Ari Meisel is a productivity optimization expert who coaches clients on optimizing, automating and outsourcing every task possible. Ari’s Achievement Architecture coaching program is an optimization framework design that helps individuals and teams improve their effectiveness and reduce the amount of time they spend on tasks. Ari’s personal website The Art of Less Doing has become a go-to resource for those seeking to improve productivity either in business, life, and/or health. Ari also has courses on wellness and productivity available from Udemy.
1) There is a lot of talk about what it might take to cross the proverbial chasm with regards to making bio-hacking more commercially viable. In your opinion, what do you think is important to get right regarding bringing the benefits of self-tracking to a wider audience? What’s currently missing?
Nowadays you can track everything… from how many emails you have sent, to how many calories you have burned… or even how many calories you have eaten if you have the right sensor. It’s so easy to do this stuff without even thinking about it now, which is great… which is the first step. The second part of it though is making this data actionable, and as far as I’m concerned there are very, very few products that provide the lay person with any sort of usable data. It is one thing to see that you’re losing this many calories today, and this many yesterday, and so on and so forth, but what does the average person do with that? Unfortunately, there are not a lot of ways that people can correlate this data and make it actionable. There is a really great website called Tictrac where you can do drag and drop corollaries; Tictrac is a step in the right direction.
2) You’ve made mention that you have some particular effective shortcuts for improving running speed? This is my gratuitous, self-serving question: I’m a Clydesdale runner who has been stuck at 8:45 minute miles for a few years now despite various training regimens. What do you suggest for someone like me that might help me move the needle?
The obvious ones are H.I.I.T. (High Intensity Interval Training) programs, workouts that involve high intensity drills with short periods of rest… there are a lot of different interval workout types that help you increase speed and efficacy from sprinting to plyometrics. I think that fartlek training is really good too, and not only because it has an awesome name. What I have actually found to be extremely effective as far as speed, and I know it sounds like stupidly obvious, but I recommend increasing leg strength. Once I started doing really heavy squats and box jumps my speed went from a mile PR of 6:17 to running one mile in 5:45. In my opinion, you simply add more horsepower when running isn’t the only thing you do to get better at running. Adding plyometric and explosive movement training makes your runs feel like every time your foot hits the ground you’re on a rubber band and ready to go again once you hit that next stride.
3) A bit outside the realm of health and wellness specifically, but knowing your expertise encompasses systematic lifestyle improvements and predicated on the assumption that generally people want to fix everything at the same time — and quickly — when a coaching client comes to you and wants to improve wellness and productivity at the same time, where do you usually have them start?
What’s the difference, really? The truth is productivity and wellness go hand in hand. It’s so funny because I invariably have somebody come to me for coaching on one of these and we always work on both. Basically, I can make you as technologically efficient from a productivity standpoint as you can possibly be, but if you’re not sleeping well enough and/or not eating right, there is going to be a limit to how much you can produce, or how happy you are going to be with your results. For instance, some come to me and say they want to be a speed reader, which most people can certainly do, but at the same time if you can increase mental focus, retention, and memory by reducing stress and improving well-being you’re going to be a faster reader because part of being a faster reader is not having to reread things.
My method is to tackle the biggest problems first. This methodology quickly addresses the low hanging fruit. So I start with “What are your biggest productivity challenges? Give me the three top things that frustrate you.” Always, always the answers I get back are inevitably two productivity things and one wellness thing or two wellness things and one productivity thing. So they’ll say something like, “I’m not sleeping great and I have to finish X number of things by the end of the day.” It’s always that mix. So if you ask somebody “what is stopping you from being the best you can be?” the answer usually covers productivity and well-being. I’m also a big believer in moving the needle at the onset of our engagement, and quickly, because progress begets progress. The worst that somebody can do is to stagnate and as long as they are doing something, even if it’s a tiny thing, that’s progress.
4) The buzz last year regarding bio-hacking was enabling, through technology, users to make better correlations by aggregating different tracking devices. There are a few options such as Open Sen.se in an attempt to increase the benefit of tracking, but so far I’m unaware of any solutions that are super user-friendly. What strategies and/or tech do you use to increase the value and utility of tracking multiple modalities?
I have already mentioned Tictrac. I find that if you ask the right questions, a lot of the time people can give you the answers about the real issue. But I say that at least with half of my clients, a lot of it involves putting those trackers in place and then letting me read the values. So whether it’s RescueTime to see how often they are checking their email; or Fitbit to track activity I won’t even ask them to look at their own data at first. In my experience I find it is more helpful if I help my client first amass data and start by making recommendations based on their data as a first step in our relationship. I can help them better understand their data after they’re comfortable with it. People usually come to me because they are overwhelmed. They don’t have the time to do the things they want to do or they’re overwhelmed because they are stressed. These are compounding issues so I don’t want to introduce a complex solution just yet. I can introduce a sophisticated set of tools but take on the heavy lifting of interpretation until we make some progress. Not to beat a dead horse but fatigue is not an isolated issue. Are you not sleeping because you’re working too late, because you didn’t get enough done for the day and you are stressed, or are you tired because you’re eating too late and you’re eating really badly… or are you sleeping poorly because you don’t have the right environment in your bedroom? You need data to make a diagnosis and cause will rarely be just one thing.
5) One of the many valuable qualities of the content you curate is your intimate knowledge of the latest technologies that enable shortcuts and optimization. What’s out there, either now or on the horizon, that really excites you regarding wellness innovation?
I dream all day about finding new and interesting ways to use two particular services: one is IFTTT.com and the other one is Zapier. Zapier has identical functionality to IFTTT.com but it’s much more business focused. IFTTT.com has like 60 different services, everything from Twitter to Facebook, Gmail and stuff like that and services that 90% of the computing-using world uses. Zapier has those things as well but it also has things like Salesforce, MailChimp and PayPal and a lot more business focus things. So IFTTT.com will do so much regarding automation but Zapier really lets you drill down and get some unbelievably detailed things done. Through these websites I’m always trying to think of ways I can automate things to make them more efficient.
These kinds of things really get me really jazzed up. The great thing about automating some of these processes is it actually allows you to track things a lot better as well, because you know when the requests were made; you know how long it took to get them done and you can correlate those things a little bit too if you’re tracking your own productivity. It’s a lot easier to go back and see how and when things have happened and how often you did them through these services. They also let you compile things in effective ways. For instance, you can have Zapier set up that every time you make a sale on PayPal the sale is added to a Google spreadsheet, so right there you can make a data set that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. There’s a whole lot of creative ways that you can use this functionality to make your life easier.
