This was originally published as an email to my newsletter on August 5, 2016. I updated it on December 17, 2016. It is still meant as a gift to my email subscribers, so it doesn't appear on the front page of my site and isn't meant to be indexed in search engines. Nevertheless, I would like you and my other subscribers to feel free to share it with whomever you wish. If someone shared it with you, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.
The Story
I want to share a deeply personal story with you that concludes with highly practical tools and strategies I used through this journey. Although my story is unique to me, I'm hoping you'll find some gems within it that can help you better take control of your own life in the way that I did mine.
Then and Now
In December of 2014, I was at the brink of mental and physical breakdown. My lungs felt like they never recovered from my last cold. My only physical exercise was walking to work, but I wasn't sleeping enough for my legs to recover even from that, and they were constantly sore. My floor was covered in coffee stains, partly because I had to drink so much coffee to keep up with my work, and partly because sleep loss was hurting my balance and making me more likely to spill things.
In a short time, I had put six or seven inches on my waist. My lifelong strategy for tying my shoes, to bend straightforward, no longer worked because I had to navigate around my belly. Out of all the things I could restrategize, this? Really? 😞
Emotionally, I was out of emotions. Had I been able to feel anything, it would have been anger, but I couldn't muster up the energy even for that.
With all this, it was the trip I made to the GI doc to investigate the cause of chronic gastrointestinal bleeding that made me realize just how far I'd plunged and made me realize that no matter what crisis I imagined coming if I didn't finish my work, if it was a choice between work and sleep, I had to start choosing sleep every time.
Fast forward to the summer of 2016. I'm leaner and fitter than I've been since my early 20s. My health isn't “perfect,” but my lungs work great, my digestion is rockin', and my muscles are recovering even from CrossFit. My only rule for sleep is I give my body whatever it wants and never wake to an alarm clock. I'm happier than I've been in four years, and recently I've been breaking out in dance when no one's looking.
–> December 2017. Still at it!
My 2-year hiatus away from blogging has come to an end. I started a podcast this spring that recently reached 100,000 downloads. I'm working with a team of students to design a human study testing the effects of a new meal replacement drink on the microbiome, metabolic function, and inflammation. I may soon be collaborating with another department to help a student finish her PhD with an impressive study on the intersection between the microbiome, nutrition, and mental health. And I have some exciting prospects in the pipeline that are now too nascent to even hint about, but exciting nevertheless.
–> December 2017. My podcast is now about to hit 250,000 downloads. I'm actually leaving academia, but I'm still doing what I can to support the students I started working with in the summer. Still not quite ready to announce the other projects, but getting close.
So what happened in between? Here I want to share with you a story of personal transformation that is less about me and more about how anyone can, with the right awareness, tools, and teamwork, arise to maximize their potential even when they feel hopelessly stuck. I didn't do it because I'm that good. I did it because I found the right tools and strategies and was able to take a “me” that was really sucking and make a “me” that was ready to begin becoming the best version of myself that I could.
Phase 1: Awareness
In grad school, I tried reading David Allen's Getting Things Done, but I never found the time to finish it. Although to the best of my memory Allen only recommended creating three email folders, the legacy of having read the first few chapters of his book for me was an over-organized inbox with dozens of folders. In retrospect, I think this is because it started by teaching me how to organize things. But I now realize that if you have a mess, the last thing you should do is organize it. Instead, you should get rid of it.
In January of 2015, I had a month off from teaching responsibilities, and it was clear that I had hit crisis, so what was I to do? Somehow, a light bulb went off in my head and I remembered that I had never read Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. I felt like I was working 400 hours a week, so if that book could help me bring it down even to 40 it would be a miracle.
It was easy for me to finish The 4-Hour Workweek. It began by teaching me to think hard about what my true dreams, goals, and priorities were. Once I had done that, I had to analyze what I was currently doing on the basis that I should probably stop doing at least 80% of it. I had planned to do an enormous amount of work revising my classes that month, but I was the one who had placed that workload on myself. So I just didn't do most of it.
Boom. I had time to read the book.
Going forward, I had to think hard about how I was teaching. Were there things that achieved large amounts of learning with small amounts of effort required from my students and me? They were keepers. Were there things that achieved marginal improvements in learning that required extraordinary efforts from my students and me? They were destined for the circular file (the trash can in the lower right corner of the screen). For anything in between, I had to think hard about whether the benefit justified the cost, with the cost measured in time, creative and mental energy, and the lost opportunity to do whatever else I could have done instead.
Phase 2: The 80/20 of Teaching
When I was at the University of Illinois, I taught vitamins and minerals to veterinary students as part of a team-taught class. We used an incredible tool called ExamSoft for exams. It automates everything that can be automated, and streamlines everything else. It creates incredible reports that help you identify good questions and bad questions on exams, students who are struggling, and exactly what students are struggling with.
When I came to Brooklyn College, I started out with paper exams that I graded by hand. We couldn't afford teaching assistants, so I was all on my own. Foolishly, I calibrated what I could put on exams based on my experience using ExamSoft, and I really had no idea how much the software was helping me until it was gone.
With ExamSoft, I could give 125 students three to four open-ended writing questions on an exam and it meant me spending an evening grading instead of minutes. Using paper and pencil, I could give 50 students the same task and I would spend three to four days doing nothing else but grading the answers.
In the spring semester of 2015 I carefully asked for the first time why I was giving the writing assignments. I got my first writing job at 16 years old writing for a local newspaper. By spring of 2015, I had been successful at writing about nutrition for lay people, blogging, and writing peer-reviewed scientific publications. Writing on exams didn't remotely resemble any of these tasks. “Sit here for 45 minutes, don't talk to anyone, don't go to the bathroom, don't look at your notes, and write from memory as quickly as you can” is a laughably useless writing skill that no one will ever use when they leave an academic program.
So I phased out writing on exams. One student said to me, “Just when I finally learned exactly what you were looking for in essay questions, you got rid of them!” This just reinforced my decision. “Learning what Professor Masterjohn wants” is also a totally useless skill. It's even more useless than the others because it doesn't even transfer out of my classroom to someone else's. Indeed, the “skill” required to answer my writing questions was to unlearn what other professors wanted and replace it with what I wanted. So, I wasn't just wasting my own time, mental energy, and creative energy. I was wasting the time, mental energy, and creative energy of my students.
The other overwhelming set of writing assignments was a series of three to four case reports where students would read the cases and answer four to six of my questions in essay format as homework. I do think this was valuable to help them study the material, but the writing wasn't valuable training for any real-life writing skill and the study opportunity wasn't irreplaceable. It also had all the same flaws of students having to learn what I was looking for in an answer.
I replaced this with a very different system that, in my opinion, provides more learning with far less time and energy from everyone. Students read the case report in their own time and are free to discuss it with their peers. They come into class and use remote clickers to answer objective multiple choice questions about the case report that cover a range of cognitive skills (yes, contrary to a prevalent but ridiculous myth, multiple choice questions really can assess a range of cognitive skills). Then they get into groups and discuss or debate the answers, and arrive at new answers through consensus. Then we analyze in real-time how the individual and group responses differed and we discuss the points where there was a lot of disagreement or confusion. The grades are generated immediately in class through the remote clicker system.
This system is just as helpful a way of studying the material as the written responses, but it also teaches debate, communication, deliberation, and collaboration. Students get their grades immediately, which is extremely valuable to them, and I have time and energy left to actually teach well (and research, and rest, and play, and live).
Fast forward to summer 2016, and I am conducting a study with a team of four students. Each student will probably write two or three paragraphs in the final paper. And they will learn a LOT more by writing those two to three paragraphs than they would have learned by writing dozens of essay questions on my exams because they will gain the depth of participating in the entire process behind the scenes that produces those paragraphs. So I cut out a lot of useless writing for a little bit of incredibly useful writing. In what universe is that a bad trade?
Phase 3: Automate the Automatable
I wanted ExamSoft from the beginning. I initiated the process of using ExamSoft in my classes in September of 2014. Unfortunately, this required a signature, and getting the signature required numerous administrators and lawyers to get involved, so it actually took me a year and a half to get the signature. Two years later, I will be using ExamSoft in my classes this fall for the first time.
But the crisis I had hit by January 2015 couldn't wait until September of 2016 to be solved. So I had to DIY it.
I converted all my exams to Scantrons. I consider Scantron archaic. And I think it sacrifices learning because it limits the types of questions you can ask. But you can do a lot with multiple choice questions (far more than many in academia think…). And the time I can save grading is time I can invest in making the lessons better, helping struggling students, or, what I really needed, sleep and self-care.
While I still had to put a lot of work into writing the exams, the Scantrons were graded with the press of a single button. The press of a second button scanned them all into individualized PDFs and sent them into an email address.
Enter my first part-time assistant.
Phase 4: Start Delegating!
I didn't have access to teaching assistants, so I had to DIY this too.
I had a family member who desperately needed money. I didn't have an abundance of money, but I needed time far more desperately than I needed money. So I paid my family member to take over once the PDF files shot into the email system. I had them automatically forwarded to a gmail account where each student had a Google Drive folder. She “handed back” everything to my students and tabulated the grades into an administrative spreadsheet. I handled the translation into final grades, but I managed to delegate everything in between.
Phase 5: Blogging and Consultations
I needed to start blogging again for two reasons: first, I loved it and missed it; second, I could use it to cover the cost of hiring my part-time assistant.
The only blog post I wrote in 2014 was about accepting my faculty position. In April of 2015, I wrote my first blog post with nutrition content since December of 2013.
Prior to May of 2015, I never advertised consultation services. People would email me and ask for consultations, so I would do it. But in the fall of 2014, I started missing appointments because I was trying to organize them by email. In May of 2015, I started using ScheduleOnce. It automates the entire process of booking even to the point of knowing when you are busy, controlling your total workload, booking the actual consultation, and setting up email and text reminders. It is completely hands off, leading to much better organization than anyone could manage on their own. At $20 a month, it pays for itself so easily that it's insane to schedule anything any other way.
It was a virtuous cycle: automation and delegation allowed me to write and consult; writing and consulting helped me pay for the automation and delegation. I was able to help more people and have time left over for sleep!
Phase 6: Traveling and Soul-Searching
One thing that became clear in this experience was that I had never stopped to take a break. Sure, I had thought about my goals and priorities. But I always did so while my mind was already cluttered with whatever I was working on at that moment.
By summer of 2015, the closest thing I had taken to a vacation in then-recent memory was the 2012 Low-Carb Cruise. But even on that I was there to give a presentation. I honestly have no idea when the last time was that I truly took off from work, but I suspect it had been longer than a decade.
One of the things I had to consider was this: who was I doing all this for? If it was to ensure a good annual review, or to impress my colleauges, or to prepare for tenure, I would have tried to launch a research program that summer. If it was to maximize my income, I would have expanded my business activities that summer. But if whatever I was trying to do was was my niche, my irreplaceable role in the world, the thing that I could best contribute to humanity, it deserved thought, care, and deliberation.
I could only design that new plan for myself with a clear mind if I first stopped everything I'd been doing. I needed to reset.
So I went to Europe for just over a month. I didn't bring my laptop. I didn't once check my email on my phone. I made a deal with myself that I would only check my email at an internet cafe. I did that once at the mid-point in my trip.
Thanks to some downright amazing people that became good friends along the way, I didn't pay a single dime for accommodations. I stayed with people I met at conferences, the friends of Facebook fans, or people I met through CouchSurfing. The unique perspectives of the people I became friends with, finally taking some time to explore the world a little, and taking a full month without even thinking about work were all critical parts of my journey.
Phase 7: Get Healthy, Get Fit
When I returned, I moved forward on the premise that my own health must come first. I like to think of the safety demo in an airplane, when they tell you if the oxygen masks drop, put your own on before you help someone else. If you don't take care of yourself first, there will be no “you” left to help anyone.
This meant putting sleep first. I've developed routines that, with good nutrition, have eliminated >99% of my insomnia. I never wake to an alarm clock. This is partly because I feel best when I wake up naturally, but it's also symbolic: I'm putting sleep as a higher priority than work.
This meant getting fit. You can see what I do for exercise here. But those details are part of a different story. One rule I've had is that on days I work out, I work out first. Again, it's symbolic: my health is more important to me than my work.
Slowly, I began to believe that the path I had chosen for myself was indeed compatible with being healthy and fit. I could indeed practice what I preached.
Phase 8: Team Building
As much as the help I sought in phase 4 had allowed me to put this all in motion, I was still left doing an outrageous amount of administrative work. I just felt so wrapped up in my own systems that I didn't know how I could effectively train anyone to do the work I was doing.
Enter Screenflow.
Screenflow is a software program for producing videos using Apple products. It is by no means the only way to make training videos. But its ease of use radically lowers the technical barrier to entry for doing so. You can capture your screen, your computer audio, your face, your voice, and even the screen and sound of an iphone simultaneously and easily edit it into a final product that you can use to train someone to do practically anything.
I consider the $100 I initially spent on Screenflow to be one of the best investments I ever made.
I also use a free tool called Jing to make short videos. The sound quality is not as good, and you cannot record your face, so this loses a certain aspect of personality that can be important when training someone virtually, and you can't record for longer than five minutes. But it processes more quickly and it forces you to keep your words short (unlike this email!)
Making training videos with Screenflow was THE single thing that freed up the time I used to start my podcast. Keep in mind that I started the podcast as the semester was winding down toward final exams with my Paleof(x) presentation two days after my last final. The time this saved was incredible.
In July of 2016, I hired my first full-time virtual assistant. In the future, if things keep going as well as they are now, I'd like to introduce you to her and talk more about how I hired her. For now, I will say that she is incredible in the work she does and enthusiastic about my mission. I'm not only getting far more done because of her, but having someone else dedicated to working on these projects with me has made my journey a far less lonely one and a far more happy one.
–> December 2017. This was the best decision I ever made.
Team-building has allowed me both to put out much more high-quality content and has also allowed me to offer research opportunities to my local students. So far I'm pretty sure they like being on my research team a lot more than writing out the essay questions I used to have on my exams!
All of this is organized in Asana. Asana is a software program for managing projects. In the future, I'm also interested in exploring Basecamp. Just like scheduling events with email is a mess, so is assigning and organizing tasks.
Why email people assignments and expect them to manually enter things into their calendar when you can just assign them a task in Asana with a specific date? Why ask them what they got done when they can just mark the task as completed in Asana? Why keyword search your inbox for emails related to a certain task, when you can create a single task in Asana and have an entire discussion that is forever located in the comment section of that task? Trust me, you only have to use these for a day to realize that organizing tasks in email was a profound waste of time and energy. It might take you a few days if you warm up to technology slowly. But I doubt it.
When my research team and I finally write our paper, we will be using Google Docs. Google Docs is designed for collaborative editing, and Word isn't. It ends the hassle and mess of passing back and forth multiple versions of documents by email, which is especially a nightmare if more than two people are editing a document. And no, using Dropbox does not get rid of the problem. Google Docs allows simultaneous editing. Try it once or twice if you haven't, and you will quickly see why simultaneous editing is an essential feature for any collaborative document to get done effectively. Princeton has a tutorial on how academics can integrate Google Docs with leading reference software.
Phase 9: Cleaning Up My Inbox
Why am I putting this last? Because your inbox is the list of everyone else's priorities for what to do with your time. You can't get anything off the ground unless you prioritize whatever it is you are working on over your inbox. Period.
But now that I've got my life, house, and projects in order, I am beginning to respond to emails in a timely fashion and help people. Granted, I have a list of guidelines for people that contact me by email, and the fact that most people who email me try to stick to them really helps me try to answer everyone.
But there are two tools that have been essential. Boomerang allows me to schedule emails. It prevents the email inbox from becoming an instant message system. At a minimum, I schedule >95% of emails to get sent >2 hours after I write them, which ensures that I'll get to inbox zero before anyone responds. For most emails, I schedule them to send the next day. If emails come too frequently, I schedule them to be sent two or four days after I respond. Basically, I set the cadence of my email flow so that it matches the time I have for email, and I respond in batches so that I get to inbox zero with every batch and never do so more than once a day.
The second tool is for subscriptions. Did you realize you probably have 1-200 subscriptions in your email? You can spend minutes going through a checklist of all of them to 1) keep them in your inbox, 2) roll them into a single daily digest, or 3) unsubscribe by using the free tool Unroll Me. On a daily basis it detects new subscriptions and offers you the chance to manage them.
Now, I realize I'm making myself vulnerable here. I'm writing you this via subscription! So, if you use Unroll Me I hope you choose “keep in inbox” for my newsletter! But I'll let you make that choice.
Update: December, 2017
I did successfully implement ExamSoft this past semester. It takes a lot of upfront work to make it a useful tool to students by tagging questions with categories of content, learning objectives, and cognitive skills, and by tagging them with well explained rationales so that they can get all of this as automated feedback. I implemented it by having students use their own computers, and this did cause some frustration for some students whose computers load large programs more slowly than others. Overall, though, it was a great success. I really can grade essay questions more effectively in far less time, and it is truly valuable for students to get very rapid feedback and performance reports they couldn't otherwise get. ExamSoft would be an even more powerful tool if used across a program or department because students could track their progress on specific performance categories over time and programs and departments could automate the process of assessing their own objectives.
Nevertheless, I've decided to leave academia to pursue things I'm much more passionate about. For that story, read Why I'm Leaving Academia and How I Knew I Was Unemployable.
The Critical Tools
Summing up, here are the tools that were most critical for me:
- The Four-Hour Workweek for first principles and an introductory how-to guide.
- For teachers, ExamSoft for automated and streamlined grading, and for highly valuable automated reports about the quality of your questions and student performance.
- ScheduleOnce for automated scheduling.
- Screenflow and Jing for making training videos.
- Asana or Basecamp for managing tasks on team projects (you could also manage your personal tasks with them, but I consider them essential for projects involving more than one person).
- Google Docs for collaborative documents and the Princeton tutorial for how to use Google Docs with leading reference software.
- Boomerang for scheduling email and Unroll Me for managing bulk email subscriptions.
I've used these to arrive at a situation that is much more hopeful and happy for me, and more productive than ever. To be clear, I also had some lucky breaks along the way, like research opportunities offered to me without having to write grants, and funding coming my way that I could use to hire a full-time assistant. But the tools and strategies are what allowed me to be able to accept those lucky breaks when they came my way.
I hope my story has provided you with some inspiration and insight that you might be able to apply to your own life, and that these tools will either prove useful to you themselves, or inspire you to find tools that actually will work for your situation.
And, this was long. If you made it this far, thank you so much for valuing my story!
In health,
Chris
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