Set It and Forget It

This strategy probably began in high school wrestling. I got to travel with the team to at least one location where we spent the night. Maybe it was a dual meet, where one team wrestles against another, but I’m not sure.

I do know for sure that I was roommates with Andrew Bates, who was one weight class lower than me (152 pounds) and devastatingly handsome. Andrew was also surprisingly clever, as I got to know when we stayed together. We talked about all of the usual things high school seniors talk about, but we also talked about Andrew’s obsession with time efficiency.

Here’s a pic of me from around this time, followed by a pic of Andrew from the same group photo. I wanted to zoom in so you could see how crazy I look, and how handsome Andrew was. I want to pat each of these kids on the head and praise them for how adorably tough they look:

I thought it was pretty silly when Andrew said he saved time by shaving in the shower, but as trivial as this was, it induced my mind to start turning over and over. I had been introduced to the idea of multitasking, the idea that you could do more than one thing at a time and thereby save a little bit of time.

Andrew may or may not have pointed out that these little morsels of time add up to quite a lot of your life, provided you use that saved time efficiently and effectively.

There’s truly no such thing as human multitasking, at least not in the sense of being equally good at two things you’re doing at a given time. For that, you want the sort of parallel processing that our computers have, and humans just don’t have that. Instead, we switch rapidly back and forth, setting and forgetting something over here while paying attention to the other thing, and so on.

If you try to answer an email while you’re walking your dog, neither you nor your dog is likely to enjoy that walk (or to be safe!). If you’re listening to an audiobook, you really can’t read a paper book at the same time.

Within these limitations, though, there are still ways I like to use the concept Andrew first introduced to me around the time when Boys II Men were crooning End of the Road and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were talking about that place Under the Bridge.

I vividly remember waiting for dial-up screens to load, right as I was building an online e-commerce business. I didn’t want to waste that time while my emails loaded—it could take more than a minute, and way longer if there was an image—so I got into the practice of using that down time more productively.

Passively waiting for a dial-up screen to load was the perfect candidate for Andrew’s multitasking trick. It was as set it and forget it as it could be, meaning I could completely walk away while the process ran. I could brew coffee, or I could put on my work clothes—either way, it was a little nugget of time I could reclaim. There was simply no need to sit in front of a screen while I could get something else done instead.

This was a process I took to the extreme when I crafted my own mixtapes for MMA and dubbed them. I understood that if I just hit record and walked away, I had started a process that could run on its own, at least for a couple of hours. This wasn’t minutes waiting for the dial up screen; this was hours of potential time.

Timing mattered; you didn’t want to get stuck trying to record a six hour tape during the day, unless it was right before you stepped out the door to go to work.

This idea became deeply embedded in my psyche, and it has since become a huge part of my identity. At the risk of becoming like Mickey, I now have several business projects that mostly run themselves. I’m going to try to create a few more over the next year or so.

I started thinking about each week’s tasks ahead like a bowling ball I can start rolling down one lane, and then I get to run over to the next lane and start another really slow ball rolling down there. The idea is to knock over the maximum number of pins with the least amount of energy, so I can reach out to someone to start the ball rolling on a project, so to speak—and while that’s happening, I can start another ball rolling with a large language model doing some deep research, just as one potential example.

I can revisit the balls during the week, but even if I never get a chance to follow up, at least I know the process has begun.

Do you have ways you mitigate the multitasking risk? Do you try to reclaim your time in a similar way? Has it ever backfired on you?