Why I'm Working on 8 week Cycles - An Experiment in Focus

Parkinson's Law states that the work that we have will expand or contract based on the time that we have given it. Now certainly there are some exceptions to this law or this rule, but how often have you noticed that if you have something that you believe you could get done in a reasonable amount of time, all of a sudden it takes a really long time because you didn't give it a definitive deadline? And conversely, something that you may not have thought was possible in the time that someone, or you, gave yourself to do it, all of a sudden, you got it done. That's amazing. That's incredible. That's Parkinson's Law. Everyone, my name is Matt Ragland, and welcome back to another episode of Connect the Dots. I'm really excited to share this episode with you because I am applying Parkinson's Law to my work schedule. To my project timelines and deadlines. And this is really exciting and kind of freeing in some ways. It's also very much scary and nerve-wracking in many other ways. So I'm going to give you some of the inspirations behind this, ways that I'm thinking about how I can do this thing that I'm about to tell you all about. All right, so go ahead, settle in, do whatever you're doing. Thank you for sharing some of your AirPod earbud time with me today. And let's go ahead and get into the episode. An experiment that I'm running in 2021 is with 8-week work cycles. I first heard about this from Basecamp. They're a project management tool. Their two founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson— hope I'm pronouncing that properly, he's known as DHH on the interwebs— but they have been running Basecamp their way with their rules for a number of years. And one of the things they started talking about a couple of years ago was a concept of running these 6-week work cycles. And what that meant is that they were basically establishing a consistent cycle of deadlines loosely based on Parkinson's Law, knowing that if they gave different projects that they were working on unlimited amount of time to get done, they often would, you know, bloat and expand to such an insane proportion that they had a lot of trouble getting things done.. So what they decided to do was set these 6-week work cycles for everything that they were doing. Now that may be all well and good for a tech company, and that's basically what Basecamp is. It's also something that is very commonly known in the engineering and tech, you know, software community as a project sprint. And normally these last anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks, and you work on one very specific goal Project, product, deliverable, something like that. If you've been following my content for any amount of time, you've probably heard me talk about the goal-setting framework QMWD. And QMWD basically takes that top-level deadline date goal of the end of the quarter, so every 3 months. You've probably also heard me talk about that I don't like setting annual goals, something that I want to get done by the end of the year, because it's too broad, it's too long of a duration to really be consistent with a goal. Now what you can do is you can break down something that you think will take all year into smaller quarterly goals. And what Basecamp is doing is essentially taking that one step like further down, not quite a month, but you know, a little bit more, 6 to 8 weeks. That they will go through different projects that they have. And I started thinking about this a lot from a personal work perspective. Now I'm not running a tech company, but essentially I am running a media company with YouTube videos and emails and blog posts and now a podcast. And I was thinking to myself, what would I be doing if I had one project to focus on for the next 6 weeks? What would that be?. Because I've even found, as Basecamp has said, that even stretching something out for 10 or 12 weeks can still cause a project to expand in scope to such a point that like all these extraneous and often unnecessary things get added on to the project and it becomes so bloated that it becomes tough to see hide nor hair of where you're actually going and what the original goal was. You'll have to excuse my little southern euphemism there saying hide nor hair. That means that basically you don't know where the actual thing is that you're looking for. Like, I ain't seen hide in her hair a Katie. She was here a minute ago and now she's somewhere else. Now there's another piece of the Basecamp 6-week project strategy that sets it apart from other Scrum or sprint styles that people in software practice. And it's this idea of a 1 to 2, 2-week cooldown period after the 6-week sprint is is over. And usually what they'll do here is there's not really any meetings. Everything is supposed to be, everything's supposed to be shipped by the end of 6 weeks. So it's not like a little bit of extra time. It's time to clean things up, maybe do a little bit of bug fixing, do a, you know, just, you know, relax a little bit, start to plan out the next sprint. And I thought, man, can I take a week or 2 off from these projects? Every, every 6 weeks. So basically out of every 2 months, you're taking 1 to 2 weeks to just kind of buffer, kind of chill. You can take some vacation there. That's usually the best time to do it. Wow. I like, that may work for a 50-person company, which is around the size that Basecamp is. It may work for a software company, but can it work for a media company? I felt really nervous about that and it was really tough for me to implement. The first time that I tried this was while I was still doing a side hustle. And so I thought to myself, okay, well, I'm still putting out YouTube videos. That's that system-based goal that I'm going to continue doing. But what if I focus these next 6 to 8 weeks on putting together the first version of my course? And that was really exciting and freeing to me for the first couple of weeks. Then I got nervous and I didn't quite hit it in those 6 weeks. But something that's really good to think about when you compress your timeline like this is— and Basecamp talks about this— is that you should compress your product expectation or your outcome expectation before you just add more time, more things to do. And over time, the more cycles you go through and the more projects you work on in this, in this like duration of time, the 6 to 8 weeks, is you start to get much better at understanding what you can actually get done in these 6 weeks instead of being like, oh, I'm going to get all this stuff done. I'm going to do all these things. This is going to be great. As you do it more, you start to have a better understanding of your own time and capabilities as you go into the beginning of each cycle and thus become more efficient and effective with the projects that you want to complete. And so it's this really nice thing. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast of The more that you do something and the more that you practice, the more confident and effective and productive that you become. And it's not just about work that this works for. The more YouTube videos I created, the more confident I felt about, I felt about creating YouTube videos. It's the same for the podcast. I feel a little bit more comfortable each time I sit in my stool right here. And it's the same thing if you were exercising or doing like new types of work. I started doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I have felt, literally felt terrible many times after, but now I'm starting to understand things a little bit more. I can't always do them, and certainly not when I'm in, yeah, I'm in a roll, but I'm starting to like, ah, I should have done this thing here. And so by compressing this time, I'm giving myself more opportunities to learn how I work and how effective I can be. Now remember, Basecamp is approaching this from a company perspective. And so they are working on a product, a software product, and it's easy to kind of think about like, well, this like project sprint thing is really just for, you know, software companies. And I'm basically building a media company at this point. So can this really work? Like, you need to be able to keep, you know, putting media out, putting content out. And so I talked to my friend Sean Blanc. Now Sean Blanc runs several sites. There's The Sweet Setup, there is Blanc Media, And Sean, you know, Sean Blanc, just his website, I'll link to everything in the show notes below. I also took his wonderful course, the Focus course. Amazing. One of my favorite online courses that I've ever taken. But Sean went to a workshop with Jason Fried at the Basecamp headquarters a couple of years ago, and they talked a lot about this 6 to 8 week cycle that Basecamp works on. And Sean started asking internally and then of Jason specifically, about like how could this apply to a solopreneur, to a small team, to a media company? Because that's, you know, like what Sean does is essentially what I am doing and aspire to do as well. And Jason's answer was, yeah, absolutely, like here are some of the tweaks that I might make. But what Sean does, and now his team does, is they work on a 6-week cycle. Okay, so that's when all the work happens. And then the 7th week of the cycle is their buffer week. So they start planning what they're going to do the next site when the next cycle starts, just kind of cleaning some things up. It's just like, it's a maintenance week. Think of it like, you know, tending the garden. You're not planting anything new. You're just going in and be like, I got to get some weeds out here. You got to, you know, do some of those things. And then the 8th week of the cycle, this is the scary part. This is the part where it sounds wonderful, but can I actually do it? Is that Sean and his team take a sabbatical week. And I'm like, "Ooh, that sounds really interesting. Tell me more." And what Sean told me about their sabbatical week is that they basically, you know, take the week off. Are they always going on vacation? No, not always. And that's the other thing, like to me time off always had to be because of vacation. I don't know about you, but vacations with kids are not always relaxing. And that's okay. They're still fun. But I would like take a vacation it would not be super restful. And then I would come— I wouldn't be thinking about work. Well, I would still be thinking about work and I'd come right back in and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so behind. And that was kind of a bummer. I didn't want that to be the case. And so what Shawn and his team do with this 8th week, this sabbatical week, he's like, sometimes I'm traveling, sometimes I'm not, you know, not so much the past year. And what I'm mostly doing is I'm spending more time with my family. I am having some, you could call it quote unquote work time, but mostly it's planning, it's brainstorming, it's forecasting. But the big rule that Shawn has, and I'm paraphrasing him here, probably going to have him on the show at some point, is that it's a no-pressure week for me. If I want to do a little bit of planning, if I, you know, like I'll try and have, he said he'd try to have more lunches with friends. He would just chill, take a sabbatical, do a project around the house. This is a big like honey-do list week for him. And I know my wife would like that as well. But that was the cycle that Shawn and his team were on. And I think this is their third year now of doing these 8-week cycles. So it's 6 weeks of work, 1 week of buffer maintenance pruning work, and then 1 week of a sabbatical. No meetings, no calls, no working on like blog posts or content. Sounds pretty wild. Sounds pretty, sounds pretty good. But it was something that until this year, until I started doing my own thing, I hadn't given a whole lot of intense thought or consideration to. Now I had tried this a little bit in my own side hustle before I started working full-time. I was like, okay, well, I'm still doing the YouTube videos. Just to wrap up that thought from earlier, I'm still doing the YouTube videos, but can I work on my course in these 6 weeks? How far can I get? So I would just give myself literally one goal, one thing to do in addition to the YouTube videos for those 6 weeks. And so now I'm like playing this forward, like, oh, I have control of all the different parts of my time and my work now. That's really great. It can also be a little bit terrifying because you're like, okay, you know, the buck stops and starts at you now. And that is fun and also terrifying. And one of the things that I wanted to start with was to test this 8-week work cycle experiment. And Sean really encouraged me to do that. He said, even though you're just starting this and you feel like you're gonna have to work every day for the next 2 years to make this work, he said, I'm here to tell you that you started, you know, thankfully through your side hustle with a good enough base that that's not necessarily the case. He said— and this is what really struck me and resonated with me— he said, when you're doing this, when you start your business, you only start your business for the first time one time. And the pace that you set yourself on, the expectations that you give yourself, and the way that you work, the rules that you make for yourself, those really, really, really become a part of your work and a part of your identity in some ways. At the beginning. So if you can challenge yourself and follow through, if this is something that you want to do, even when it feels— even if it feels scary at the beginning, this is the exact right time to do it. Because if you can do it and be consistent with it when it's scary, it's going to just become a part of your work and your lifestyle. He said, it's the best thing that I've done for my work, for my mental health, for my sanity and my pace since I started my business. This is Sean talking. I think he's been in business for himself for 8 years now. And that really made me sit back and think like, okay, this is the time to do it even though it's scary. What this really came down to was, did I have the courage to make my own rules? And I started thinking about this because it really is the perfect time to design the life that I want. It's going to be harder to backtrack from this if I run myself into the ground in the first year of the business. I just know my personality, the way that I work, it will be so hard for me to believe internally that I can take a step back and slow down. And the answer is to start at a reasonable pace regardless, like from this point. So if you think about this with a running analogy, I ran— I used to run a lot more, but it's more like running a marathon right now instead of like starting out like it's a 100-yard dash or a 400-yard dash. Those were the things I ran in high school very averagely. But don't— to not push myself to the limit in year 1, but to give my— to have the courage to give myself a pace that was reasonable and something that I could maintain for a really long time, because this is something that I want to do for a really long time. I'm going to read you a quick note that I wrote. If you're listening on the podcast, you won't notice that I'm looking down at a note, but if you are watching this on the Connect the Dots YouTube channel, you'll just see me doing this for a moment. But this note is titled Make Your Own Rules. And I posted this on Instagram also. One of the reasons to start your own business is to make your own rules and goals. Everything is made up anyway, so why not design what fits you best? What you work on, when, how, why— everything is on the table. The challenge is reprogramming old beliefs and fears about how work works. Experiment to find your fit. Resist the fear of messing up so you can discover the best life for you. That's easy to write. It's a lot harder to implement. It's something that I have to remind myself day after day that it is the right way to make my own rules, to follow what makes sense to me. Now let me give you some differences that I might have with this. When I look at my yearly calendar right over there on the door, then I'll see that 6 weeks, 8 weeks doesn't always make perfect sense with things that we have planned for the year. And so I am kind of shifting this around a little bit. That's okay because it's okay to make my own rules. If we use someone else's great idea as the jumping off point for creating our own life and our own systems, That to me is the ideal method for creating a life that works really great for you. And so for example, I'll probably run instead of an 8-week cycle at, you know, 6 and 2, I'll probably run a 10-week cycle at some point this year, 8 and 2. I might run a 5-week cycle or a 6-week total cycle. So 4-ish weeks of work followed by a week, week and a half of buffer time and sabbatical time. And looking at the time that I have available allows me to do this a little bit better. So it's a fun way to plan out and think about what can I focus on very specifically for the next 6 weeks, give or take, but for the next 6 weeks, how effective can I be when I just have one big thing to think about? It's an interesting and very illuminating thought experiment. And I'm taking this now from thought experiment into actual taking action type of experiment. I'm going to be reporting back to you on this throughout the next several months and hopefully through the entire year. Now let's talk about a couple other questions that, as I was talking to friends and people on the interwebs about this, that came up. Now I have brought up a couple of times that Basecamp and Shawn recommend working on one big goal. And so that's like one thing that you believe will take about the full 6 weeks to work on. Now, if you followed my annual planning, like, goal setting episode a few weeks back, then you know I made an entire list of everything that I wanted to do this year from a project perspective. And I look at these and I think, okay, if I was to go through this and do this, would this probably take me like a month or a quarter? So now it's looking at some of these projects that I initially defined as a quarter and think about, is there a version of this project? An example is rewriting all of my emails. So like when you come and you sign up for my email list, there's a bunch of different types of emails that you can get. Pretty much all of them need to be rewritten at this point, and I set that as a quarterly goal initially.. And so now I'm thinking about, okay, if I really focused on this, could I get it done in 6 weeks? And the answer is, yeah, probably. Actually, I could. Now, one way that I can kind of chunk that, just in case I don't get through every email, is to look at the different types of emails that I have. Like, some are for goal setting, some are for the Bullet Journal, some are for time management, and looking at those as categories and deciding, like, okay, I'm gonna definitely get through the Bullet Journal and the goal setting categories, and as long as I can get through those, it's a completion, it's success. Maybe the next cycle's main project is to do the other 2, 3, 2 or 3 categories of emails. So what Jason and Shawn recommend is one big project for those 6 weeks because it is a tight enough time, you know, constraint that probably one big thing is all you're going to be able to focus on. But you can also look at it and say, okay, can I add in 1 or 2 other more small batch projects is what Basecamp calls it. And if you're thinking about it from those terms, now go back through your project list for the year and look at the ones that you initially titled as thinking they would take a week or a month. And those become those small batch projects that, okay, if I'm rewriting a bunch of emails in this cycle, then I can also look at Am I able to create a, like, a knowledge base of the different types of content that I have? That should probably just take a couple of weeks of looking at, you know, all my videos and saying like, this one's about habits, this one's about bullet journaling. That should be able to get done in a week or two. So now I have one big batch project and one small batch project, and that's what I focus on for this 6-week cycle. At the end of the 6 weeks, now the fun yet scary part begins. That is the 1 week of buffer. And then the 1 week of sabbatical. Now the challenging thing for me and anyone who's running a media company is that you have a lot of angst and anxiety— maybe that's a better word— of, ooh, can I actually like not publish anything for a week? Because the way— where I'm at right now with the podcast and with YouTube is I'm not too far ahead on my content calendar. That's the goal, that's the ideal, is even during these buffer weeks and these sabbatical weeks, I still have some type of content to go out, even if it's just an email to my subscriber list. Because, you know, people on my email list are special and they get special stuff from me. And thinking about it in those terms of like, okay, well, at some point I'm going to need to get enough of additional, enough additional content so I don't have to be working on this week's episode this actual week or the previous week so it can go out on Sunday or Monday. So thinking about it in those terms, but the challenge is when my buffer and my sabbatical week come up at the end of February now, am I gonna have the courage to, even if there's not a video that's ready, there's not a podcast, am I gonna have the courage to actually get those things— to actually not do anything and be like, nope, it's my buffer week, I'm not going to spend 15 hours working on a video, or it's my sabbatical week, I'm not going to spend 10 hours working on the podcast or writing a bunch of emails. It's that way that I already know will feel very weird and unproductive and against everything that I stand for in some ways. But taking a step back so that I can continue to take multiple steps forward, take really big steps forward in the coming months and years and decades of doing this with you. That's going to do it for this episode, friends. Thank you so much for listening. If you're watching this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. I'd love to hear from you, whether it's in comments or if you want to tag me on social media @MattRagland. What do you about this 8-week cycle. 6 weeks of work, 1 week of buffer, 1 week of sabbatical. That time to cool down, to reset, to think about like, okay, what's next? And to think clearly about it, not just like, okay, it's my 30 minutes of review time on Sunday. Let's spend this next 30 minutes planning out the next 3 months. You can do a little bit, but to take an entire week— I said, saying it out loud sounds really good. It's, can I, can we have the courage to actually give ourselves a little bit of a buffer? And like I've said a couple of times, this works really even if you work for another company or, you know, you don't run your own business. That's not most people. I feel very fortunate, but this can work really well from a side hustle or even a hobby perspective as well. So what do you want to do in the next 6 weeks to help move your side hustle forward? Or if there's, you know, a hobby or a project that you're working on? Can you compress it down to this like 6-week timeframe to see how much more progress you can make with Parkinson's Law? If you shrink the time a little bit, can you actually get it done with a tighter focus and narrowing maybe the scope of the project a little bit? I'd love to hear more from you. Like I said, you can email me matt@mattragland.com. You can tag me on the internets @MattRagland. Mainly Twitter and Instagram are where I am. But I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots. We'll be here each and every Monday morning so that you can listen and enjoy some different, you know, types of content and ideas about productivity, about time management, about goal setting, about planning, all the different ways that our work like comes and meshes together with creativity and life and just the way that, the way that you have the life that you want to live. So thank you so much for listening, watching. I'll see you next time. Bye.