Adrian Reid uses Brendan Burchard's block time technique to triple his trading system development productivity. He allocates uninterrupted 50-60 minute blocks for backtesting, journaling, and documenting, closing all other apps to eliminate distractions and improve idea quality.
Have you ever been frustrated by how long it takes you to actually get through the trading system development process, finish doing all of the design work, the testing, the optimization, making sure your system is robust and all of these things? I went to High Performance Academy with Brendan Burchard a couple of weeks ago in San Diego and I learned something which was super cool and has really changed the game a bit for me or a lot for me with my trading system development. And it's Brendan's concept of block time. And what he talked about at High Performance Academy was to take your time and allocate a block, like a 50 minute block and do absolutely nothing but the one thing that you're focused on delivering. And for me, 50 minutes to do nothing but trading system development used to get me nowhere. I used to do a few back tests, run a few different optimizations and try a few different rules, but never really achieve anything. If you can relate to that, then this is going to be really interesting. What I learned to do at High Performance Academy was to take the 50 minute block that I've allocated and do absolutely nothing but trading system development. You see, what I used to do is open up my computer, open up amibroker, run a backtest, and while the back test was running, go do Facebook, go do some email, go do these other things and then when the back test was finished, come back to it, have a look at the results and try and interpret them and then take the next step forward. But what I realized is that flicking between tasks is a huge mistake. Huge mistake. So what I've started to do as a result of the learnings at High Performance Academy was instead of flicking between tasks when my backtest is running, I'm instead using the time when the backtest is running to think about what I'm going to do next, to journal about what I'm doing right now and what the results are so that I can find, I can direct my creativity at the trading system development process that I'm working on right now rather than getting distracted and focusing on all sorts of other things. And the benefit that I found even just yesterday, I allocated one block of time to do this. I did no email, no Facebook, didn't look at my trading account, nothing for the entire hour. I was doing the trading system development. And let me tell you, I got through probably three times more development work than I would normally have done because I was eliminating the distraction. I was focusing solely on the task at hand, solely on the development of this one system. And what I found at the end of the hour. I had made more progress, I documented more ideas and I had clearer steps and better outcomes than I would normally if I'd have just taken my normal approach of doing some backtesting, doing some emails at the same time while the backtest was running, doing Facebook, all of that stuff. So my learning for today or for this week for trading has really been just focus. Be willing to spend the time to just focus on one thing and you'll be amazed at the difference it makes. That little bit of time when the backtest is running and the optimization is running and your computer is just churning away. Take that time and dedicate it to creative thinking, to brainstorming, to documentation of exactly what you're doing, and you'll find that your training system development will accelerate dramatically. But you're also going to have much better ideas. You're going to close off ideas so that you can move on, you can eliminate the bad thing, the bad ideas, and you can find more good ideas to improve your trading profitability. So that's my trading learning for this week. If you want to make more progress, if you want to make better progress and design better systems, allocate block time and do nothing, nothing at all, apart from system development and thinking about system development and documenting system development. Eliminate those distractions, Close down Facebook, close down email, close down your broking platform, close down everything else apart from the application that you're using for your backtesting. For me, that's amibroker. For my clients, that's amibroker and the application that you're using to document your trading system development process and the findings and the results. So all I've got is Amibroker, Microsoft OneNote, where I keep all of my training development notes, and Excel where I'm keeping all of my output results, my optimizations and all of that. And that's all that I've got open and that's all I'm focusing on. And I found my productivity just improves so dramatically, it's ridiculous. And if I'd done this from 15 years ago when I started trading, God knows how much further I'd be along now. But I'm going to encourage you, allocate some block time to do your trading system development. That's what I've learned for this week about my trading. Hope you can find a way to apply that in your life too. So that's all for this video. See you in the next one. Bye for now.
