- Cancel select items from Restoration Hardware order
- Check status of birth certificate correction
- Find homes for sale matching these criteria
- List this item on Craigslist

To see my top tasks throughout the week, follow Twitter hashtag #ttask

So, I’m not going to lie.

“I’ve been looking forward to this Friday ever since last Friday and the introduction of breakfast friday. I’m just kind of a geek about breakfast. Well, let’s change that to passionate. I’m passionate when it comes to breakfast and it sounds like you are too.”

For more of my favorite recipes check out my collection on Foodgawker.

6/14/13

Friday Posts

10000 hours is a long damn time: What are the 7 steps to genius?

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/06/10000-hours/

10000 hours? Seriously? Looking at numerous examples of genius performance, what are the seven secrets to transforming yourself into a world class expert?

101 Reasons to Quit Eating Processed Foods Forever

http://www.drfranklipman.com/101-reasons-to-quit-eating-processed-foods-forever/

It’s almost impossible to go to the market without coming back with something in a box, bag, can or jar. The simplicity of eliminating steps in preparing our food is now commonplace. We cut corners because food manufacturers make it so unbelievably easy and cheap to do so. Certainly some processed foods are safer than others, and most of us recognize how truly lucky we are to have so many options at our fingertips. And that’s just the point: When we change our food habits, we change the world.

12 Scientific Ways Reading Can Actually Improve Your Life - BuzzFeed Mobile

http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/12-scientific-ways-reading-can-actually-improve-your-life

It prevents Alzheimer’s! Also, it makes you sexier.

6 Apps You Don't Want To Miss

http://mashable.com/2013/06/08/6-apps-you-dont-want-to-miss-6/

Our weekly app roundup, featuring our favorite apps of the week such as Thirst, Scribblemix, Twitter, Hulu, and Facebook Home. Vine finally arrived for Android this week. The popular app already has 13 million users on iOS.

8 Ridiculous Nutrition Myths Debunked | Popular Science

http://www.popsci.com/node/74033/edit

There is a lot of incompetence in the area of nutrition and health. Even health professionals seem to constantly contradict each other. Here are 8 ridiculous nutrition myths, thoroughly debunked.

Athletic Greens - All In One Nutrition

https://www.athleticgreens.com/v4/index.php

Athletic Greens® is an all natural, mega-nutrient formula designed to cover the DAILY nutritional needs of active people.

CamFind - Point, Shoot and Discover

http://camfindapp.com/

Take a picture with CamFind to learn more about any object. The app uses visual search technology to tell you what things are, and it can even tell you where you can buy them. Oh yeah, it translates into multiple languages, too.

Fascinating research findings: 6 facts that will surprise you

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/06/fascinating-research-findings/

6 fascinating research findings regarding sex, attraction, charisma and other subjects. Did you know that elbows can indicate sexiness?

Flow Free — Give Your Brain Cells A Workout (Android)

http://www.esoftload.info/flow-free-give-your-brain-cells-a-workout-android

Puzzle android games have been extremely popular ever since their inception. They always manage to keep the player occupied and tease them with puzzles that require some serious thought in order to be successfully solved.

How to Troll the Junk Mail Sender ~ Damn Cool Pictures

http://www.damncoolpictures.com/2013/06/how-to-troll-junk-mail-sender.html

How to Troll the Junk Mail Sender Monday, June 10, 2013 Funny Pictures, Pranks, Trolling Tweet Pin It now!

Laws of Subtraction - Should you do less to get more out of life?

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/06/laws-of-subtraction/

Life is so busy. Is doing less the answer? Six laws of subtraction explain how doing less can bring your life much more.

Nutrigenomics - "Let Food be Thy Medicine and Medicine Be Thy Food." An Ancient Truth in Light of Fancy DNA Analyses

http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2013/06/nutrigenomics-let-food-be-thy-medicine.html

Researchers working in the field of nutrigenomics prioritize berries over pills and individuality over "one-size-fits-it-all approaches" - can they also tell us how to "eat away" from cancer and fool the aging process? Learn more about what nutrigenomics are,

Platform harnesses the crowds to solve rare disease cases | Springwise

http://www.springwise.com/platform-harnesses-crowds-solve-rare-disease-cases/

When doctors don't have the answer, CrowdMed relies on the knowledge of a broad set of users in order to find out the potential causes of rare diseases.

Salt: What Is It Good For?

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/salt-what-is-it-good-for/

For years, we've been told to reduce our salt intake as much as possible. But recent evidence suggests that salt is vital for optimal health.

The business of email. - Fancy Hands Blog

http://www.fancyhands.com/blog/the-business-of-email

Have you ever wondered about the history of the email system that you likely use every day?

The Ultimate Guide to Healthier Baking [Infographic] | Greatist

http://greatist.com/health/healthy-baking-recipe-substitutions-infographic

The Ultimate Guide to Healthier Baking [Infographic] Stare at that wall of sneakers no longer! Here's your guide to choosing the right type of shoe for any type of exercising, from running to cycling, weightlifting to hiking.

Track health and chart symptoms of pain, PMS, weight gain, high blood pressure, allergy, depression and other conditions

https://www.chartmyself.com/

Do you ever notice how certain foods can make you tired? Have you wondered if your mood improves with exercise? Do you know how your relationship changes with your menstrual cycle? Now you can make sense of it all. Track multiple aspects of your health and lifestyle and see how they change. Watch patterns emerge that will help you improve health and happiness for a lifetime...

Walking meetings - walk 30 miles a week while still at the office.

http://nanoworkout.com/2013/06/walking-meetings-ted-video/

Walking meetings – walk 30miles a week while still at the office. People spend an average of 9.3 hours every day on their butt. It’s actually possible to trace 6% of all heart disease and 7% of all type 2 diabetes to inactivity.

Why Businesses Should Care How Well Their Employees Sleep

http://greatist.com/happiness/job-stress-sleep-061213

Ever had a nightmare about a meeting with the boss, only to show up groggy and irritable for work the next day? New research suggests stress messes with our sleep. Here’s why employers should care about our bedtime.

Why Some of the World's Most Productive People Have Empty Schedules

http://lifehacker.com/why-some-of-the-worlds-most-productive-people-have-emp-512473783

Back in 1991, Warren Buffett met Bill Gates, though as he tells career community website Levo League, neither of them were excited to see one another. But it turned out they had a great time talking—and during the course of the conversation, Buffett pulled out the little black date book that he carries in his pocket. He flipped through it: The pages were practically empty.

You commit three felonies a day

http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day

In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the government takes a dislike to you for any reason, they'll dig in and find a felony you're guilty of.

Read the Entire Article at Greatist.com

This pod cast was edited and remastered professionally using Fiverr as well as fully transcribed using Fiverr

Ari:               Hi and welcome to the podcast.  Today we’re talking with Owen McGab Enaohwo from Sweet Process; cofounder of Sweet Process.  Thanks for talking with us today.  Hi, Owen.

Owen:          Thanks Ari for having me on the call; I really appreciate it.

Ari:               Yeah, absolutely.  So, first of all tell everyone what Sweet Process is.

Owen:          Basically Sweet Process is whenever an entrepreneur is in essence which is where they feel like they’re on the bottom and they have so many things that you need to delegate for the problem.  How do you clearly make your teammates understand what is to get done?  Well, Sweet Process allows you to document procedures that show step by step how fast or repetitive your business gets done so that you can delegate the work to your teammates and you know exactly what to do.

Ari:               Great.  Anybody who’s has been following podcast’s and seen the blog notes know that I’m really big on processes.  I think that people go through these routines throughout their day or throughout the week that has to do with their personal life or their business and a lot of times they just do them and take it for granted and they don’t ever take the time to stop and figure out all the parts that go into it and how they might be able to optimize those.  I really, really love what you’re offering here.  Basically, give me a walkthrough; how do you draw out a process basically?

Owen:            Once we draw out a procedure is what you’re saying?

Ari:                Right.

Owen:            The short way of putting it is basically as the person who doing the work in the business.  The quickest way to document procedures is to look at what is currently the bottom neck of my time it demands at this very moment?  If you try to document every task you’re going to get overwhelmed.  The short is to look at what you’re doing on a daily basis and see what single recurring task happens to be the biggest bottom neck of my time.  Once you know what that task is the first thing to do is you look and now you know exactly what to start with.  You document step by step how to get that task done by using.  Once you’re done documenting that specific bottom neck, the biggest bottom neck using Sweet Process, then you delegate the work to your teammates.  With the freed up time, after doing the delegation part of the process, you know have the ability to look at what is the next biggest bottom neck of my time.  So by formulating this and starting with the biggest bottom neck known, document it in Sweet Process and then delegate it to someone on your team.  Then you can look at the next bottom neck so you can document it.  It allows you to basically eventually document everything in your business.

Ari:                So most people should probably be able to think of a process that they have to deal with on a regular basis whether it’s billing a client or paying their bills themselves or to telling someone how to post the new blog post on the company blog – whatever it might be.  Are you seeing any kind of really common processes that are showing up among different users?

Owen:            That’s a great question because the reality is we [3:21].  Some users are signing up with their blog or creating blog posts for their site.  That’s why we always say it’s going to be a lot difficult to see, to put people into that bucket and have to train what they are documenting but if they stop on their own specific lead and focus on what that bottom neck is in their own business, it allows them to get started quickly and document things on their own real need.  Once they have sweet time after documenting and delegating the work, they can use that free time to study what is the thing that I have to do in my business.  It might be something that they’re already doing but with that free time you can really think about how to take your business to the next level.  That’s all I’m saying.

Ari:                Now, are you seeing any to be using this for kind of personal processes, home processes?  I even talk to people about how they prepare family meals for the week and how they can kind of make those more optimized just by how they do it.  So are you seeing any personal use for this, too?

Owen:            We have not seen any personal use Sweet Process; it’s the fact that we try to encourage mostly business use.  The way we look at it is that if your customer is too folded, too tense – if I lose customer, I lose profit.  The person who is initially bottom necking and can no longer do the work anymore; he’s to document procedures and they’re looking for a way to do that so Sweet Process works for them.  Then the second type of person is someone who already has a team in place and they already have documented procedures in their business but it turns out that the tool is not an enterprise tool and is very complicated.  They want something that is easy for their team.  In both of those scenarios more people are using Sweet Process for business related tasks.  Of course people can use it for personal but we don’t see that happening; mostly it’s a business related task.

Ari:                Yeah, I figured that; I just thought it was worth asking.  Do you have any plans for the data side of this sort of amalgamating this information seeing if you can find ways that maybe you can suggest ways to make these processes more efficient or things like that?  It’s an obvious, I think it’s an obvious tie in for what you’re offering and other services that help you delegate such as virtual assistant or other things like that.  Do you have any programs for that kind of stuff?

Owen:            Let me see if I get the question before I answer it.  Are you asking us if besides just the part where we’re helping you make the procedures if we’re working on some way in which now the procedures are documented, how the work can actually be delegated to somebody else like project management or workflow?  Is that what you’re asking me?

Ari:                Yeah, it would just seem to me if you’re having the opportunity to observe many peoples different business processes that there may be some data that you can claim from that about general suggestions and ways that those processes can be made more efficient.

Owen:            One of the things that we are working on right now is the idea that once people start using or your teammates start using the procedures, they’re going to see situations in which they will have five steps with specific recurring tasks.  But it turns out that your teammate now someone is there proactively saying, I don’t need to do this in five steps.  Yeah, three steps and I can be able to handle this task and get it done quicker and more efficiently.  The goal would be to have the teammate basically leave a comment or suggestion for that very specific step that needs to be eliminated or improved upon.  That flows back to the owner of the account.  Now, your procedures become more of a living, breathing document as opposed to just being static and nobody’s using it.  By them being able to get that feedback from the users, you can manage or create or improve your procedures over time.

Ari:                Yeah, okay.  That’s great; I think that’s really, really cool.  So, what are some of the future plans then?  New services that you’re going to be offering?

Owen:            One thing we’re currently discussing and one of the things that we’re doing at Sweet Process is to make sure we build based on playing the feedback.  Also, think in completion with the feed the reason we have.  So, one of the things we’re trying to do is look into this personal; should we take it pass that layer of just documenting procedures.  We have to question, why is this person really trying to document procedures.  It goes way deeper than, oh, I want my teammates to know exactly what I want to do.  The reality is that if you really dive into that question where are they going to place themselves and know that realistically that the work gets done exactly and also be able to track that it gets done.  Myself and Michael is evaluating that vision of do we go beyond documenting procedures which we are currently solving and also get to a point where the tool essentially helps people to literally replace themselves.  It goes beyond the procedures and goes into more workflow management and managing the work with all the teammates.  This is something that we are talking about.  We don’t know if that’s the next direction.  The thing with software and service products is that they evolve based on user feedback and it opens suggestions.

Ari:                Yeah, you mentioned something that I actually wanted to touch on which I really like that you also offer; I saw this in the demo – people can check off as they go through the procedure which is great.  I’ve had this issue before where it’s hard sometimes to describe the details of a task very well even if you’ve gone through this many times; every task is different.  Honestly, it’s my opinion that if somebody follows your task description and they make a mistake, it’s more likely your fault than theirs because you didn’t put down enough detail or new product.  I’ve had tasks that I thought were really good and there were times when people missed a step, one way or the other.  So, I love the idea that you sort of have these checkbox that people can go through as they go through the task.  It’s really important that people make that distinction between a to-do list which is the thing that you have to do and a checklist which is how you do it.  Whether it’s a commercial airline pilot or a heart surgeon, those people use checklist no matter how many thousands of times that they’ve done something, it’s so you can make sure that you don’t miss any steps.

Owen:            Yeah and it seems people really question themselves but you and me, we do work based on checklist.  They’re just in a resistant way that it makes the work look more mountainous but the reality is no, it actually helps to foster creativity in a sense that now the person you hire who is doing the work they have a starting point from where they can start from.  They used the checklist and the procedures that were created using Sweet Process to know exactly what needs to be done.  One thing that I tell my users is that you also want to empower your workers so that they can take ownership of the fact that ok you have your starting point, you have the opportunity to help us improve the procedures because we know that it’s supposed to be an ongoing repeating product that [10:59]  so, one thing that I suggest is that you get your teammates come back and tell you better ways to get stuff done based on the facts of just using your steps, incentivize.  Some people incentivize by giving them a bonus.  Some people might be incentivized by being recognized in a team; hey, these are the people who I helped in their business.  Whatever incentivizes your teammates it helps to include that so that it can help you improve the procedures or task.

Ari:                I love it.  I played around with it and I really, really recommend people try it out as a method of really breaking down and sharing and thinking of new processes.  So, the last question that I always like to ask people on the podcast is what are the top three things that you do personally to make yourself as effective as possible?

Owen:            What I do a lot is if I find something that I tend to be, in my team I’m depended on a lot because if I don’t get my input back to them, it doesn’t get done.  Then, I know that’s one of the bottom necks i need to figure out on how to replace myself.  The second this is figure out what I should replace myself on, the question is how I grab out documenting the procedure to get it done?  To be honest, it is going to be painful because you might say why document it?  Why not just do it myself?  At the end of the day I need to get myself to understand that not spending time not doing something is such an investment.  If I were to do the work on an ongoing basis 10 hours every week but if invest about 2 hours or less to really document the entire procedure, that frees me up from having to do the work 10 hours every week.  Trick your mind into believing that when it comes to removing yourself from being a bottom neck, trick your mind into understanding that it’s actually investment.  Any time you invest to create procedures to replace yourself, is an investment that off over the long time.

Ari:                Great, those are really, really good tips; thank you for sharing those.  Why don’t you tell everyone the URL for Sweet Process?

Owen:            The URL is SweetProcess.com.  that’s where you can go on there and check out Sweet Process and one of the things we do is we give you a 14 day free trial, no credit card required, so that you can at least try out and evaluate           the service and see if it’s a good fit for you.  If you like it, you can go ahead and sign up and become a paying user.  Also, we have a blog SweetProcess.com/blog where we post information about how to systemize your business and help you get more productive; you can check out the articles we have there as well.

Ari:                Well, we definitely like that.  Everyone, definitely check that out and try to get your free trial and start documenting some processes so you can be more efficient and do less.  Owen, thank you so much for your time and good luck making people more efficient; that’s what we love.

Owen:            Thank you very much for having me Ari, I really appreciate it.

- Fancy respond to reddit thread and talk about LessDoing
- Find services like Plated and Blueapron outside of NYC
- Find a clothes dropbox near my home address

To see my top tasks throughout the week, follow Twitter hashtag #ttask

Amazing story showing how much he truly loves his work. It really puts many of our lives into perspective considering the hardships he has to endure on a daily basis while most of us sit in comfortable chairs during our work days.

“Yvonne Ruperti is a food writer, recipe developer, former bakery owner, and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Easy Artisan Bread. You can also watch her culinary stylings on the America’s Test Kitchen television show. She presently lives in Singapore working on her new baking cookbook, and as a recipe developer for HungryGoWhere Singapore. Check out her blog, shophousecook.com, or follow her on Twitter @yvonneruperti.”

Photo:  Yvonne Ruperti / Serious Eats

For more of my favorite recipes check out my collection on Foodgawker

Today I got to Interview Yoni Donner from Quantified Mind. I hope you enjoy it!

Quantified Mind
Happy Couple Workout
uCheck urine analysis kit
Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

This podcast was edited and remastered professionally using Fiverr as well as fully transcribed using Fiverr.

Ari:               Hi and welcome to the podcast.  Today we’re talking with Yoni Donner of quantified mind.  Hi, Yoni.

Yoni:            Hi, Ari, thanks for having me.

Ari:               Absolutely. So, start off by just telling everybody what quantified mind is.

Yoni:            Quantified mind is the first ever cognitive testing platform that was designed specifically for the goal of repeatedly assessing the same person at multiple time points.  Unlike standard cognitive testing which is concerned with measuring the person once and comparing them against a population.  We are interested in how a person varies by conditions and a different time.  The whole goal here is to have a set of tests that can be applied many, many, many times and are efficient and scalable and can give you an indirect picture of how different things you do affect your cognitive performance.

Ari:               Right there I see a difference.  My question was how does it compare to things like lumosity or the others which have no platforms but they don’t really tell you how things you are doing affect those numbers.  Is that really your differentiating factor?

Yoni:             Compared to like lumosity then yeah the difference is that they focus on training and that quantified mind is really focused on assessment.  Although it happens that, if you’re trying to test your strength, you’ll probably try to lift some heavy weights and by the same process you will get stronger.  It’s the same way you could try to assess your cognitive ability gets better with quantified mind.  This is not dissimilar to what lumosity are doing but in terms of branding expensive goals, they’re trying to focus on things like communication and making things fun and visible and attractive and engaging so that people will treat those as games and come back and do more “training”.  Whereas quantified mind is more dare I say scientific and focus on efficient rigorous assessment.  You try to get the most information that you can so you can actually learn something about yourself rather than just have a good time.  Having said that, I have a lot of respect for lumosity; I really like those guys and they have a great website and I’m actually working with them with some data analysis assessment.  We actually fit very nicely as complimentary sides of the same kind.

Ari:                What kind of things will somebody be able to find out from them using quantified mind?

Yoni:             It turns out that every person has their own questions and the things that bother them.  I guess some of the common things are the simple day to day choices that we make in life.  That is getting more or less sleep, eating your carbohydrates high fat diet or not eating at all, exercising doing cardio versus weight, drinking coffee versus not drinking coffee, is a little bit of alcohol last night really hurting my whole day to day?  All kinds of things that a lot of people occasionally ask and it’s very hard to answer.  Our ability to introspect it is just not very good and the subject is very biased now we can put numbers to all of these things.  But also I’ve seen a lot of people use it for less daily less standard intervention such as going into polyphasic sleeping cycles and trying to see how much of a cognitive price we pay for the actual time games and trying all types of weird drugs or other supplements that are family unusual.  It’s really a whole range out there.  But I say for most people these are the same topics that are given in newspapers [4:16] improves brain function or something like this.

Ari:                So, now when we’re talking about cognitive performance, what are we talking about?  Memory?  Tasks?  What are really talking about when you talk about cognitive performance?

Yoni:             Right.  The goal would be what you define as all of it but of course realistically that cannot be achieved.  What I am trying to achieve is to build on a whole set of tests and develop an [4:49] and have anxiety and shown to mean something in real life.  That’s the first; some things that can be measured and the other criteria which can be what actually matters.  The things that are obviously important to something and then validated as such and things which can be measured efficiently and completely repeatedly.  For example, one thing that I would very much like to measure but have not been able to devise a completely repeatable and automatic test for this creativity.  Some of the other things that I can measure very well as such basic processing feed and sensory processing and visual, auditory and so on, working on restarting the memory, learning executive functions which you could content switching of inhibition and attention; even a little bit of motor functions. We try to capture everything which matters and can be reasonably captured.  It ends up being, depending how you count and how you separate them with something like 6 to 8 different cognitive domains covered by something like 30 tests overall.

Ari:                Okay.  Now when you’re looking at these results and I’m assuming you’re previewing a good amount of data.  Have you discovered anything that you found surprising?  Have you found the optimal amount of sleep on average or a supplement that works really well or anything like that?

Yoni:             Yeah, definitely a lot of results.  Most of them are not surprising but it’s also nice to see that we can validate expected results.  For example, medication is one thing that we expect to work but it was really encouraging to see a significant effect with a  fairly small sample size.  There have also been surprises and you see those mostly 10 to 1 experiments that are just done by dedicated individuals.  Then also know how much it is an individual effect versus something generalizable. I’ve seen a lot of peoples surprised with respect to their optimal time of day for doing things; their memories first thing in the morning they discovered that their performance is best in the morning it’s just the perception that is fairly clouded.  I always thought that fasting is associated with clarity of mind and better performance.  I discovered that the numbers actually tell a different story. Yeah, I guess there have been stories that have bothered which has been somehow acclaims some reputation in the quantified self-community as a cognitive enhancer.  But all the evidence we’ve seen so far is actually anything. It is neutral for some people and negative for some.  There are all kinds of results on supplements, I don’t think I can mention those without getting information from people that did those experiments.

Ari:                Okay. Fair enough; fair enough.  Well can you tell me this though.  Was there any significant difference between possible neutropic drugs versus supplements?  Where there supplements that were actually more effective drugs or vice versa?

Yoni:             That’s an interesting question.  I would say no we’ve only seen mild effects for both drugs and supplements.  I guess the diversion is not always very clear because most neutropics are really just supplements, right?  From the experiments with stronger substances, I only received several reports but they were interesting but I can’t actually share those.  One of the stronger results I’ve seen is actually on the same as drinking coffee by the [9:27] affect that you’re familiar with.

Ari:                Absolutely.

Yoni:             So yeah we did a big experiment that had about 300 people expressing initial interest and 50 actually signed up.  It’s a smaller number that actually completed the study but it was a very demanding study and a pretty demanding protocol. We compared both butter and upgraded coffee versus a control coffee which was Starbucks and the results were just extremely strong.  We’re going to go public with this in just a matter of days.  I can’t tell you correlatively what we found, we received a very specific detailed report about the findings of the study pretty soon.  Basically when they had some time to go over the report I sent him but essentially we found very significant effect for the coffee type and a complete lack of effect for butter.  This was kind of interesting because now…. Sorry?

Ari:                I was just going to say it was interesting because I drink [10:45] coffee and I never drank it with the goal of getting like an energy boost and I never feel an energy boost but I definitely feel sharper and more clarity when I drink it versus that I don’t.

Yoni:             Great. I guess in your case you’re quite perceptive or maybe the effect is pretty big so you wouldn’t actually need the numbers to tell you that but at least now we do have numbers that seem to back your subjective experience

[both talking]

Ari:                Go ahead I’m sorry.

Yoni:             To me the value it lies in the domains where you don’t really know and really do need the numbers and maybe your intuition is reversed to reality because of varies vices.  Actually a lot of examples of those things.  You can’t just read it out.  Coffee is probably one of the things that…. Coffee compared to no coffee is certainly very strong intervention.  Most people can say, I know, life is worth living when I drink coffee.  You don’t need to take a bunch of tests to tell you that coffee does something but when you’re talking about comparing different kinds of coffee, I think most people are not so sure and definitely when you’re talking about finer grain intervention.  Like 8 hours of sleep versus 7; who knows really?

Ari:                The one that’s really intriguing to me is the time of day study you have on your site. One of the things I’m always talking about with my clients and in my seminars is about learning the best timing for you to do certain activities.  People know that they are a morning person or a night person but I try to explain it goes way beyond that.  I’ve learned through just being observant about myself that I don’t particularly don’t like making phone calls before noon; I just don’t feel like I’m myself.  I like to work out in the afternoon.  I like to deal with creative problems late at night.  I know that the timing of things can really affect how well you’d do, the more even if you will do them at all and I’ll just get distracted and do something else.  How do you do the time of day testing actually?  Obviously you take lots of samples I presume?

Yoni:             Yeah.  My goal with this one was to go with something which has no intervention really so it would be the central repository for collecting unstructured data without any additional stress from the participant side.  Therefore this is the experiment with the highest amount of variation between sessions.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but every time you do get a different set of tests and this is actually meant to give me better data to learn about the different correlations between tests.   No one is ever going to do them in a single session so I had to mix them up somewhere in a way which would enable me to compute all the correlations between them.  I chose this particular experiment to do this. This one is really interesting because essentially I get data on all the tests from all the users from various times of day including that information as far as feeling energy levels and sleep and so on.  It’s definitely the experiment with the largest number of data finds and it’s really, really interesting because of those unique properties.  So far it’s been useful in multiple ways developing interesting analysis [14:51] and in validating the intratest correlating which duly corresponds to what they should buy so they can [14:59].  It’s maybe not something that would interest a lot of users but it’s definitely interesting to researchers who are interested in using the site and definitely interesting to me as the researcher who’s building this validated things that make sense. [15:14] Things are working properly.  But also I tell you it’s easy to learn something about yourself from this one which is why looking at the data.  It doesn’t take this many data points and the results are usually quite striking.  I’ve seen a lot of surprises there too.  I’ve said this before people just, I guess, self-perception seems to be uncorrelated with actual performance when it comes to time of day.  I completely agree with you, this is a huge thing.  This is actually one of the strongest variations that we have.  Anyone will testify if you try to force them to do something really demanding when you just woke them up or the weakest point of the day.

Ari:                Yeah it’s interesting because that’s like one of the tenants of the military is wake up and start doing drills immediately; you have to be ready to go at any given time so training for that or knowing what your baseline for that should lead to some outcome.

Yoni:             One of the interesting studies that I’ve seen in epidemia is standard traditional methods or the very classic way America study where they took the navy or marines doing death week.  Not Americans; they’ve given an amount of number which one it is.  But it’s this horrible week where they don’t sleep and they do a shit ton of physically demanding feats.  Then they gave them 100mg or 200mg or 300mg of coffee.  You could see tremendous boost in performance.  When you actually get to the point where you need to give people 300mg of coffee and you still see improvement; these are people in poor shape.

Ari:                All in the name of science I guess.  When someone goes to the website, there’s all these standard ones that you talk about like coffee, sleep, and time of day but can people create their own experiment?  Like if someone wanted to see the effect of how much TV they watch in a day?

Yoni:             There are options for generating your own experiment.  You can use a variety.  You can create your own variables and design your own protocols and the way you want to do the experiment.  Furthermore, I also work together with people who are interested in doing experiments on themselves and more people.  Doing group experiments; anyone who is interested in doing that just needs to contact me and I will help them create some landing page you can direct the users to and I can let them get access to the people who take their own experiments and will help them do the analysis.  I’ve been doing this with several users; so far it’s been a blast for me, it’s been really great to see the people are interested in asking you questions and trying to generate discoveries using the tool that I built.  It’s always better to work with them.  Everyone is so positive and happy to design clever experimental designs and to go and find something new.  This has been one of my goals with this site.  I don’t want to stop with those structured experiments.   Those actually were added at the later stage just to make it so that people who don’t have a specific question will still find something to do and find the site useful.  The original goal is definitely to enable discoveries.  If there was some feature that was missing and someone has some very cool question they want answered and they need this feature, I usually am more than happy to implement things for people up to reasonable limits and who work with them.  We’ll all be able to answer lots of questions and make really interesting discoveries.

Ari:                That’s a really wonderful resource that people should have at their disposal.  I’m glad that you’re open to doing that.  The last question that I always like to ask on the podcast is what are the top three things that make you more productive.  They can be anything from diet to meditation to software program.  What are the top three things that make you as effective as you want to be?

Yoni:             First I want to say that is a great question and you picked a very fun one to talk about.  I’d say that the number one for me is very separated and far and above and beyond anything else.  It is actually to optimize at the right resolution.  Basically, think very careful about the things that you are doing in your life. Before you start tweaking your minutes or saving ten minutes a day by brushing your teeth more efficiently or something like this or going to those optimizations.  Even before you go and gain even an hour more of focus a day by doing some hack.  I think it’s more important to make sure that you are sending those hours that you are working on the right things.  It’s so easy to go wrong there and to be super-efficient at doing something which a year later turns out to have been useless.  Who cares if you’ve done it efficiently or not?  I wrote a long blog post about this at some point, if anyone’s interested my blog is called [21:12].  But the number one thing is first optimizing the year level.  What are the most important things to spend time on and then start tweaking the way you do things so that you spend your time effectively on those things.  But remember to keep the priorities right.  That may be the second thing would be to take good care of yourself. I think it’s very tempting to try things like polyphasic sleep which may or may not work but it seems worth it to me individually or just sleep or keep socializing puts more stress in your life in favor of getting more done.  I’m the last person who will deny that spending more time on work usually results in getting more work done.  But I think burnout is real and that often it’s very hard to appreciate beforehand how important work is. But it’s always important to take care of yourself.  I think maybe maintaining a low stress life and making sure your health doesn’t suffer from things you’re doing either recurring things amongst people who regret how they behaved in their start of days.  Having seen this again and again, I’ve sort of experienced this myself multiple times, I think this is really important is to stay productive.  Make sure you keep the machinery working in good shape because you’re the most important thing.  And maybe going down to one further level beyond that.  Let’s say that if we’re going to talk about a specific hack something that you actually do to become more productive in day to day life, there is no question for me that the most awesome hack in life is exercise, physical exercise; it’s magic. It makes your moods better.  It makes you happy and improves your sleep.  It’s hard to imaging something else that has so many benefits wrapped up in a single activity.  It’s amazing how even knowing all of these things and speaking like a total exercise week, I’ve still kind of not really want to go exercise every time; I have to convince myself but it’s awesome. Every single time I do it, I feel awesome afterwards and it always seems like it was worth it.  Keep doing exercise.  I guess that would be my three

Ari:                Those are really good and diverse things to make you want to practice so thank you for sharing those. That’s sort of the end of the podcast.  Can you tell everybody the URL for quantified mind?

Yoni:             Yeah, it’s quantified-mind.com.  Don’t forget the dash.  Don’t hesitate to send me any thoughts, ideas, and suggestions.  I’m very likely to not implement every single thing that people suggest but I’m also am really happy to hear what it is that people think and what it is that people find useful or not.  I’m always happy to explain my choices and try to help whenever I can; try to make it useful.  If it’s not useful, tell me why.

Ari:                Wonderful.  Yoni thank you so much and I really encourage everybody to check out quantified minds when they get a chance.