How 10 marbles became my key remote productivity tool

10 marbles? Huh?

Let me explain.

Like many of you – I’m now sitting at home (attempting to work) next to my 2 ‘remote school’ kids, my wife with her honey-do-list and every other distraction known to man.

And also like many of you – my workload hasn’t changed. If anything – it’s gone up due to the overall economic chaos.

Importance of Deep Work

In Jan’16 – a professor from Georgetown University named Cal Newport wrote a great book called Deep Work. In this book – he tells a story about an aspiring author that spent $4k to take a same day flight to/from the US-Tokyo to be completely removed from distraction and finish writing a book. Wow – sounds awesome right now.

The overall lesson of Newport’s book is to solve any cognitively difficult problem – you have to spend long stretches of uninterrupted time thinking about the problem. He outlined a great new ‘law of productivity’:

Law of Productivity = Time Spent x Intensity of Work

(Where work is defined as ‘uninterrupted work’ at full concentration)

And since a flight to/from Tokyo isn’t an option for most of us – I needed another way to keep focused – while making it fun.

Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro technique was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the ‘80s. The technique basically uses a 25 min timer to ‘deep work’ then take short breaks. Each interval is known as a pomodoro, from the Italian word for ‘tomato‘, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that Cirillo used as a university student.

This technique is great – but I found that it needed a bit of updating. It needed some gamification/competition and a larger focus on goals. Also – no disrespect – but nobody really wants a tomato timer on their desk.

Marble Method

The Marble Method is my spin on the Pomodoro technique and involves 10 marbles, 2 containers, and a countdown timer.

The way that it works is super simple.

First, you set the countdown timer to 30 minutes and start working.

During these 30 mins – you do only 1 task.

Let me repeat – only ONE TASK.

You SHUTDOWN email, IM, notification, social media, etc. You move your phone just out of reach. You don’t get up. You don’t go to the bathroom. You don’t go get a drink of water. You don’t do anything that isn’t that 1 task you’ve set to do for the 30 mins. Your only job is to get from 30 mins to 0 mins without losing focus or being disturbed. 1 task only – period.

And believe it or not – I also recommend you don’t even use the internet during these 30 mins. You want to be doing content creation – not research.

You also have the timer clearly visible for anyone passing by so they know not to disturb you (or you just point to it if they forget). They can see the countdown – and know you’ll be taking the short break after – so they’ll wait.

Simple right? Wrong…

It’s crazy hard to stay cognitively focused for the entire 30 mins. When your body comes upon a difficult moment in your task – it looks for an easy escape. It’s super tempting to glance at your inbox, glance at the stock market, or worse yet – pick up your phone (which the average American does 96 times a day).

But the countdown timer helps to visually see where you’re at and motivate you to keep going.

And when you complete that 30 minutes (congrats!) – you celebrate by moving 1 marble from one container to the other. Then take a break, check your phone, grab some water or do whatever. Then figure out when you want to schedule your next marble attempt.

And despite our human intelligence – there is still an amazing Pavlov’s dog response when you achieve a marble. The marbles really motivate you – much like points in a game. You’ll find that you may even get a bit mad if you find that you broke concentration and missed the marble. Just a bit of gamification to make concentration more interesting.

It’s funny now – if I’m a few minutes away from getting a marble – the house literally has to be burning down for me not to finish (even then – I’d probably make a judgment call on the amount of smoke vs time left). My wife and kids now know they better be bleeding if they want to disturb me.

Manager vs Maker Schedule

Now – some of you are saying ‘sure – this works if you’re an individual contributor – but not for managers’.

Not true.

I’m currently the CEO for 14 companies – and I can tell you with certainty – that deep work is critical to guide teams or companies in the right direction. The ‘manager schedule’ isn’t just a series of meetings and endless emails. Your company needs you to produce deep insights on where to take your teams, strategy, changes, etc – not shallow work. Make time for marbles.

I use Workflowy or a simple Word doc for a lot of my marble attempts – and think deeply about specific topics for that entire 30 mins. Perhaps it’s how to make my Customer Success team better, or the next generation of the product roadmap, or budgets, staffing, etc.

When you start this method – you’ll start thinking about your calendar differently. Rather than stare at the meetings – you’ll start noticing the gaps between. You’ll start calculating how many marble attempts you have today and what tasks you want to do in those attempts.

For my ‘manager schedule’ – which unfortunately does have a lot of meetings – I find that a good day is 5-6 marbles and a poor day is 2 marbles.

I still hope to achieve all 10 marbles at work someday – but honestly – I’ve never been able to do it during weekdays (I’ve only reached 10 on weekends – perhaps not healthy work/life balance – I know).

For most of the individual contributors or ‘makers schedules’ – I’ve seen that 10 marbles is a great day and 5 marbles is a poor day. Obviously depends on the person and the role – but I’ve found that team members feel more ‘accomplished’ after a day of achieving 10 vs 5.

Gamification within your team or family

The beauty of the Marble Method is that you can make it a competition – both at home and at work.

I’ve given several of my team members ‘kits’ (which make great gifts, btw) and we now have various team members competing against each other and various teams competing against other teams. I couldn’t be more excited about folks competing on who can be most productive. Judo anyone? :)…

And most surprisingly – my kids have taken to the Marble Method. I find that 30 minutes is just the right amount of time for them to maintain concentration (they’re 11 and 9) on a task. If they can learn the theory of ‘deep work’ at this age – I feel like we’re winning…

Marble Method ‘Kit’

Obviously – you don’t really need to purchase any of this stuff below to do the Marble Method (and I don’t get any commission from Amazon, unfortunately). But for anyone interested – here are the links to what I use:

Marbles – $14: LINK
Timer – $20: LINK
Wood Tray – $50: LINK

I’ve also seen folks use coins instead of marbles, phone timer instead of a standalone timer, cups instead of a tray, etc. Anything that can create the same ‘marble accomplishment’ effect is 100% fine.

Conclusion

In this crazy time – where many of us are now working from home with distractions everywhere – finding little methods to maintain your concentration can go a long way.

Hope this little Marble Method can help you and your family…

Other pieces from ‘How to’ remote work content series

March 17, 2020January 18, 2021

Why managers hate remote work

It’s true – most managers hate remote work.

Yes, they trust their employees.

Yes, they want a culture of flexibility & openness.

Yes, they believe that results matter more than hours logged.

But no – they still hate remote work.

Why?

It’s not that managers don’t like the theory of remote work.

Who doesn’t want to believe that everyone is more productive in their pajamas, banging away at home in an asynchronous manner, only being interrupted from their deep work by their Amazon delivery person?

It’s just that it’s not a world most managers live in today.

Most managers are not trying to solve the problem – ‘how I can get John to work more efficiently’.

They’re trying to solve the problem – ‘how I can get John, Kevin, and Sara to all collaborate together to immediately solve this urgent customer issue’.

Remote work makes this more difficult.

Particularly if the company isn’t a remote-first culture and has always relied on ‘in-person collaboration’. Most Fortune 500 companies are this way today – and many have recently spent MILLIONS to redesign their offices to the ‘open office’ concept to promote more impromptu collaboration.

So what should these managers that were forced to quickly go remote work do?

One easy solution is for managers to set up a virtual office like Sococo.

A virtual office is basically a pseudomorphic depiction of their physical office. It looks just like their physical office – but it’s online instead. Simple as that – no more, no less.

The manager can set up the virtual floor to have individual offices, cubes, meeting rooms, kitchen areas – or whatever else they want to recreate in the space.

The most important part for managers, however, is that their entire team is there and available.

When each team member starts work in the morning – they are automatically placed into their office. The manager can ‘see’ her team, go have impromptu chats, see the various team members collaborating, call a meeting with everyone, etc, etc.

Just like a physical office – simply online instead.

Sometimes – just simplifying and getting the team back to par is a decent first step…

If you have any questions – please feel free to contact me at @andytryba.

November 22, 2019January 18, 2021

Book Notes: What you do is who you are (Horowitz)

I have to admit that I wasn’t always a big ‘culture’ guy. The word always sounded like a fluffy HR term that didn’t really mean much. Now with a bit more grey hair and a few thousand people spread across the globe – I realize that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Particularly in the remote team environment – developing culture is much much harder. You have all the variables that work against you – not seeing each other very often, language barriers, various countries, various cultural norms, different holidays, various religions, etc etc etc. If you’re not ABSOLUTELY intentional in defining your company culture – your outcome is literally a random number generator.

This book by Ben Horowitz hit home for me. The book is written from a perspective of a CEO/Founder (unlike other books in this category written by HR). I could respect it – and I could hear his pains along the way as he learned what really mattered.

One line I loved was ‘Culture is the decisions your people make when you’re not there’. CEOs/Founders forget that, at scale, most of the decisions made in your company are without you there. And how you ensure those decisions are aligned is where culture comes in.

My 3 takeaways from this book

Be intentional about defining your culture – but ensure you also consider how it can be weaponized (Uber example)
The definition of culture is really ‘what does it take to succeed in your company’ – and don’t ask execs or managers to define it
Your culture needs to be who you really are – don’t try to make some pretty descriptions of what you think a company should be. It’s all about what you wakeup and do everyday – that’s your culture and what you’re company culture will be.

Ben’s Checklist

Cultural design – aligns w both personality and strategy. Be sure to think how it can be weaponized.
Day 1 orientation – people learn more about what it takes to succeed in org that day than any other.
Shocking rules – so surprising that people ask why it’s here – will reinforce key cultural elements
Outside leadership – sometimes the culture you need is best brought in from an outside pro with a culture you want
Object lesson – public display of importance
Make ethics explicit – don’t leave unsaid
Cultural to make deep meaning – what do they really mean
Walk the talk – refrain from choosing what you don’t practice yourself
Make decisions that emphasize priorities

Here are some super raw notes

Culture is the decisions your people make when you’re not there
Saying in the military – If you see something below standard and you don’t say anything – then you set a new standard
Culture changes over time as market and company changes
Andy Grove – You don’t take the ball and run w it – you deflate it, put it in your pocket, grab another ball and run into the end zone, then inflate the other ball and score 12 points. (Innovative thinking outside the box)
Innovative ideas fail more often to succeed. And they are controversial and hard to gain momentum. So cultures typically kill those ideas as ‘dumb’ – particularly in large companies with many layers to kill it.
Virtues are what you do, values are what you believe
Who are we? ‘Who you are’ is not what you list on the wall – it’s what you do.
Make ethics explicit
Michael Dell famously stated (when Apple was down to 3% MSS) – that he would shut it down and give money back to shareholders. (Before Jobs came back). Back then – every PC maker was horizontal and the belief was that innovation on supply chain was the future (like Dell)
Amazon – frugal culture ‘do more with less’ (door desks, etc). Also written culture – not PPT (only written docs for meetings)
Facebook – Move fast and break things (but replaced w Move fast w stable infrastructure)
Yahoo – Work hours must be in office (no working from home).
Uber:
- TK actually designed Uber’s culture carefully – and it worked exactly as designed – but had design flaws
- Values: Celebrate cities, Meritocracy and toe stepping, Principled confrontation, Winning – champions mindset, Let builders build, Make big bold bets, Always be hustling, Customer obsession, Make magic, Be an owner not a renter, Be yourself, Optimistic leadership, Best idea wins
- Elevated 1 mindset above all – competitiveness. Do whatever it takes to win.
- No evidence that Travis ordered all the unethical actions – but the culture to win at all costs took over.
- Culture, like code, can have bugs
- And if ethics are the bugs – then many bad things happen

Samurai culture
- I will never fall behind others in the way of the warrior, always ready to serve my lord, honor my parents, serve compassionately in the benefit of others
- Extent of ones courage (or cowardice) cannot be measured in ordinary times – all is revealed when something happens
- Awareness of mortality was a big driver – and die at any moment. Ready for death and accept worst outcome. Enables you to be fully live.
- 8 virtues: justice, courage, honor, loyalty, benevolence, politeness, self control, voracity/sincerity
  - Honor: immortal part of themselves. Individual name matters throughout time
  - Politeness: Most profound way to express love and respect for others (still works this way in Japan)
- ‘Samurai word is harder than steel’
Bill Campbell – you’re doing it for your team, don’t let them down
How to know if your culture is working – ask yourself what it takes for the employees to succeed and get ahead. Don’t ask exec team or managers – you’ll get back what you want to hear.
Design the culture. And be you
Disagree w Drucker quote – strategy and culture work together
Growth question in interview – what’s one thing you could have done better in your current job?
Wartime vs Peacetime CEOs – typically people that like to work for one type doesn’t like working for the other
Trust – tell the truth even if people don’t want to hear it (state facts clearly, what was cause, what is meaning and end result of action)
Kimchi problems – the more you bury them the hotter they get
Be okay with bad news – embrace it publicly and encourage it to be aired
People don’t leave companies – they leave managers. Take genuine interest.

In a remote world – we have to work that much harder to develop a unified company culture. Don’t neglect defining it – and don’t neglect reinforcing it on a daily basis…

If anyone has additional notes from the book or ideas on remote company culture in general – love to hear them! You can reach me on Twitter – @andytryba