Eric Tian

A few days ago, I came across idea of the Input-Output Framework from Ali Abdaal’s newsletter. It’s been a while since I’ve come across a new idea in personal productivity – the main ones of meditation, pomodoros, gratitude and ‘eating the frog’ seem to have been done to death – but this one I’ve found to be new and quite effective for the few days I’ve experimented with it. Here it is:

How to make the most out of free moments: the Input-Output framework

There are many free moments throughout one’s day. These little moments could just be 10 or 30 minutes such as space between meetings and classes but they can accumulate into a significant amount of time. How do we make the most of these little ‘time pockets’?

1. Divide everything you do into either an input or an output activity.

Input is seeking to understand the ideas of others. For me, the main input activities are reading, listening to audiobooks/podcasts and studying. Output is creation. For me, the main output activities are writing, journaling and more recently, making videos.

2. Decide what your inputs and outputs will be.

As a medical student, a significant part of my inputs include content in the form of lectures, tutorials and textbooks related to the medical field. However, I also enjoy learning about psychology, spirituality and creativity. I learn about these in the form of books, podcasts and articles. These are my main inputs.

For my outputs, I love to write and journal. This gives me gain a sense of clarity in my thoughts, freeing up space for other random musings. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the notion of sharing one’s work and the intersection between psychology and spirituality. Aside from making videos, which is a less frequent activity, these are my main outputs.

3. Establish a hierarchy.

Within both inputs and outputs, there should be a rough hierarchy in the value of the task and the attention required. I’d rather read a book than listen to an audiobook, but it requires more attention. Likewise, I’d prioritise listening to an audiobook over reading short articles on my phone, which is above watching YouTube videos, with each level broadly requiring less optimal conditions than the previous one. There should be a similar hierarchy for output activities.

The next step is where productivity arises. Whenever a free moment arises, all I need to do is ask myself:

4. “Is my current priority input or output, and what is the highest task in the hierarchy I can currently do?”

If I’m at home, with few responsibilities and distractions, I can grab a book or my kindle and start reading. But if I’m on a noisy bus or out walking, I’d struggle to read a book. Easy: I can listen to a podcast or audiobook. If I’m catching up with a friend and waiting for them to arrive, I can take my phone out and read an article on The New Yorker or Brain Pickings, my recent go-tos.

The beauty with this approach is that it removes the need to make decisions in the moment. Free moments pop up throughout the day and when one needs to be productive, this framework makes it frictionless to decide what to do in these moments. If the context changes – perhaps a lecture is cancelled or a friend wants to call in 15 minutes – I only need to ask myself, “In this new context, what is the highest task in the hierarchy I can do?” And start cracking.

Of course, productivity isn’t everything – the need for time socialising, exercising and protecting one’s mental health cannot be overstated. But for the moments when work needs to be done, I’ve found this framework to be great at deciding what to do in those ‘pockets’ of time, where I would previously be scrolling through social media mindlessly.

From the base of the mountain, the summit can’t be seen. When you look up you instead see giant glaciers, the remains of bodies who’ve journeyed before you and black vultures which eye you with bloodthirsty anticipation. Glancing eastward, you see a great boulder falling down the mountain, toppled by an invisible but even greater wind. Your mission, for a reason you’re unaware of but doesn’t matter, is to scale the mountain. Looking down, you notice you’re dressed in nothing but shorts and sandals, yet this doesn’t bother you. As you take your first step, the vultures – as if on cue – jet down towards you in a black cloud, screeching in delight…

Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

The shrill but familiar sound of your alarm forces you back into the world of reality. For a moment, you find yourself stuck halfway between the two worlds – neither here nor there – but after a while, the constant assault of the alarm pulls you out. You stumble out of bed, find the alarm clock across your room and hit the snooze button.

It’s 7am on a Saturday. A day with no scheduled online tutorials, webinars or responsibilities. In other words, a free morning. A day off. Rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, you look down at your desk to find the to-do list you laid out the previous night staring back at you.

You see your first task begins at 7:30am: revise thorax anatomy. Glancing at the time (7:04am), you calculate you have 26 minutes to pee, brush your teeth, drink some water and do your morning pages. But since you’re tired, you decide against doing so. “I have the whole day to be productive,” you think, “let’s just go back to sleep…”

Of all the couples at the beach, one clearly stands out as being more in love than the rest. While others complain about the overcast skies and choppy waves, this special couple laughs as they exchange stories about their day, the unmistakable twinkle of love in their eyes. You smile as you hear the hearts of this couple beating in perfect unison, unlike the other couples on the beach. As you turn, a little Indian boy in a green bucket-hat stands in your way, holding a half-eaten pink soft serve towards you. “Wanna buy?” he asks with big, brown eyes and stained lips. “No, thank you.” You reply, smiling and walking past him to an unknown destination. In the distance, you hear the crackling of a thunderstorm and rain begins to fall.

Once again, a rude and intrusive sound forces you out of your dream. You frown as the sound fades, then hear it again. Clang. The sound of metal on a skip bin downstairs. More locally, you hear the sound of a shower running, suggesting your housemate’s awakening, and glance at the time: 10:03am. You somehow napped for another 3 hours. Like a familiar act, you groan, climb out of bed and stare down at the to-do list staring up at you.

“Alright,” you say to yourself. “Even though it’s a weekend, I think we’ve rested enough – let’s get some work done.” As you begin to convince yourself of this plan, another voice chimes in. Look, you’ve worked hard this week – you should give yourself a break. That’s what weekends are for, right? Recharging. Go on, you’ve already wasted 3 hours, just take the rest of the day off. Studying is for nerds.

You hesitate. Your autonomic nervous system seizes this moment to advise you that you’re cold and to go find some warmth, as your pajamas aren’t exactly the best at insulating heat. You look around for some socks to put on but realise your favourite socks are in the washing basket which is unfortunate because your feet are getting very cold. Out of desperation, you dive into the only fast-acting sauna you can find: your bed, still carrying the residual heat from your body. Your lazy voice whispers its approval. Good decision.

You know you can’t stay in bed forever, but while you’re in bed you jot down some of the strange dreams you had that morning. Something about a mountain, vultures… and an Indian kid selling ice-cream? How bizarre. A few moments later, you hear the opening of the bathroom door and decide to finally get up and do your business. You throw on some mediocre socks before you leave your room and go to the toilet, grabbing your phone on the kitchen table on the way. You open your phone to be greeted by an assault of social media and email notifications and as you start going through them whilst brushing your teeth, you take note of the time: 10:14am.

In your email, you see an interesting-looking article in your inbox. You take some time contemplating whether to read the article now or to start with your to-do list, now 3 hours behind schedule. Once again, your autonomic nervous system seizes this opportunity to advise you that you’re hungry and to go make some breakfast, as you didn’t eat much last night. Your lazy voice giggles in delight at having an ally as powerful as the hormones and neurotransmitters that govern your physiology on its side. You sigh and grab for your oats container.

When you first sat down to eat and read the article, you thought it’d only take 10, maybe 15 minutes max. But it’s now 11:21am, the oats bowl now empty and cold, and you realise you’re on YouTube watching a video called My longest yeah boy ever. You silently berate yourself, quickly wash your bowl and sit down at your desk. Your journal sits in front of you, waiting to be written on. “Okay,” you think to yourself. “I’ll quickly do these morning pages and then do some work.” After taking some time to write, you glance at the time: 11:45am. 15 minutes until noon. Your lazy voice pipes up.

Oh, just forget it. If you want to do work, just start at 12:00. It’s more legit that way, hey? You hate to admit it, but you find yourself agreeing with this advice. And as if on cue, your autonomic nervous system chimes in to thank you for feeding it, but now it’s sleepy again and would very much like another nap if that’s okay. You sigh, resigning yourself to these powerful forces and silently apologise to your last-night’s self for being such a failure. When you crawl back into bed, you promise yourself that when you wake up, you’ll do some work.

We’ll see about that.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an article called The Mundanity of Excellence: An enthnographic report on stratification and Olympic swimmers. It examines the question of ‘What makes people excellent?’ by assessing the differences in practices, habits and mindsets of swimmers at different levels. The general message is that everyone can be excellent with the right set of practices, rather than some obscure notion of ‘talent’, an encouraging message for all. Here are 3 key takeaways.

1. Excellence comes from qualitative, not quantitative differentiation.

World-class swimmers don’t necessarily train longer or work harder than average swimmers. What differentiates the best from the rest, the author argues, is differences in quality. The best swimmers tend to be more mindful of their technique, rock up to training on time, sleep regular hours and watch what they eat.

This idea makes sense. There’s no use training 5 hours a day in a pool with incorrect technique: you’d be training the wrong thing, engraining the wrong skills. However, I suspect there is a balance here between quality and quantity. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell notes this observation for classical musicians:

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

2. Excellence comes from differences in attitude.

The features that an average swimmer finds unpleasant, the top swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring – swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say – the top performers find peaceful, even meditative. Those that are excellent enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions and set difficult goals.

From a running perspective, this idea is familiar. Some of the top runners at my Uni running club do 30km long runs on the weekend. Once, I asked them how they do it every week and if they get bored of it. I remember their confused faces staring back at me. “We don’t do it for work,” they said. “We do it because it’s relaxing and it’s fun.”

3. Excellence is mundane.

This is the main point of this article – that there’s really nothing ‘special’ about high achievers. They just have this set of practices, habits and mindsets that when added and compounded together over time, result in the phenomenon of excellence. The notion of ‘talent’ is essentially meaningless and is just a lazy way of saying, ‘we don’t know how they did it.’ The author argues that if we took the time to investigate what makes a top performer excellent, we’d find a set of practices that if we wanted to, could apply to our own lives for similar results. It’s really quite mundane. In his conclusion, he writes:

But of course, there is no secret. There is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life. 

Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

– Ben Okri

When I was a kid, I used to obsess over this type of Lego called Bionicles. It was more than just blocks and pieces, there was this whole universe about it – movies and comics with heroes and villains and twists and turns, and 5-year old me devoured it all. When I went to Big W with my parents, I would always beg them to buy me a new Bionicle to play with. And usually, out of what I now suspect was a ploy to get me to pipe down, they complied. Little did they know how much these toys would take over my time, thoughts and obsessions.

From the ages of 5 to 7, hours each night were spent on my bedroom floor with swarms of Bionicles pieces in front of me. During these hours, I’d create epic battle scenes, new ‘hybrid’ Bionicles and a complex story with my figures which I thought was honestly pretty good. At the peak of my obsession, I even created a card game out of Bionicles. For each card, I would give each unique Bionicle a name, a ‘description’, some attack/defence stats and draw its face on a piece of paper like a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Looking back, it was absolutely ridiculous but as a kid, I was in my own little world and I loved it.

This strange phase of my life illustrates how my inputs directly influenced my outputs. It was only through my constant input of Bionicles: the movies, comics and buying new figures, that I was able to fuel my ideas of storylines, new figures and even a card game. If I had never taken any of these ‘Bionicles inputs’ in, there is no chance any of these weird ‘Bionicles outputs’ would’ve ever transpired.

Of course, this concept applies to almost all domains. If you want good grades, you’d better learn the lectures. If you want a healthy body, you’d better eat right. And if you want to be an epic Bionicles producer, you’d better have some interest in what the Universe and characters are like. Our outputs are directly influenced by our inputs.

This seems obvious. But due to the enormity of the information available on the internet these days (let alone podcasts, movies or books), there is huge potential for our ideas about ourselves, the world or other people to be radically altered. Whether it’s a subtle Facebook comment or an alarming news headline, the amount and diversity of stimuli out there that we can interact with is astronomical. This means negative and unproductive stimuli can hurt us, inspiring and exhilarating stimuli can build us up, but on unprecedented levels.

Which leads to the idea of the importance of developing ‘intentional inputs’. Whether it’s reading good books, avoiding unproductive pieces of information or having a stronger filter, controlling the ideas and products we input can help make dramatic changes in our outputs, whether that’s ideas, physique or anything in between, illustrating the ever-increasing need to defend our inputs.

I’ll admit, this can be uncomfortable as it creates responsibility on us to decide how we want to see things, and responsibility can be scary. But at the same time, this notion of defending inputs is also remarkably liberating, as the ideas that shape how we see the world can be slowly but surely moulded into something new, if we only decide to choose so. The potential for this is enormous.

So what you need to do, if you really want to broaden your horizons as a listener, is to get exposed to new things. Pick somebody. It doesn’t have to be me…. Find somebody who you trust as a guide, and let them open your ears to these new experiences.

If you do that, you will be rewarded infinitely…

– Ted Giota, from a podcast episode on Conversations with Tyler.

On another note, I’ve been enjoying writing recently and so I’ve decided to write more during this Easter break. Starting today, I’ll aim to write 2 thoughts a week on this online journal: probably on a Sunday and a Thursday. I’ve absolutely no clue how long this’ll last, but we’ll see how it goes. As always, any feedback or comments are always appreciated!