Don't let your 'crop' die

To get good at something, you need to truly prioritize it. Here are simple tactics that work — even if your life seems maxed out.

Warmup

When you’re alone in a room for two years cranking out a 90,000-word book, you never actually know which of those words will resonate with anyone else.

The fun part comes later when strangers begin to tell you.

I received a Facebook note recently from a reader of NOT TOO LATE — Amanda (Mandy) Catoe. She’d inscribed Don’t Let Your Crop Die on her Road ID, which cyclists use to communicate emergency contact information. That Road ID was now attached to her Apple Watch. (Picture in the Post section below w/ permission.)

She’d been listening to NOT TOO LATE while riding. These were five words that stuck with her.

If you haven’t dug into the book yet, here’s what these words mean.

Summary

• On average, we’ve got roughly 4,000 weeks — or 80 years — on this planet.

• When you truly hone in on the numbers you realize “it’s really not that long a stay.” (I’ll send a free NOT TOO LATE patch to the first person who emails me or posts in the comments here what Jimmy Buffett song that lyric comes from.)

• In this short stint, we hope to potentially love, work, raise a family, have pets, create a home, travel, exercise, volunteer, engage in hobbies that fulfill us … and those are just the things we want to do.

• While the challenge of how to parcel out our precious and constantly dwindling minutes can vex humans at any age, it can be particularly acute in midlife. 

• What is truly indispensable to our happiness — and how do we organize our weeks to prioritize it?

It took a text message and a farmer on his tractor for me to crack the code — and for Mandy to get her new Road ID.

Let’s get it done.

Post

After finishing my first Spartan obstacle course race at Citi Field in 2018, there were two thoughts burning in my mind (other than how much every body part hurt).

1. When can I race again?

2. How can I do better?

Number one was easy. I found a couple of races coming up nearby. That gave me a goal post.

Number two was a lot harder. I’d wake up with the best of intentions to train and learn more — run an extra thirty-minutes or squeeze in another class at the local obstacle course racing gym.

But then I’d get derailed.

A health insurance claim was denied. The car needed inspecting. We’d committed to a dinner party. The laundry pile was too high. My social media feeds needed checking. Taxes were due. The dog vomited on the carpet after eating a stick on our walk.

You get the idea. You feel this in your own way, I’m sure.

I was gerbil-wheeling it around the day but somehow couldn’t find space to embrace something I instinctively believed would make my life fuller, healthier and better.

And then I saw the man on the tractor.

The text and the farmer

A few weeks after that first race, I was home visiting my folks on North Carolina’s coast.

I’d spent most of my childhood vacationing in this area, where the site of farmers on their tractors, working the land to raise corn, cotton and tobacco was like visual white noise.

A text popped up from work while I was driving. I felt the urge to answer it, so pulled over.

While I awaited my colleague’s response, I watched the farmer. At first I only kind of saw him. And then my brain brought him into sharper focus:

Two hands on the wheel. The hum of the engine. The number of rows left to finish. The methodical nature of his pursuit.

He wasn’t on his cellphone. Not on text. Not scrolling through Instagram. Not on email.

And with a clarity that should have been immediately obvious, I thought:

If he doesn’t get on that tractor, his crop dies.

3 tactics to get time back

That night, I wrote down in a notebook the words Mandy Catoe now has on her Road ID:

First, I defined my crop. It was: family, health, work — and obstacle course race training.

The first two would forever be non-negotiable. The last two were subject to change based on my life circumstances. This was the crop I wanted to grow right now.

I started taking a very hard look at how my hours in a day got spent. And I realized if someone had been taking video of me, I’d have been appalled at the waste.

In NOT TOO LATE, I share in depth what I did to fix it. But here are three tools to get started:

Time suck management

Quickly, I zeroed in on just how much time got sucked away in 5, 10, 15 minutes slices. Checking email randomly; ordering something on Amazon; a quick dopamine hit of an Instagram scroll; chatting w/ a colleague on Slack or in the hallway about non-urgent matters.

We talked two weeks ago about how to use these time slices to offset “sitting and screens.”

I also found that bucketing these activities for certain hours and days made a huge difference because it allowed me to amass concentrated chunks of time to focus on my crop.

I saved all bills and paperwork and ordering on Amazon until Sundays.

Systems and routines became important:

• Where I put my keys.

• Where I kept a spare pair of reading glasses.

• Where I put on my earrings (you’ll need to read the book to see how that one saved me about 416 minutes annually of whatever life I have left).

• Who fed and walked the dog in the morning and evening.

The discipline and reorganization of effort reshaped my days in small but important ways so I could use the hours better.

Saying no

This one might get parked in the lot of “self-evident” but it was hard for me.

I had to learn to say no to other people, and to myself.

Saying no to others meant declining a lot of wine-filled social invitations from “kind of friends who aren’t close friends.”

I stopped saying yes to small random asks for my time.

I temporarily stepped away from volunteer work and boards.

I explained why honestly — no made up excuses. It felt weird in the moment. Like I was letting people down. But remarkably, they said more often than not: “We totally understand.”

Equally important, I said no to myself. To the hour of Netflix at night. To scrolling on social media in my time slices. To aimlessly checking the weather or playing a quick game on my iPhone.

I culled my Instagram followers, for the time being, to primarily be accounts that were related to learning about obstacle course racing. That way, it became a teaching tool and not a time suck tool.

Fewer, shorter meetings

If you don’t work somewhere where you have a lot of meetings, you’ll have your own version of this. Think of it as something where you probably only need a fraction of the time you’re currently spending to get the same results.

At the time, I ran a department of 150 people. After I added up how much time I spent in hour-long 1:1 meetings with people, I was shocked.

It was roughly 20-25 hours per week.

Overall, the meetings were effective. But often we spent 15 to 20 minutes just catching up on personal things. Sometimes we filled the space with unimportant matters simply because we’d booked the time.

I cut all these 1:1 meetings back to 25 minutes. I switched some to biweekly. And I told my direct reports to schedule ad hoc time with me as necessary.

This involved trust. But it worked.

With each of these moves — organizing time sucks, saying no, reducing wasted meeting minutes — my crop began to thrive. Some weeks, to be sure, everything blew up. But much of the time, it didn’t. And my racing improved.

Cooldown

• Longer read: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. This book will imprint upon you how short the time we have together really is — and why what we do in our allotted weeks should be so carefully selected.

• Longer read: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. There is one diagram in this book that truly drove home for me how putting my energy into lots of little things meant I wasn’t getting very far with any of them.

And a quick reminder that Spartan Race, the world’s largest obstacle course racing company, is offering a FREE RACE of any length in 2024 or 2025 to people who purchase a copy of my new book, NOT TOO LATE.

This offer is good even if you’ve already purchased the book. And if obstacle course racing isn’t your jam, give the code to someone who might like to give it a go!

(Click the button below to get your code; available while supplies last.)

Thanks for reading. Let me know how you prioritize your “crop.” And as always, find something you love. Dig in. Stick with it when things get hard.

Wendy