The more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic

From Stephen Wolfram in The Personal Analytics of My Life in which he reviews data he has collected about his personal activities and where his time is spent. The story behind the graphs is one of enormous and sustained productivity and connectivity with peers and the information ecosystem.

The overall pattern is fairly clear. It’s meetings and collaborative work during the day, a dinner-time break, more meetings and collaborative work, and then in the later evening more work on my own. I have to say that looking at all this data I am struck by how shockingly regular many aspects of it are. But in general I am happy to see it. For my consistent experience has been that the more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.

An interesting article. For many years now I have been struck by the huge variability in productivity between individuals owing not to differences in capabilities per se but to differences in habit and behavior. Even when they are on the surface nominally comparable there can be material differences in how effectively they use their time. Many years ago I had to prepare a couple of managers in a strategy firm to conduct a time and motion study. These two managers were both from top tier business schools and both had about the same number of years of work experience in high growth/high performance firms. After introducing the concept and how to conduct a time and motion study, we did a dry run with them monitoring their activities in the space of a week.

The results were striking. One individual was managing his affairs (sleeping, eating, commuting, etc.) in such a fashion that he was getting about 1 1/2 hours more productive work done in a day. Given that the standard was about 10 hours of productive work a day, this fellow was getting in an extra 15% of productivity over his peer.

And it wasn't particularly dramatic the things he did to get that extra time. Most of it was about making the non-routine into a routine and about being disciplined. He was very disciplined about working on trains and planes. He kept showers to less than 10 minutes. He used the radio in his commute to get most of the news for the day. His meetings started on time and finished on time. On and on. Shaving five minutes off this task and ten minutes off that added up.

We can talk about the philosophical basis for how people ought or ought not be compensated but regardless of those principles, there is a simple reality that there is a huge huge gulf between the most productive and the average and below productive.

And it is more than 15% a day. It is the sustained time on weekends. It is the effect of compound interest. It is the greater openness to the potential benefits of Black Swans (low probability, high consequence, inexplicable events) as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan:

Black Swans are unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naively try to predict them). There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them. Indeed, in some domains - such as scientific discovery and venture capital investments - there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event. We will see that, contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning - they were just Black Swans. The strategy for discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.

So much of what is ascribed to luck is actually attributable to preparedness - the capacity to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself and the ability to act on that opportunity. Join this with the habit of making the non-routine into a routine, and increasing personal productivity on a sustained basis and you have the root of the huge disparities of individual outcomes despite surface similarities. For 99 out of 100 "success" stories, what you are likely to find is not blind luck and privileges but rather sustained hard work, efficiency, effective decision-making, ability to recognize unusual patterns in the data environment and the capacity and willingness to take a chance.