Plan like a poker player
The world is full of uncertainty. In poker, there are a small number of combinations that will beat what's called a full house --three of a kind plus a pair -- but if you're holding a full house, particularly if the three is of the highest value cards: aces and the pair is above average -- say eights -- you're the likely winner with little risk to you. Wild Bill Hickok was holding the winning hand in a poker game with a lower value, but still respectably advantaged hand of two aces and two eights. While he was holding the highest value set of cards for that round, a higher-level chance arrived. Hitchcock was shot in the back and killed by a rival who had entered the saloon behind him. Predictable randomness.
The moral to this story is stay aware of the bigger game: always sit facing the door.
I'm feeling the odds are likely that perhaps all of you reading this, have a calendar for this week of your commitments and expectations for how you'll use your time, attention, and energy next week.
And from equally reliable data sampling, your calendar for last week had equally tidy predictions of your commitments and expectations. What's equally true is: should you revise last week's calendar to show what you actually did, there will still be some recognizable elements of your expectations, but there will be large portions that are filled by things that showed up and you redirected your attention to those.
This doesn't mean you made bad predictions beforehand or made bad choices in the moment -- although more on that later -- what happened is a different set of cards got dealt than the ones you expected. I remember someone commenting when the day's weather contradicted the forecast, "I just shoveled 6 inches of "partly cloudy" out of my driveway."
However, the changes in your actual week's activities aren't as random as they appear. By carefully tracking your expectations of a week, against what actually happened during the week, you can start to see the patterns of the weekly game and the bigger game more clearly. The process involves anticipation, activation, reflection.
Anticipation: we have the ability to imagine what the future may be like. It's why I have a calendar. It's why two weeks ago, at the beginning of August, Disney put out an ad priming my anticipation of Christmas.
Try this: pick a task you have a commitment to work on. Pick an hour on a day next week, Wednesday at 10am, for example. Make some notes with your imagination of how that hour will go. Where will you work? What will you need? How will you start on time? What will be on your mind as potential distractions? How will you defend that space and time against interruptions?
Activation: What actually happened during that hour. It's likely that at least some of that hour, if not all, went to something that just showed up. That's not failure, it's information. Record what you did. Record what your attention and energy was like.
If the time arrives, and you are staying with the plan, note the time or start a stop watch. Then note the first time you catch your attention drifting, Recommit. Note the time when you've lost productivity. What did you do instead?
Reflection: on the following day, look back on your chosen task period. How do you judge what happened? If you did something completely different, was that in your judgment, a better use of your time? Remember, we play the hand that got dealt, not the one we imagined.
The goal of this is to develop a better awareness of what shows up, compared to what we imagined would show up. Lots shows up from this.
What I've described is the conscious playing of one hand of a much bigger game.
More next week.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
Wild Bill Hickok: https://www.poker.org/latest-news/aces-and-eights-the-story-behind-this-iconic-poker-hand-aKEmX4F2qsXq/