Scaling Yourself • Scott Hanselman • GOTO 2012

Main ideas / concepts / lessons

• Scaling yourself means increasing your ability to do meaningful work by managing:

  • attention
  • inputs
  • commitments

• More work isn’t the problem—doing the wrong work (or too much of it) is.

• “Law of scale” (as described in the talk)

  • When systems do nothing, throughput can increase and latency can be effectively zero.
  • Lesson: reducing unnecessary activity can dramatically improve “effective output.”

• Information overload is real

  • The amount of information people must absorb has exploded (few books → internet → huge volumes).
  • A major cost is interruptions and constant urgency demands, which create overwhelm and wasted time.

• “Phoniness” and chronic overwork

  • The talk describes a feeling of being a “phony” when people work late because they fear being caught not knowing everything.
  • Hope is not a strategy—waiting for “busy season to end” won’t fix underlying attention/productivity problems.

• Effectiveness vs. efficiency (core distinction)

  • Effectiveness = doing the right things
    • Choose the correct direction/goal.
  • Efficiency = doing things right
    • Execute economically and well.
  • Treat them as distinct; combining both is powerful.

• Triage your life’s “inbox”

  • Reframe everything as an inbox (email + life events/requests).
  • Use triage instead of trying to “handle everything”:
    • Most urgent + important → handle now
    • Neither urgent nor important → dump/drop
    • (Implied: other categories exist, but the emphasis is on not wasting time on the wrong ones.)

• Drop / delegate / defer

  • To scale yourself, you sometimes must stop doing things:
    • Drop it
    • Delegate it
    • Defer it
  • Dropping is described as especially powerful.

• Over-urgency is an addiction

  • Many tasks feel urgent but aren’t important (phones, drop-ins, Twitter, crises that aren’t high-value).
  • Urgency grabs attention but doesn’t necessarily deserve your time.

• Flow depends on reducing distractions and context switching

  • Emphasizes “flow” and avoiding frequent interruptions.
  • Uses systems metaphors:
    • Fault tolerance: dropping packets can be okay.
    • Flow control: attention needs flow control too.

• Saying “no”

  • Encouraged repeatedly to enable focus and sprinting.
  • Framed as harder for people who love to say yes—especially technical folks at conferences.

• Psychic weight: lingering mental load

  • Examples: “to watch later” DVR piles, unmanaged commitments.
  • Keep only what truly matters; otherwise it becomes constant background pressure.

• Busy is a form of laziness

  • Being “busy” without thinking about what you should do isn’t the same as doing meaningful work.
  • Creativity/making something is contrasted with “hanging out.”

• Use signal/noise sorting (homework)

  • Treat life streams as inputs.
  • Identify what provides value (signal) vs. what doesn’t (noise).

• Email practices (major actionable guidance)

  • Sort inbox by relationship/priority
    • Boss vs. CC’d people, and sometimes external community contacts vs. internal.
  • The “one email rule”
    • Don’t let CC expand your obligations.
    • If your boss CC’s you, you typically shouldn’t treat it as a direct instruction.
  • Act on what you’re mailed directly; CC is treated as less actionable.
  • Don’t check email in the morning
    • The talk claims it “time-travels” your day (wakes up → email → time shifts forward).
  • Answering email increases more email
    • Response behavior trains others.
  • Phone/urgency addiction tactics
    • Move the phone away at night.
    • Use trunk placement while driving.
    • Possibly wait until noon before checking email.

• Conserve keystrokes / knowledge dissemination

  • Long email replies waste the sender’s finite time and effort (“keystrokes go to die in email”).
  • Prefer:
    • blog posts, wiki entries, product docs, knowledge base articles, FAQs
  • Rule of thumb:
    • Emails to others should be 3–4 sentences max; longer content belongs elsewhere.

• Pomodoro / personal sprinting

  • Use a timer-based sprint:
    • Focus on one thing for ~25 minutes
    • No multitasking during the sprint
  • Track interruptions:
    • If you notice you’re interrupted internally, mark it with ticks.
    • Reduce interruptions over time by reflecting on counts/patterns.
  • Practical metric:
    • Productivity = number of Pomodoros completed

• Turn off distractions / notifications

  • Turn off toast/popups, notifications, and disruptive background processes.
  • Important events will repeat/arrive even if you don’t constantly refresh.

• Multitasking is essentially not real

  • Optimal number of threads in systems is one; for humans it becomes task switching.
  • Task switching creates context switch time (example: a phone call costs 10–15 minutes of reorientation).
  • “Multitasking” examples are mostly task-compatible situations:
    • walking/working out
    • commuting + reading/podcasts
    • exercising while listening to podcasts
    • watching TV only while working out (rule-based “carrot and stick”)
    • using waiting time efficiently (e.g., train commutes)

• Guilt systems and mental clutter

  • A “guilt pile” for unread books becomes mental clutter.
  • Remove things that don’t serve current goals (especially money/business goals, but also broader life goals).

• Recenter on life priorities

  • Example: after having kids, career decisions were evaluated by whether they help him be home more.
  • Measure decisions by life goals, not abstract career momentum.

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Methodology / instructions (detailed bullet list)

A) Effectiveness vs. efficiency (apply)

• Define effectiveness as:
  • Pick a goal (choose direction)
  • Ask: “Am I doing the right thing?”
• Define efficiency as:
  • Execute economically (process)
  • Ask: “Am I doing it the right way?”
• Use both together:
  • Choose the right direction (effectiveness), then move fast within it (efficiency).

B) Triage your inbox (“inbox of your life”)

• Treat incoming tasks/requests/events as inbox items.
• Use triage categories:
  • Urgent + important → act immediately
  • Not urgent + not important → dump it
  • (Implied: “important but not urgent” is planning/scheduling; “urgent but not important” is handled carefully, not automatically.)

C) Drop / delegate / defer (the “scaling” lever)

• For each non-critical commitment:
  • Drop it (stop doing it)
  • If someone else can own it: Delegate it
  • If timing matters but it’s not now: Defer it
• When deciding what to drop:
  • Use an Importance × Urgency mindset (quad-style reasoning).

D) Weekly planning + daily execution (rule used in the talk)

• Have a Monday vision of the week.
• Have a Friday reflection:
  • Ask: “Was this a successful week?”
  • Identify what to change for next week.
• Suggested daily planning pattern:
  • Choose a small number of target outcomes per day:
    • commonly 3 things per day (“rule of three”)
  • Pick daily “3” items based on the appropriate time horizon:
    • Days: small units (e.g., fix bug #3)
    • Weeks: medium units (e.g., release 1.2)
    • Years: large units (e.g., double business size)

E) Email rules (step-by-step behavior)

• Structure inbox
  • Separate/label sources (boss vs. CC’d people; external community vs. internal).
• CC handling rule
  • Do not treat CC as direct instruction.
  • Act on messages mailed directly; treat CC as informational unless explicitly assigned.
• Inbox behavior
  • Don’t check email immediately in the morning.
  • Avoid answering immediately if you’re reducing inbound volume (responses encourage more email).
• Train expectations
  • If you only respond late-night, you signal availability then.
  • Adjust response timing (e.g., wait until noon).
• Phone discipline
  • Put the phone away (trunk/across the room) to reduce urgent checking.

F) “Conserve keystrokes” (reduce long email)

• When you want to help with detailed explanation:
  • Don’t send a huge email.
  • Instead, write:
    • a blog post/wiki entry/documentation/knowledge base article
  • Then email the link briefly.
• Keep direct emails short:
  • 3–4 sentences maximum; move long-form content to durable shared sources.

G) Pomodoro sprint system (implementation)

• Set a timer for 25 minutes.
• During the sprint:
  • focus on one thing
  • no multitasking
• Track internal interruptions:
  • each time you notice you interrupted yourself, mark a tick
• After the sprint:
  • reflect on interruption count and what might reduce them next time.
• Use Pomodoro count as a metric:
  • “Four Pomodoro day” = productive day.

H) Reduce distraction to protect “flow”

• Turn off:
  • notifications, background processes, popups (including toast-style alerts)
• Keep attention stable:
  • avoid constant refreshing; important events will come again.

I) Replace multitasking with “compatible multitasking”

• Use combinations that don’t cause context switching, such as:
  • exercise + podcasts
  • commute + reading
  • waiting time + learning
• Build rules:
  • Example: only watch TV while exercising (no passive “stare time”).

J) Sort sources / signal vs. noise (homework)

• Audit each data stream:
  • email/news/social tools/doc subscriptions
• For each stream, identify:
  • signal (value) vs. noise (doesn’t support goals)
• Reduce to what you truly need; aggregate where possible.

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Speakers / sources featured

Speaker (main)

• Scott Hanselman

Other named individuals / references

• Rob Conery (co-host of Scott’s podcast “This Developer’s Life”)
• David Allen (Getting Things Done; referenced for “three kinds of work”)
• Stephen Covey (used for urgency/importance quadrants example)
• Brian (mentioned in the context of Scott exchanging questions/emails)
• Steve Balmer (used as an example of an email arriving in the same “peer” category)
• Jesus (joke about a Twitter/“footprints on the beach” scenario)
• Buddhism (humorous “conversion” reference after Twitter arguing)
• Kathy Shar (credited for a “guilt system” blog post)
• Frederick “Fred” (mentioned indirectly via a Skype toast interruption)
• Lady Gaga (joke about refreshing and whether she is “dead”)
• Fred (again, from the Skype toast)
• Brian (again—multiple examples)

Concepts/frameworks/tools referenced

• Law of scale (DevNull/throughput/latency analogy)
• Triage
• Urgency vs. importance quadrants
• Inbox management / CC vs. direct email handling
• Getting Things Done (GTD)
• Pomodoro Technique
• Signal vs. noise
• Flow / context switching
• Psychic weight
• DVR (recording TV)
• Mark as read / “Mark all as red” (email-management action)