I always make the mistake of trying to fix the small incremental things instead of the big, consequential stuff. But unless you work on the big stuff, none of the small changes will matter.
Let’s introduce you to Ben. Ben is a teenager who doesn’t want to be skinny (any resemblance to the writer is purely a coincidence). Ben spends most of his time searching up new exercise routines, research on what time of the day to exercise, and advice on different kinds of training splits. But even with all this effort, to Ben’s frustration, he remains skinny.
But why?
He’s exercising at the optimal time. He’s doing the right exercises. And he clearly understands a lot of the science behind being not-skinny.
Well, if we looked closer at Ben’s routine, we’d find that he’s actually not very consistent at all. He might try and improve his technique and find dozens of little things to improve, but he’s not working enough to get the results he wants. No amount of technical improvement will help him if he doesn’t spend enough hours actually working out.
And here’s the issue. Spending more time working out is not a sexy problem to solve. It’s boring, tedious, annoying, and any number of synonymous adjectives. It’s much more fun to try and find a silver bullet, a miraculous fix that’ll suddenly help, but the truth is, the most consequential thing to improve would just be to work more.
This same principle applies to many things. If you’re studying and not getting the grades you want, instead of searching up study hacks, you should first check- are you spending enough time studying in the first place?
The amount of time you spend is the bottleneck in the system of improvement. Even if you improve your technique and other small things down the line, you aren’t spending enough time for it to matter. In the end, you need to fix the bottleneck if you want to see any sort of improvement. No amount of improvement to your technique will help if you don’t spend enough time doing what you’re trying to improve.
You need to find the smallest change that’ll give the biggest return. If we apply the Pareto Principle, that means you need to find the 20% to change that’ll give you 80% of the returns. The problem is, these improvements are often very obvious, but also very boring and tedious to solve. To improve your grades, maybe the answer is just that you need to study more.
If you’re too tired to get anything done, you should try and sleep more instead of downloading the new flashy productivity app to keep on top of things.
But getting more sleep is a very big obvious boring (BOB) problem . You need to do a lot of very basic, annoying things. No screens before bed, sleep at the right time, put aside enough hours to sleep, don’t sleep with your phone, etc.
<aside> 👉 BOB problems: Big, Obvious, Boring problems. The ones that you procrastinate solving by looking for easier, less effective fixes
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Why do all of that when you can get that flashy productivity app and convince yourself you’re improving instead?