The Sharp Axe Method

how much stuff is in your head right now twelve thousand years ago here are all the things that you would have to think about in your day sharpening tools hunting gathering figuring out how to get a goat to foliar in present day it's this check the 50 notifications that came in last night from 30 different apps make sure the trial subscription that you signed up to last month isn't draining your bank account reschedule those three overlapping zoom meetings that you have this week say happy birthday to three people that you haven't talked to in five years because social media guilt tripped you juggle those four projects that you said yes to while you're in a good mood pick one of the 80 million songs at your fingertips while you wait for the food that it took you an hour to pick eventually decide that you're actually going to watch a true crime documentary so scroll through 100 of those while you wait for your date that you met after sifting through 20 000 strangers on an app while laying in bed half watching some youtube video where a bald australian dude is trying to tell you about how overwhelming modern life is becoming so so much more historically speaking you me all of us we have every right to feel overwhelmed before we dive into why i just want to say a quick thank you to shopify for sponsoring this video more on them and why they're relevant later and if you have been feeling overwhelmed lately then well firstly you're not alone but secondly if i do my job correctly you're watching the right video skylab was the first ever united space station and in 1974 skylab 4 was set to be the final mission to that station given that this was the last mission nasa wanted to milk it and so they overloaded the crew with every task imaginable so who was this crew well on board the rocket were three astronauts gerald carr edward gibson and william pogue while these guys were extremely trained and clever none of them had been to space before ever this is what's known as an all rookie crew and it understandably comes with a couple of problems as the rocket takes off one of those problems comes up william pogue the pilot gets space sick nauseous to the point of vomiting but not to alarm anybody he keeps this quiet when it's found out by ground control the crew gets reprimanded to the point where this mistake was printed on the front page of the new york times cue tension so skylab 4 gets to space and the crew gets to work for 84 days the missions before them had gone for 28 days then 60 days but now skylab 4 was going to be up there for nearly three months and on the seventh day one of their three gyroscopes malfunctioned which means they now had no backup if another breaks to me this feels like the equivalent of wearing a white shirt while eating spaghetti you're not in trouble but you're not far from it every day started with a long morning briefing via radio ground control would hit the crew with a series of complicated questions and demands then a list would be printed through the teleprinter one morning this list was so long that edward gibson measured it at 60 feet after the meeting the crew would then divide up the tasks and get to work some of these tasks were standard and expected others were standard but came with the demand for increased effort an example of this was the number of spacewalks the crew had to do was doubled from two to four and then there were the last minute tasks remember how nasa wanted to get the most out of this final skylab mission nasa capitalized on this by throwing in a bunch of other stuff the crew's workload now included a whole host of stuff for which they had no training so naturally the guys get 24 7 micromanagement meanwhile all his work was hardly being appreciated instead skylab 4 was constantly being compared to the previous skylab astronauts skylab 3 were given the nickname the 150 crew because of how much additional work they got done meanwhile skylab 4 with a rookie crew with the vomiting pilot and the 60-foot to-do lists and let's not underplay the context i will say it once again none of these guys had ever been to space ever this is an adjustment to everything sleeping eating using the bathroom brushing your teeth even just moving now at the fact that they also had a mandatory 90-minute daily workout while being weightless and it starts to stack up and as many astronauts have noted space isn't just the physical adjustment there's the mental game too loneliness cabin fever homesickness nausea bored and pressure the genuine risk of death now add media scrutiny and the fact that there is 12 billion dollars riding on your every move this as you can imagine is a huge recipe for overwhelm one day the crew misses their morning briefing what happened next would change nasa forever cliffhanger how that story ends later in the video for now let's talk about the nature of overwhelm itself because the more we understand the concept the richer the ending to that story is going to be so this project this little research project on the topic of overwhelm why am i making it man well the reason that i'm making this is to scratch my own itch see i've been stretched incredibly thin in the past couple of months it's been really really hard i'll give you a quick rundown first things first my wife felicity and i we became parents to our amazing little daughter it has been this magical emotional and exhausting bliss my animation studio started a new project called streutheverse i took on one too many illustration projects although i am proud of them this one particularly my friend bryce and i wrote a live comedy special which we've been touring around theaters in australia and on top of this i got this youtube channel my podcast and any spare time that i'm not playing with my daughter i am writing my second book can you see the bags baby can you see them good lord in short i have been really really overwhelmed so i started this research project this video that you're watching right here and when i came across this experiment that is when it all started to click this is baba shiv he's a marketing professor and an expert in something called neuroeconomics a field of study that combines economics with psychology so babashiv right as an experiment he gathered a bunch of people put them in one room and then he made them remember a number then they had to walk down the hall enter another room and recite that number some people were given a seven-digit number while other people were given a two-digit number now here's the cool part right when they were walking down that hallway unbeknownst to them somebody would interrupt them they didn't know that this was part of the experiment but what happened was a woman would come up to them with a bunch of snacks and she had two snacks on options she'd say do you want some chocolate cake or do you want some fruit pretty simple decision however what happened was that the people who only had to remember the two-digit number were twice as likely to pick the fruit whereas the people who had to remember all of those seven digits they tended to go for the chocolate cake what does this mean to explain his findings babashiv referenced this theory that the brain is divided into two systems you have the rational or the prefrontal cortex and the emotional the limbic system their rational brain was busy it was trying to remember the seven digit numbers and so while it was in use it didn't have enough resources to allocate to whether or not it should pick the healthier decision without the rational brain to remind you to take the healthy option the emotional one just said chocolate freaking cake let's go and as it turns out this emotional response is incredibly common in people who are overwhelmed and stressed i don't know if this resonates with you but it definitely does with me every time i am overwhelmed i do tend to react to things more emotionally and less rationally and obviously this is incredibly important as the decisions that you make in your everyday life will become your life so if you are overwhelmed and constantly taking the short-term gratification option eventually you'll build that life this reminds me of a quote and i've quoted this a lot on the channel but i'll do it again it's from the olympic weightlifter jersey gregorik hard choices easy life easy choices hard life the hard choice makes for an easier life in the long run but what's really cool about bubba shiv's research is making these hard decisions it's not just a matter of discipline it's also a matter of not being completely overloaded in your brain which brings us to the big question how do you do it how do you get less overwhelmed sounds pretty good man but how all right that method after a quick word from today's sponsor shopify is an all-in-one easy to use online commerce platform anyone can use it regardless of your technical ability to start grow and maintain and scale a business baby if you've ever had that little thought in your head that goes hmm i could sell products online and then the other thought that goes no you couldn't well today might be the day that you do it shopify most of us know unless you sell online but it also lets you sell in person and on social media they've got plugins resources and support from your first sale to full scale i've got a link in the description if that is something that you are curious about and they support more entrepreneurs than anybody else in the world millions and millions of people in 175 different countries including your boy streuthless.com the place where i have all of my apparel art prints all of that sort of stuff that is built on shopify actually fun fact when i switched to shopify my sales pretty much doubled link in description shopify baby alrighty back to the video the sharp axe method i've got this method the sharp axe method because of that abraham lincoln quote give me six hours to chop down a tree and i'll spend the first four sharpening the axe this quote for me is about doing the right work up front preparing correctly so you can save yourself time in the long run and that's what this method is going to be about and just before we get into it a quick reminder i'm not an expert i'm just a dude with a youtube channel and this is just my system if it doesn't work for you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you so you know cherry pick the stuff that does resonate ditch the stuff that doesn't i recommend using multiple sources to build your own system and with that in mind let's sharpen our axes step one environment so the first step when i am overwhelmed is just to take a bit of control over my environment and make it a little bit more ordered this means physically it's like cleaning my desk clearing all that sort of stuff like cleaning the kitchen i don't know just generally cleaning i do this digitally as well so on my laptop what it means is exiting every single program i'll clean up my desktop and if i'm really in the mood i will move a bunch of big files onto a hard drive on my phone it's deleting social media because that is the mess that's on there it's usually that or even just putting my phone itself somewhere else like a draw now while we're cleaning up our physical and digital environment there's also this mental environment that we can just help before doing the rest of the sharp axe method basically throwing a couple of like breathing exercises at the wall so things like box breathing which is in for three hold for three out for three hold another thing that helps here is naming five things you can hear see touch smell and taste what we're trying to do here in this first step is address the immediate concerns the things that are within our reach in our environment that are distracting us the notifications on the phone the plates that have been left out the fact that we haven't really gotten back in touch with our body so once we've done this step it's time for step two brain dump yes the brain dump if you've read my book you'll know that i am a massive fan of the brain dumb what this involves is getting all of your thoughts that are up here out onto the page there are lots of ways to braindump but for this sharp axe method what i'll do is i'll just write out a stream of consciousness and just kind of get the top layer thoughts onto the page and then i'll follow this up with a list a list of everything that i might need to do at some point ever just get all of those potentially pressing tasks in front of me it doesn't need to be in order just needs to be out step three categorize those things so that list that has come at the end of our brain dump is gonna act like a to-do list but at the moment it's a massive mess so what we're gonna do here is categorize it there are a couple of cool ways to do this like the eisenhower matrix this is where you plot all your tasks based on their importance and their urgency everything in this quadrant you do everything here you schedule everything here you delegate and everything here you delete so that's one way to categorize the second way might be uh there's this cool tim ferriss question where he asks what one thing if done would make everything else on this list easier and then a third more simple way to categorize is just lookalike groups so this is where you cluster your lists based on things that require either similar energy or similar resources what i like about it is it sort of plans for minimal context switching so you can just always kind of stay in one particular headspace for as long as possible but yeah categorizing tasks it's kind of like building lego i don't know if you've built lego recently but it's so much easier to build if you have all of your colors separated because you're like oh that's where the yellow one is oh that's where the gray one is boom we've built a yellow gray boat i guess so now we know what's important what's urgent what's pressing what we actually have to do what was in our head that might have been stressing us out it's time to figure out how long all of this is gonna take step four schedule this is obviously quite a straightforward action scheduling in its core form is looking at all of these tasks that are competing for your attention and sticking them on a calendar in a doable way so when i'm doing this when i'm taking my list to the calendar there's a couple of rules that i follow first rule if it takes less than two minutes i don't schedule it i just do it immediately the second rule is i plan visually on a calendar i don't try to write it out like a list i just need the boxes in front of me rule three i put in the dates that can't be moved first so things like deadlines birthdays holidays i'll put it in first and then i'll build everything around it rule four however long i think something is to take i double it i use this one just to offset the fact that i seem to always overestimate how quickly i'll be able to do something always rule five put the most important tasks in the calendar first to the least important regardless of how much i want to do either also when i'm doing this i do try to put an emphasis on creating large uninterrupted blocks of time rule six get ultra specific when writing what needs to be done rule seven if it looks impossible just ask what would it look like if it were easy then plan for that rule eight plan for average me not me at my best if i make a schedule assuming that i'm going to be 100 every single day i will fall short of that schedule 10 times out of 10. but if i include reality into my schedule and i know that usually one day a week i'm just kind of like off just have like this off day where i can't get anything done if i factor that in into my schedule then things start to look achievable rule 9 where possible focus on doing one task to its completion rule 10 a good plan is a flexible plan be prepared to change everything so those are my rules for a schedule and just a recap on where we are in the sharp ax method so we started with our environment that's all looking nicer we got the brain dump we organized the brain dump now it's in a calendar and now we get to step five communicate so i know what work i have to do but before i start any of that i communicate to my stakeholders so let's say there's an illustration and i'm a week late on it what i'll do is i'll call up the client and i'll say hey i'm not going to have that illustration done until thursday but gamble the schedule said wednesday so by telling the stakeholder exactly when they'll get something their frustrations are a little bit quelled for the moment and now they have a day that they are expecting the illustration on but by the time wednesday rolls around they're pleasantly surprised i'm not a completely overwhelmed mess yay or if for example you have friends and family relying on you for something for me i always want to let them know sooner rather than later that i am overwhelmed alright step six just do it yes it is that annoyingly true nike slogan this step is basically about following your schedule until you're a bit less overwhelmed it's about getting through it by doing the work if you are stuck in this stage i've made a bunch of videos about how to just do stuff so i'll put them in the description too but yeah what this step six is about is about actually chopping down that tree and the only way to chop is to chop so that's the sharp axe method fairly straightforward probably makes sense intuitively ultimately this is i guess it's about reality right in an ideal world we wouldn't have to work in an idea where we wouldn't get overwhelmed but this world ain't ideal and we are working and we are overwhelmed because there's rent there's food there's everything and all of it's just hitting your head every single day and meanwhile you're thinking dude i didn't even have to be born we're just floating on a rock we're monkeys there's a freaking sun in the sky and also you just happen to be alive in the largest communication revolution known to humans it's not ideal however it does leave one big question unanswered why did this happen in the first place why did we get overwhelmed i mean up until now we've mostly been talking about curing overwhelm but there's also prevention a final thing that i like to do once i've overcome a particular period of overwhelm is sort of look back and ask why and those answers come in all shapes and sizes sometimes i find it hard to say no i'm just a people pleaser and i'll say yes in the moment because it's way easier than being like actually i have too much on i'll just find the time later this is something that we can work on by practicing saying no if you do struggle with saying no i'll link a podcast that might help you in the description sometimes i get overwhelmed because i'll be using work as advice or i give myself a really ridiculous expectation that i need to do something by some particular moment and other times it's because i'm avoiding something i don't know there's a lot of reasons why we might get overwhelmed and this is so personal so it's sort of hard to really provide the tools for introspection here but one particular technique that i like is asking why and then when you've got that answer ask why again eventually you might find your answer but if you don't chill too and on that note of introspection the final thing that i do want to say about this is being drained being exhausted being overwhelmed being pushed to your limit it's not always a bad thing don't get me wrong it feels awful i would not spend 100 of my time there but it can be a way to know your own personal limits and it can be a way to grow there's this beautiful lyric from the band eve climb blue where the singer says if you're ever coming down or if you ever take too much remember that's much better than never ever getting enough being pushed to your limit sucks but it could also be an amazing teacher and it's also sometimes better than the alternative not getting pushed at all so on that note let's revisit that story that kicked us off so remember those astronauts the ones who got given way too many tasks every single day at these long arduous briefings the first half of that story it ended with them missing a meeting on a 12 billion mission this is a pretty big deal the media saw the astronauts miss the meeting and they painted it as some sort of space strike but the reality was just a bit more simple they were overwhelmed it was an honest mistake they were genuinely in this exhausting haze that they just missed the meeting but as it would be missing this meeting actually turned out to be a good thing because it let ground control know that they were pushing the astronauts too far this led to a different type of meeting a very important and kind of historic one ground control on the crew decided to air their grievances just talk about everything get it all out on the table and there was some good results ground control agreed to stop micromanaging the astronauts just give them more wiggle room the amount of information that the crew needed to digest every day it was just decreased and all of those last minute tasks that nasa was so hell-bent on gone so now the workload is manageable instead of spreading themselves thin the crew was now focused on doing a few things really well and given that it was the last ever skylab mission these changes did have their skeptics well turns out these changes were great baby hell yeah so the first change was super noticeable morale was up the astronauts were happy hmm but the big change that nasa didn't see coming productivity was up too like seriously up to the point where a 12 billion dollar investment starts to look like a good idea in addition to those four space walks the astronauts also performed a whole bunch of experiments they photographed the earth from space they photographed comet kahutek and they took 75 000 new telescopic images of the sun including the first ever from space recording of the birth of a solar flare in fact by the time the crew returned to earth their productivity record was even better than that 150 crew despite the rocky and overwhelming start once they sorted everything out the mission was a huge huge success by taking stock of what was going on by auditing what was and wasn't important by ditching a bunch of stuff by giving themselves a little bit more freedom and a bit more happiness they were able to take one of the most overwhelming situations that any human has been in ever and make it work so i don't know maybe i can too i'm not very good at inspiring stories or even inspiring quotes but you know who is seneca the younger so we're going to finish with his words because i feel like this is what nasa learnt and now i think this might be what i've learned the mind should not be kept continuously at the same pitch of concentration but given amusing diversions our minds must relax they will rise better and keener after a rest thank you so much for watching i do hope that you are feeling less overwhelmed than you did when you started watching big shout out shopify and also i have turned on members what i'm trying to do there is build like a q a community so that way we can go a little bit more specific on stuff and if you like this vibe stick around subscribe and if you really like this vibe check out my book it's about mental clarity it's called your head as a houseboat and other than that have a beautiful day catcher

Channel: struthless

Views: 1,104,449

Keywords: too much to do, too much to do overwhelmed, overwhelmed, constantly overwhelmed, tired, exhausted, burnout, a guide to burnout, stuck in a rut, procrastination, motivation, feeling overwhelmed, too distracted, have too much to do, overcoming overwhelm, abraham lincoln sharpen the axe, your head is a houseboat, mental clarity, a guide to mental clarity, how to achieve mental clarity, declutter the mind, mentally drained, fix brain fog, dopamine detox, the toothpaste theory

Id: prMuDIiFyC4

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2022