Psychotactics Blog

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Podcasts, membership site, cartoons, photography, Whatsapp—the list goes on and on.

And it’s puzzling to clients how I (Sean) manage so much. Well, there are bound to be some principles. Here are just four of them, and we cover two of them in this first episode.

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Principle 1: Getting faster, instead of better

Back in 2004, we met with a client in Chicago. The client called me “mad”.

As you may have figured, it wasn't meant to be a derogatory term. The client simply meant that I was doing many things, and others weren't doing quite as much. The term “mad” was her way of describing how she saw that activity level as somewhat unusual.

However, back in 2004, I wasn't doing that much at all.

Fast forward two decades. What have I achieved?
I have done a watercolour painting almost every day (about 4000 so far), gone out on 3-6 hour photoshoots (40,000 images in three years), cooked quite elaborate meals (over 6000 masala dosas alone), and am simultaneously learning two languages: French and Spanish.

This is on top of having almost endless chats on WhatsApp, both personal and group-based, writing books and courses, writing and recording a weekly podcast, answering posts like this in 5000bc, and doing other activities. Plus, I take weekends off and have enough time to waste on any day.

Why is all of the above information about the activities important?

That client in Chicago called me “mad” because she was comparing me to others. In most cases, when people ask: How do you achieve so much? they're usually comparing me with themselves.

They've never stopped to compare me with myself.

Back in 2004, I seemed to be “as busy” or “as productive,” yet I was doing a fraction of the activities I did today. If you were to jump a decade from 2010, you would find that I had just started doing watercolours, but there was no podcast, photography, or language learning.

In terms of courses and writing, the output might seem similar, but the quality is better a decade down the line.

This means that the Sean of 2004 is not the same as the Sean of 2014 and is radically different from the Sean a decade later, in 2024. However, let's stop the navel-gazing and look at you instead. Aren't you doing a fair bit more than ten or twenty years ago? Aren't you better and faster?

The key lies in those two terms: better and faster.

However, the problem is the sequence in which the terms appear. Everyone's goal is to improve, but that trajectory is almost always a mistake. The goal should always be to become faster. Hence, I took pictures like most of us when I first started photography. I pointed and shot.

Yes, maybe I composed a little differently, but in general, the photos I took back then were remarkably average. Then I decided to get better, but started out with “faster”. How could I take the same “average” pictures faster? How could I do the same podcast faster? How do I write the very same type of article “faster”?

This concept of “faster” isn't just a theory; it's part of our training system.

If you take the Article Writing Course, you'll notice I'm super fussy about completing the assignment in 45 minutes. What if you took 3 hours instead of 45 minutes? In every instance, I will point out that the assignment activity can't exceed 45 minutes. Why is this factor important?

Because it's OK to spend 3 hours writing an article on Monday, but will you be able to do that on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday? And what about the next 10-11 weeks? The sheer burden of trying to be better means you'll get burned out and decide to return to your old “easy” life. You'll wrongly conclude that you're “not talented” and that others are better than you.

They're not better. They're faster.

When you take 45 minutes, you tend to do an average job. However, you don't burn through an enormous amount of energy. You can put in 15 minutes here, 14 minutes there and the rest of the time to complete your 45-minute task. Or, if you so wish, you can do the entire task in 45 minutes.

Either way, you don't dread the activity when you have to do it the next day. And the next day is important because the brain learns slowly. You have to sleep; the brain has to take twenty pieces of today's puzzle and put them into long-term memory.

Except the brain won't move all the pieces. It will move just two or three. Or, if you're lucky, maybe five pieces. However, much of the learning goes through one ear and out of the other. Your brain is a sieve, and for good reason.

You need to know what's important, not know everything. In any case, if you're able to do an average task in an average manner in 45 minutes, then you create consistency.

A week from now, you are possibly doing the very same task in 41 minutes.

You take the additional four minutes to add a new layer of learning. You sleep, you wake up, you transfer bit by bit. When you get fast enough, you stop thinking. You do this every day when you walk, pick up a spoon, or navigate through your house in the dark. You have developed speed, then later, you get very good at things.

I was hopeless at watercolours.
I was, at best, average at photography.
I was pretty terrified of speaking to large audiences.

It may be hard to believe because you were not there initially.

Not back in 1994, 2004, 2014, or 2024. All journeys start slowly and seem pathetic. I'm at that stage with French, for example. I was told that not only was I saying some words incorrectly, but I had the wrong tone.

As for Spanish, I know enough to read a page or even a small booklet. I can understand conversations, but speaking it even semi-fluently is out of the question—but only for now.

I am very much in the “getting faster” mode

In a year or two, I'll have enough (not practice, but pattern) in my head to speak faster. To think faster, to respond faster. At the same time, I'll also get better until, eventually, it will seem like I'm getting a lot done to the outside world.

Hence, the first principle of getting a lot done is to get faster.

Speed matters. Look at anything you do in the day and ask yourself: How can I do this faster? Can you learn to chop onions faster if you're cooking a dish? If you're writing an e-mail, what could you do to make it a tiny smidgen faster?

This doesn't suggest that you need to speed up all your activities in life. Cutting onions in slow motion is a real treat. However, having the capacity to do things faster is what counts.

Speed does make a difference. However, it's just one factor. The second factor is to “Spotting and swatting the recurring headaches”. Let's see how that goes, shall we?

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Factor 2: Spotting and swatting the recurring headaches

The problem with most people is that they want to be more productive.

I, on the other hand, want to be more lazy. Or, to put it another way, I want to have “lots of time to waste”. What would I do with that time? Maybe I'd talk to the barista, nap, read a book, or paint. I'm happy being an adult and finding meaning in my work. However, I'm also thrilled being a five-year-old and doing things that waste time.

In order to waste time, you have to examine what takes time.

If you drove an old car and you wanted to increase the fan speed, all you had to do was reach down and drag a knob to the right. That simple act increased the fan to the desired speed. Electronics and computers drive modern cars.

Hence, if you want to increase the fan speed, you might need to tap on a screen, choose an option, and then drag the slider to the desired speed.

Three steps instead of one.

Technology doesn't always simplify our lives as we go through our day. We deal with three steps here, three steps there, and suddenly, we have three hundred extraneous things to remember and execute. However, wherever there are complications, there's also usually a shortcut.

And in many cases, the shortcut is not a single “knob” but is a chain of events that can reduce the time spent on the activity.

If only we knew all the shortcuts, right?

And yet, we don't and can't know them all. As we go through life, things change around us all the time. We could read manuals, go bleary-eyed on YouTube, and still be behind. You couldn't keep up with changes twenty years ago, and the future isn't making things easier.

Which is why I have a benchmark

The benchmark is: Am I doing this activity several times a day/week? If so, there must be a shortcut, and I won't rest until I find it. This shortcut doesn't apply exclusively to work, either.

Take, for example, the problem that Renuka had with her allergies. She'd start the day quite usually, then find that something would trigger the allergies, and she'd have to come home and take a tablet, making her drowsy.

She'd have to sleep, and when she woke up, she'd be fine. However, considering twenty days of allergic reactions in a year, that's quite a lot. The medication is not a shortcut—something else is.

You may not have allergies, but get into battles with your kid

You know what's good for them; you want to protect them, but they have a plan and mind of their own. They get into unwanted trouble or won't cooperate. At this point, you're wasting a lot of time wondering how this problem can be solved.

“You should do this, you should do that, you know better than to…” you tell your child. There's a big tug-of-war between you, but there are no winners. Plus, it's all taking time and happening with a recurring frequency.

You see the problem, don't you?

We started this piece with a small problem, namely, how to increase the fan speed. However, in a day, there are many new and recurring problems. A one-off problem is primarily out of our control, but a recurring problem has a solution: a shortcut.

If we decide to squash or at least reduce that problem, we are able to achieve our goals by doing little or nothing at all.

If we return to the car, the solution may be to press a button and say: “Increase fan speed to 5”.

In the case of Renuka's allergies, the search was more prolonged. However, we were able to find someone who, without any blood samples or medication, solved the allergy problem (she was allergic to six different things). The allergies have never returned, and it's been nearly 20 years.

When arguing with kids, the problem might lie with “should”. When someone tells you, “Well, you should do this”, you take a dim view of the advice. Why would your kid be so different when faced with a lot of “should do this” and “should do that”? In most situations, even hostage situations, the problem isn't solved by telling the terrorist what to do.

Instead, hostage negotiators often resort to mirroring and asking a lot of precise questions. You might have to dig deeper into how to deal with your “home terrorist”, but there's usually a starting point that leads to an enduring shortcut. All of these seem to save you time.

However, for most of us, the problem isn't just about “time”, but “energy”.

We all have time. We know we have time because we end up on our phones, social media, Netflix, Hulu, or whatever. The bigger problem is that we run out of energy. We can't be bothered to do anything more, even if we have several hours to spare.

The battle with the kid, the fiddling with the idiotic air-conditioning knob—it successfully drains the remaining joules of energy. If the problem recurs, it's something that needs to be fixed.

I look for recurring problems.

If something shows up frequently enough, I start looking for shortcut. The shortcut isn't always easy to find, but in most cases, the solution exists. For me, at least, it's important to find and fix the recurring problems. If not, I will always be running out of time and energy. Which is no fun at all.

That's the second tip to managing things in a slightly different manner.

However, there's a third aspect to managing so much. And it involves a bit of feedback.

Coming soon: How do you manage everything? – Part 2

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