Asteeeg! Beyond traditional careers and conventional lifestyle

Productivity and time-management lessons are not what you would expect from the unapologetic trailer-trash comedy show “My Name is Earl”. But those are what I exactly got. Or maybe it’s just me since I reviewed some of Brian Tracy’s self-development materials in the morning and watched the episode finale of the sitcom later that night on the same day.

Before anything I do recommend you to watch even a few episodes of “My Name is Earl” despite that I often advice friends to quit TV as the boob tube is among the top time-suckers of all time.

For many reason I love the show: I love the humor, the dumb characters, the hot women and really love references to old school themes. Besides, I often relate well to the ne’er-do-well characters of Jason Lee from the 90s cult classic Mall Rats, his love of comic books, slacking and the overall grunge, generationX which he and comedy represent.

As for productivity and time-management, Brian Tracy should be one of your references if you are a total newbie to self-productivity craze. I often go back to him as he articulates succinctly a lot of fundamentals and principles on the broad subject which on the other hand many of his younger predecessors have diluted and over analyzed. I won’t stretch the relation too much but you would clearly see how the “My Name is Earl” intersects with Brian Tracy’s works and other productivity concepts:

Eat Your Frogs

In the season finale episode, Earl takes the blame for his ex-wife who stole a truck and he goes to prison for it. He chose this because he knows his ex-wife’s family would be broken up if she went behind bars instead.

Earl always voluntarily goes through the most uncomfortable situations and painful acts because he knows he just has to and secondly it always pays off. Doing the unselfish but various self-flagellating tasks redeems himself from his many misdeeds in his past and he gains additional rewards usually in the form of new friends.

Brian Tracy calls this Eating Your Frogs First Thing in the Morning, a personal development concept he is very fond of and for which he entitled one of his books “Eat that Frog!”. In short, if you face up and do first the most fearful, uncomfortable or even embarrassing thing you really need to do (usually they are the same things), everything else for the rest of the day would be so easy. The normal unproductive person avoids or more often just delays such things.

This is a more colorful and much more cool metaphor for “delayed gratification” or “first thing’s first”.

Write it Down
Central to the story of the show is his “List” which is many tasks he has to cross out in his folded piece of yellow pad. His list is very crude in light of numerous new methods of doing “to-do” lists. Earl often picks the tasks arbitrarily, no 80/20 Pareto Principle to eliminate majority of the items, and no prioritizing whatsoever. But it does the job quite well because of course they are written down irrevocably on paper for easy reference and each one is specific enough that he is sure when to cross it out.

Take heed PDA fanatics, going digital is overrated. Paper trumps any digital organizer for reasons that paper limits the number of items, it is easily retrieved, and takes more effort to delete.

Single Handling
This is the most important lesson from “My Name is Earl” and you will see it in every episode when he does everything to cross out only one item at a time. I share the opinion with Brian Tracy that this is perhaps the most powerful time-management concept among the rest.

Single-handling in recent times has gained more and more proponents in the time-management field (I suspect the culprit is the trendy influence of Zen teachings applied to contemporary western world). Single-handling is simply single-mindedly focusing all efforts to complete a single specific task without veering away from it until it is 100% done.

This is the antithesis of multi-tasking, now an old and stupid concept in comparison. It kills procrastination. It stops you from making mountains out of molehills and relates well to Parkinson’s Law - “A task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.”

Contrary to intuition but can be validated by practice, doing everything to complete only one thing will save loads of time by abandoning distractions, eliminating unnecessary evaluation and even over-planning assuming that the final desired outcome is clear and measurable (refer to Peter Drucker).

In our work and careers today, because of all the advancements, it is obvious that we have more roles,” slashes” and positions than simply being a salesman, lawyer, writer or whatnot. Hence we are always juggling so many projects. Unfortunately, our education and our parents have taught us that the only solution is to multi-task. Has it been working for you? I’m sure it has not and has only produced many loose ends or little monsters gnawing in the back of your head. Experiment on doing the complete opposite: just do one thing at a time…

Hey, I finished this post in one sitting when usually I do posts by sections or when I feel like it… No wonder we are so late in updates…