You are what you eat.

I have a problem with hobbies and focus. I have too many, and I don't focus well at all. Over the years I've drifted in and out of various interests always promising that this time I'll stick with it. But the problem is I can't bring myself to give up several interests to just focus on a single hobby of choice.

I've tried to of course. At once point I was just going to play chess. And then I was just going to play piano. And then I was going to write every day. Then I was going focus on computer programming. I'm always telling myself that I'm going to exercise: for a while it was yoga and then it was swimming. (And never mind all the "maintenance" things that I should be doing every day like cleaning or organizing!) The bottom line is, I just can't contain my interests.

A few years ago it dawned me: that you can't have a large number of interests and do each one every single day. There aren't enough hours. So I came up with a system. I decided to make a list, which I laminated and used with dry erase marker, with the idea that I would work down the list until everyone was done at least once, and then I'd start it all over again. It didn't matter if it took 3 days or even a week to go down the list; at least I'd be getting to everything on a regular basis. And I would be making forward progress on my goals.

It takes about 10,000 hours or 10 years to get really good at something. That seems like a long time at first glance, but time flies quickly. And when six months, or a year, or a decade, screwing around and not working on something you love, you've done yourself a real disservice.

Peter Norvig wrote a fantastic eassy about this on his site. It focuses on learning to program computers, but the article could apply to anything: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years". I've copied part of that text here:

Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Malcolm Gladwell reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced:

"Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practicing well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totaled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totaled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours."

So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult." Although in Latin, can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".

Similarly Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner wrote, "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect."

I'm shocked and saddened to realize that it has been about ten years since I resumed piano lessons (with an outstanding teacher no less) only to end those lessons a few years later. I was pleased with my progress and really enjoying myself. But I let life get in the way. I was working at dotcom company burdened by the stresses of the moment. (And I was undisciplined.) But where is that company now? Gone. What were the emergencies of the moment? I can't remember. If only I'd set aside an hour a day to practice and continue my lessons...

Today I couldn't play a single piece on the piano. How nice it would have been to be at least a highly accomplished amateur. My face feels numb just thinking about and writing about this.

Going back to the system I created, it didn't work. The idea of having to cross everything off the list before returning to any particular activity was too rigid. And there was no way to track my efforts over time. Within a year I'd given up on the system as a complete failure.

This week however I have some renewed hope. I stumbled across a site called Joe's Goals that makes this kind of tracking very easy.



The idea and the mechanism are simple. In fact, I suppose you could do something similar with a spreadsheet. But I'm not going to take the time to put together a spreadsheet. And it won't look as nice or be as elegant. And besides, the site is funded with ad revenue (a cheap subscriptions gets rid of the ads), so there is hardly any reason not to use it or at least try it.

Basically you create a list of things you want to track. Then when you've done an item on your list a single click records it for the day. And the feedback you get from recording your activities helps you stay focused on the things that are important to you. (I learned the power of feedback when using the biofeedback lab in college. Information is a powerful tool!)

On my tracker I have a very long list including things like piano, chess, photography, photography editing, stretching, exercise, clearing, and so on. I'm not going to try to do everything on the same day. I might not even do everything on the same week. But when I start to neglect something, it will become apparent.

Of course, this isn't the only way to use the site. You can assign weights to different items. You can assign negative items in addition to positive items. (For example if you're trying to break a habit, I suppose.) And you can track your tasks in various ways to suit your taste:



There is a lot of flexibility here. And the simplicity of the tools makes it very usable.

Time will tell if this system increases my productivity and focus, but I think it will; I'm very excited about it. Just last week in my journal I was writing about the need come up with a new system for tracking goals, especially under the onslaught of my current work schedule. I'm pleasantly surprised that just days later I stumbled across just what I needed. Maybe that's the power of positive thinking? Hmm, maybe there's an app for that too!