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

5 Advanced Video Conferencing Tips

When people hear you’re a ‘remote worker’ – they automatically assume you’re working in some elevator-music-filled coffee shop or sitting around the house in your pajamas taking conference calls. They also, unfortunately, think you’re less professional (which obviously isn’t true). But if we want to truly make remote work mainstream – we need to change these perceptions and up our ‘remote work’ game. We need to start with how they ‘see’ you. In a remote worker world – that is via video conferencing. Here are 5 ‘advanced’ tips on how to improve your video conferencing professionalism.

Note – I’m skipping the ‘basic’ video conferencing stuff. Yes – have enough bandwidth to do great HD video. Yes – audio quality matters. Yes – use Zoom or some other provider. No – don’t use your phone as the endpoint. No – don’t have your cats jumping on your lap. There are plenty of blogs out there with basic tips – this blog is for the advanced class.

Advanced Tip 1: Camera orientation

First – it’s important to discuss the end state of what you’re trying to accomplish – a video conference that feels super professional and feels as close to an ‘in-person’ meeting as you can. To do this – the #1 consideration is the orientation of the camera.

I do video calls with 50-300 remote workers a week – and I can tell you that it’s in the single digits on how many of them get the orientation right.

The key to a correct orientation is the camera angle is parallel to your eyes. When the camera is ‘straight on’ – you look like you would if you were meeting in-person. Angles are everything here – and if you’re off by even a little bit – you lose the feeling of in-person.

Take a look at the images below – and you can see the huge difference between the right angle (first image) and wrong angles (all others)…

The right angle
Wrong angles

Advanced Tip 2: Laptop camera

Note the middle ‘wrong’ image above – this is a typical ‘laptop’ camera angle. What often occurs (since the camera on the top of the angled screen) – is that you get the ‘up the nose’ angle. You lose professionalism – and it doesn’t matter who you are – nobody looks good from this angle.

To use your laptop effectively for video conferencing – you have to eliminate the angle of your laptop screen and have it positioned at 90% instead. But for the camera to then not point at your neck – you need to raise it by putting 5-6 books under it. This puts the camera at eye level and brings your orientation back to the right position.

The only problem now is that you’re actually too close to the camera – and you look huge on camera to the other side. So to solve that – you’ll want to move your chair about 2 feet away from the desk or table you put your laptop on. This will feel a bit weird at first – but it’s the right distance away for the correct amount of torso to be seen in the video and for you to look closer to the ‘correct’ image above.

Advanced Tip 3: Background

Another big mistake that I see remote workers make is not paying attention to what’s behind you in the video conference. It’s hard to take you seriously when I see your Luke Skywalker bedsheets in the background.

The ideal background is a blank or wallpapered wall (like you see in my image above) or a professional area such as a neat bookshelf or lamp. You should basically ask yourself – if I were closing a $1M deal – would the person believe I’m in a corporate office? If yes – you’ve got a good background.

There are also apps that have built-in background blur or green screen. I find those largely distracting and don’t often work well (particularly around the edges of people). I wouldn’t recommend using that option to hide your background.

One trick that I’ve used in the past is to ‘make’ a professional background using a photography setup. You can pick up a stand kit on Amazon for under $40 and a variety of different backdrops for only $10-$15. So for ~$50 – you can have a truly professional background – that’s super easy to put up and down – and you’ll fool everyone that you’re not in an office. So if you’re stuck with your Luke sheets and have no other options – get this setup.

Advanced Tip 4: Noise-canceling

There is nothing more annoying than tons of background noise from a participant in a video call. I’ve heard it all – from the noises of being outside to dogs barking to children crying to the flushing of toilets (this happens too often actually). I know there is a mute button – definitely use it – but also do us all a favor by getting a noise-canceling microphone.

Noise-canceling microphones are different than noise-canceling headphones. Noise-canceling headphones are to block out external noise for you (the listener). These are also great for video conferencing (such as my favorite – the Jabra Evolv 75e) – but they don’t do anything for the microphone (for us on the other side of your line).

Noise-canceling microphones, on the other hand, actively cancel out noise for the receiving side. There are many hardware mics that do this – and I highly recommend them. But the latest innovation is software microphone noise canceling. I’ve been super impressed with the Krisp.ai software guys. For $3/m – they have an amazing product that all remote workers should use to eliminate background noise. One of my favorite products of all time.

Try Krisp

Advanced Tip 5: HD Option in Settings

I’m not sure how I discovered this option – nor why it’s not ‘on’ by default – but there is a setting in Zoom (and other video providers) to turn HD on. I’m assuming they want to either conserve your bandwidth or reduce their compute requirements – but who in their right mind wants to do SD video? Have you tried going back and watching a non-HD TV? Can’t do it.

The setting in Zoom is under Preferences -> Settings -> Video -> Enable HD. Turn it on…

Okay – enough tips for now – but I’m excited for the day that everyone follows all 5 of these. And if you have more – please let me know and happy to pass them on…