountability partners

6. The Pygmalion Effect, which means you rise or fall to the demands of expectations and situations

• Your personal history and past affect you, but does not define you, your present, or your future
• Your emotions are a key source of information in designing your environment

7.  How Forcing Functions put you on the hook for things that matter and help you create desired outcomes

• Parkinson's law, i.e. work expands to fill the time allotted for it
• The 80% approach, i.e. going for 80% gets results while striving for 100% is still thinking about it

8. Peak experiences allow you to stretch and grow beyond your limits

• The integration of pure work and pure play is necessary for creative insights
• Mental breakthroughs occur when you engage in deliberate rest, daydreaming and mind wandering, and quiet reflection

9. You usually need willpower to change your environment. But it’s really the environment that allows you to sustain the change.

Read the transcript. 

Resources cited:

• Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Secrets of Success
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• The Incrementalist, Ep. 8, How to Plan Your Ideal Week
• The Incrementalist, Ep. 10, Rest Even When You're Busy
• The Incrementalist, Ep. 20, Consistency and the Compound Effect

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr: Album – Olemus; Song – La Nieve (hearnow.com)

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

2020 was an especially challenging year. And this year continues to require some extra effort to start and finish things that matter.  Even if you’ve built a business for yourself (like I did), you can still have creative exhaustion and feel trapped by your work.

Maintaining discipline is more critical than having motivation. Preserve your energy and leave some fuel in the tank. Steady, daily progress through discipline allows you to cultivate long-term motivation. When you have autonomy, discretion, rewards that you value, social support, fair policies, and meaningful work, you feel more engaged and less burnt out.

In episode 30 of The Incrementalist podcast, you will learn:

1. Small, key things to do when you're in a motivation rut and feeling depleted

2. Why maintaining discipline is more important than having motivation

3. The three key dimensions of the burnout-engagement continuum, as defined by Dr. Christina Maslach and Dr. Michael Lieter: 

• exhaustion-energy
•  cynicism-involvement 
• inefficacy-efficacy

4. The six workplace factors that trigger burnout:

• workplace overload
• lack of control over your work
• insufficient reward
• lack of community
• absence of fairness
• conflicting values

5.  External factors and rewards don't always match with internal drivers and intrinsic motivation

6. How a unique framework -- the Motivation Code (MCODE) -- helps you to understand what motivates you and why

7. The Motivation Code includes 27 motivational themes that are grouped into six motivational families: 

Visionary

• Achieve Potential
• Make an Impact
• Experience the Ideal

Achiever

• Meet the Challenge
• Overcome
• Bring to Completion
• Advance

Team Player

• Collaborate
• Make the Grade
• Serve
• Influence Behavior

Learner

• Comprehend and Express
• Master
• Demonstrate New Learning
• Explore

Optimizer

• Organize
• Make it Right
• Improve
• Make it Work
• Develop
• Establish

Key Contributor

• Evoke Recognition
• Bring Control
• Be Unique
• Be Central
• Gain Ownership
• Excel

8. What motivates you does not always include work that you love, but involves work that allows you to accomplish what really matters to you.

9. Use clean fuel to motivate your work and create possibilities, meaning and significance to feel alive and engaged, instead of depleted and drained.

Read the Transcript. 

Resources cited:

• Christina Maslach & Michael P. Leiter, The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It
• Todd Henry with Rodd Penner, Todd W. Hall and Joshua Miller, The Motivation Code: Discover the Hidden Forces that Drive Your Best Work
• Dyan Williams, Attorney Burnout: The High Cost of Overwork

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr: Album – Olemus; Song – La Nieve (hearnow.com)

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

True productivity is not just about getting more stuff done effectively and efficiently. It also involves creating a meaningful and satisfying life. This doesn’t mean you always get what you want or that everything comes easy to you. Hardships can build appreciation for life itself. 

Words like purpose and calling are nebulous. They are associated with living authentically, with integrity and in alignment with your core values and commitments. 

Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy for discovering your purpose and building self-awareness. Your ikigai is something that gives you a sense of purpose. It sustains you and matches with your heartfelt desires and personal definition of success. It’s not always about goals or accomplishments. 

There is no perfect English translation for ikigai. Roughly speaking, Iki is "life" and Gai is "value or worth." It is your reason for being, your reason for living. You can find your ikigai through natural evolution or active contemplation. It is can include divergent interests and doesn’t have to be one thing.

In episode 29 of The Incrementalist podcast, you will learn:

1) What ikigai means from a traditional perspective compared to the Westernized version

2) The limits and benefits of the Ikigai Venn Diagram, which includes four elements:

• What you love, e.g. your activities or interests that trigger flow
• What you're good, e.g. your skills, talents, expertise, knowledge
• What the world needs, e.g. what you can contribute to your community, your group, and your market in terms of skills, talent, expertise, knowledge
• What you can be paid for, e.g. earning real money to meet your needs and be financially sustainable

3) The Venn Diagram shows your ikigai as being at the center, where the four elements intersect:

• Passion is what you love and are good at 
• Mission is what you love and what the world needs
• Profession is what you’re good at and what you can get paid for
• Vocation is what the world needs and what you can get paid for

4) Your ikigai may come from small, daily joys in life as well as from a role or activity that combines all four elements. A quick example:

• My long-time friend and piano teacher, Sebastian Brian Mehr, just released his debut album, Olemus. 
• His ikigai is in composing and making original music. It’s what he loves, what he’s good at, and what his audience needs. 
• If he can make a sustainable income through this path, all four elements will intersect. 
• It’s ideal to have them all, but you can usually find purpose with one or all of the first three.  

5) Your ikigai may come from different sources, such as pure enjoyment of an activity, regardless of whether you’re good at it, you get paid for it, or the world needs it. 

6) Your ikigai doesn’t have to be what you love. It’s a reason to live, which can come from hard things, like being a parent to a child or a caregiver of a disabled, aging parent. These roles and responsibilities bring meaning, but are not always fun. 

7) The source of your ikigai may come from difficulties, obstacles, struggles and tragedies. It might even arise from daily chores or mindful rituals. 

8) 10 ways to keep finding and experiencing your ikigai:

• Start small
• Let go and release what you don't want
• Aim for harmony and sustainability
• Be present with what is
• Take time to interact with nature
• Keep a healthy diet
• Stay active
• Give thanks for the small victories and gifts you have
• Sleep well for rest, recovery and rejuvenation
• Cultivate a sense of wonder and curiosity

9) Your ikigai can evolve and change over time, depending on the context, circumstances, and season of life.

Read the Transcript. 

Resources cited:

• Héctor García & Francesc Miralles, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life
• Yukari Mitsuhashi, Ikigai: The Japanese Art of a Meaningful Life
• The Incrementalist podcast, Ep. 15, Evening Routines and Rituals to End Your Day
• The Incrementalist, Ep. 26, Get Stressed the Right Way

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr: Album – Olemus; Song – La Nieve (hearnow.com)

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

To gain traction and execute better on your goals, start with a 12-week action plan instead of a longer term, annual plan. Rather than wait an entire year to track progress and measure results, you do a formal review every 12 weeks.  And in the 13th week, you make a plan for the next 12 weeks.

As part of your routine, you score the week, plan the week, and participate in weekly accountability meetings (WAM). Stay accountable by owning your thinking, choices and actions. Keep your commitments by uncovering hidden intentions, internal contradictions and big assumptions that undermine your desired behavior. 

In episode 28 of The Incrementalist podcast, you will learn:

1. The benefits of making a 12-week action plan for the 12-week year

2. The weekly routine involves scoring the week, planning the week and having accountability meetings

• The difference between measuring lead versus lag indicators
• Why you will benefit from a daily review and weekly review to track your actions and progress
• How a support group can help you when you're struggling with accountability

3. Accountability is not about negative, external consequences or punishment for bad performance or rewards for good performance. It’s about ownership. 

4. Commitment means you keep your promises to yourself and to others. It is part of being accountable. 

5. Commitment involves:

• Having a clear, compelling vision of what you want to create in life, which gives rise to intentional imbalance
• Defining specific key actions to reach big goals
• Counting the costs, including what you will need to give up and the obstacles you will face

6. The Immunity to Change model and how it affects your capacity to change

• Competing commitments are for self-protection and self-preservation, but they often get in the way of your accomplishing improvement goals and making necessary change
• The importance of hitting resistance straight on
• Why you need to uncover hidden intentions, internal contradictions and big assumptions to execute key actions

7.  Lack of execution - not lack of knowledge, insight, ideas or network - is what most prevents you from aligning with your vision and implementing your desired actions

Resources cited: 

• Brian Moran & Michael Lennington, The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
• Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization 
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• The Incrementalist podcast, Ep. 27, How to Accomplish More in 12 Weeks Than in 12 Months

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

If you’re resisting what you need to accomplish, you might have given yourself too much time to execute your plans. New Year’s Resolutions and annual goals rarely get you to where you need to be and create the life you want.   

Move out of annual thinking and adopt the 12 Week Year. With this planning technique, a year is no longer 12 months; it's 12 weeks. 1 year = 12 weeks, 1 month = 1 week, and 1 week = 1 day. You are no longer focusing on distant annual goals broken into 4 periods or quarters.

In episode 27 of The Incrementalist podcast, you will learn:

1) The advantages of a 12-week planning system to set and implement big goals

2) How your thinking affects the results

3) The key ingredients of a weekly plan and ways to make it work for you

4) The steps to creating and recreating a 12-week action plan

5) How shorter time frames prompt you to take action and avoid procrastination 

6) The importance of having a clear vision and defining specific tactics to get you where you want to be

7) Time blocking helps you control your day and carve out time to execute your plan

Resources cited: 

• Brian Moran & Michael Lennington, The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• The Incrementalist podcast, Ep. 6, Stop Procrastinating and Just Start
• The Incrementalist podcast,  Ep. 8, How to Plan Your Ideal Week

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

Stress is not always bad. It comes with having big goals and pushing beyond your comfort zone. Going off to college, starting a new job, traveling to a foreign country, or launching a business trigger stress. And they also bring feelings of excitement, confidence and achievement.

Stress is positive when it stimulates growth, adaptation and expansion. It’s the chronic, persistent, negative stress that you need to watch out for.   

Stress can be good and productive or it can be toxic and destructive. That’s why it’s important to get stressed the right way. 

Stress is a stimulus that challenges your body and mind to adapt, moves you out of homeostasis, and shift you away from your baseline.

Too much stress and not enough rest lead to injury, illness and burnout. Too little stress and too much rest result in complacency, stagnation and dissatisfaction. 

In episode 26 of The Incrementalist podcast, you will learn:

1) A simple growth equation: Stress + Rest = Growth

• how to alternate between stress and rest
• how to get the right dose of stress

2) Why you need to set a just manageable challenge for your current abilities and skills

• Ideal challenge-skills ratio is - 
• 7 out of 10, where you succeed most of the time, but need to pay attention to the challenge
• 4%, where the challenge level is 4% greater than your present skill level

3) What happens to your state of flow when the challenge is too high or too low

4) The difference between the anabolic state and the exhaustion state and how stress affects each

5) Why you need to know your limits and be realistic when setting a challenge

6) The significance of the ultradian rhythm (work-rest cycle in a 24-hour day) 

• How to use it to your benefit when switching between cycles of work and cycles of rest
• 90 minutes of deep work followed by 20 minutes of deep rest generally synchs with the ultradian rhythm
• Why some breaks (e.g. taking a nap or a walk) are better than others (e.g. scrolling social media)

7) The optimal work-rest split depends on your own focus muscle, energy level, the type of task, the time of day, your work schedule and other factors

8) Vacations and extended breaks are critical, and must be accompanied by regular breaks between work sessions each day

9) Whether you view stress as a challenge or as a threat affects your response

• challenge response triggers DHEA, which boosts testosterone levels and lowers anxiety, worry and neuro degeneration 
• threat response increases cortisol and inflammatory proteins, which cause inflammation, contribute to depression and impair the immune system. 

10) Two ways to prime yourself for peak performance

• Customize routines and rituals, which condition your mind and body for focused work
• Block distractions and interruptions, which stop adaptation to stress

11) The 5 Principles in the Incrementalist approach to make big changes without going too far outside your comfort zone

Resources cited: 

• Brad Stulberg & Steve Magness, Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• The Incrementalist podcast, Ep. 5, Finding and Sustaining Flow

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter

When you’re making a decision on tough problems, you are always missing key information. Every decision is biased because it’s based on limited beliefs, assumptions and data points. You can never be sure of the outcome. 

A bet is a decision about an uncertain future. And decisions are bets in uncertain environments. 

As you seek to learn more, you start to peel back the layers. You become more skilled at finding different pathways and generating creative solutions to complex problems. When a problem cannot be solved with a simple technique or known procedure, being certain will block out conflicting and vital information. The more certain you are, the more-close minded you become. 

Being uncertain can be a key to success because it opens you up to new ideas, insights and information to create the best possible future. Thinking in bets improves your decision-making. You can embrace the power of saying “I am not sure” or “I don’t know.” 

In episode 25 of The Incrementalist podcast, you will learn: 

• Life is like poker and decisions are bets in uncertain environments
• Why uncertainty has benefits and how to embrace it
• Some questions to ask when thinking in bets
• The reasons you need to separate the outcome quality from the decision quality. (Hint: A good outcome can follow a bad decision and a bad outcome can result from a good decision.) 
• The role of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning in decision-making
• The advantages of getting out of your echo chambers and considering alternative viewpoints
• Dr. Robert K. Merton’s ethos of science, or CUDOS approach, for group decision-making and dissenting to win
• The 10-10-10 approach for your present self to make decisions for your future self
• Why you need to break big stuff into small action steps to minimize high-pressure, high-stakes decision-making

Resources cited: 

• Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
• Dyan Williams, The Incrementalist: A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
• Dyan Williams, How to Think Clearly and Make Better Decisions: Get Out of Echo Chambers

Music by:

• Sebastian Brian Mehr

Dyan Williams
Check out the book: The Incrementalist, A Simple Productivity System to Create Big Results in Small Steps
Visit website: www.dyanwilliams.com
Subscribe to productivity e-newsletter