If you break your wrist or your knee, it screws up your life immediately, and likely does some damage to you for the long-term. You'll probably have somewhat lower peak athletic capacity, and have to be more cautious around the once-damaged area.

That's obvious in the case of a large trauma, but less obvious are the everyday actions we take that have ripple effects throughout our lives.

Taking the time to clear the decks of distractions, clean up and either finish or officially cancel old projects, making incremental improvements to diet, learning minor time-saving techniques that add up (keyboard shortcuts, typing faster, etc)... the gains to these are largely invisible, but they have a positive ripple effect going into the future.

If you have a great idea on Tuesday, you might not attribute it to being better rested and sharper-thinking because of dietary and sleep hygiene changes you made a few weeks before. But indeed, the ideas that are most useful to us are the ones right at the edge of our problemsolving ability.

The flipside is the debt you build up from bad choices in passing. Since quitting fried and microwaved food a while back, I noticed better energy levels. How many times have I been able to avoid a stupid argument or deadlock because I was slightly healthier and clearer-thinking? I've been 100% consistent with my fitness regime. How much of that is attributable to better sleep? Or, phrase differently -- how many more arguments would I have had, and how much more often would my positive habits have broken down  if I'd been eating fried foods and sleeping more poorly?

A friend of mine was signing up as a translator for Gengo.com recently. It's a site where you can work as a translator to earn money. Right away during the signup process, it says this:

That just doesn't make a whit of sense.

It's not Gengo's fault: they're just following the law.

And the law made some sense before. But now, we're in a funny position where someone who is an excellent translator is allowed to work through Gengo from anywhere in the world... unless they're visiting the United States on a student or tourist visa.

Measures like these won't make any positive impact on the American economy and don't protect American jobs. It just makes it harder for people who are interested in visiting or studying America to do so sustainably, and that's to the detriment of everyone in the States. America was built by talented, entrepreneurial people who struck off from the native countries to build a life in the New World.

Moved the thread "What are you working on? How can we all help?" to the Community Section.

There's 44 replies on there now, many are good with specific advice on productivity, projects, business, sleep quality, nutrition, etc. Definitely worth a re-read if you haven't seen it recently, and keep it going with what you're working on if you haven't weighed in yet.

No need to be shy, go weigh in on what you're up to and what's potentially holding you back, and get some good advice in turn.

What do you want to eat?

"I don't know, I don't care, anything is fine." --> NOT COURTEOUS.

When do you want to schedule that lunch meeting? I can do Wednesday, Friday, or the following Monday.

"I don't care, any day is good." --> NOT COURTEOUS.

They seem courteous, but you're really offloading the decisionmaking back to the other person. And the thing is, maybe you don't do this, but a lot of people will say they're totally flexible but then dislike the first option suggested and only then do their thinking and propose something.

About 10,000 new visitors to the site yesterday. If you're new here, welcome. In addition to the blog posts here, one of the nicest things about the site is we have a pretty great community of smart people who make smart comments, share knowledge, and generally treat each other great.

You can see some posts in the Community Section, many are smart discussions. 

In this thread here, I'd like to invite you to share what you're working on, and what's holding you back right now. What knowledge are you missing, or skills, or habits? What's not clicking and you're not sure why?

Veterans of the site and new people, you're all welcome. What are you working on?

I had a really fascinating conversation with Francesca McCaffrey, the Director of Development for the Children's Lifesaving Foundation.

Francesca and I swapped some notes on when the best work happens -- in addition to her role at Children's Lifesaving, she's an avid writer and really immerses herself into the historical era she's writing about to truly flesh out the characters and the environment.

Like everyone else, Francesca looks at those periods of time when things are clicking incredibly well, and wonders how to make them happen more frequently. Here's some observations we came up with:

*The most common time that massively great work happens is when there's a Big Opportunity + A Hard External Deadline

*The Big Opportunity means there's Large Motivation.

Maybe you've heard the rule already -- touch it once. 

I'm not sure where it came from originally, but it's a fantastic rule for productivity. Once you open up an email, a piece of mail, or something else that needs action, you don't do anything else until the required action is dispatched. A lot of time, mental energy, and stress are wasted by looking at something repeatedly.

So, you "touch it once" -- after looking at it, you immediately take action on it. If you can't for some reason, say because you need other information, you at least explicitly define what information you need.

It's really a fantastic habit to get into, but one of the hardest parts of it is subtle -- to only touch things once, you need to refrain from going through them when you don't have time to dispatch them.

This is hard, but worthwhile. Once you start refusing to open your email until you're ready to clear it, stress goes way down and productivity goes up.

In response to A Hypothesis of Relative Assurance and Chained Wins, Ben Nesvig wrote in with his experience:

"100% agree. I only recently came to this conclusion while analyzing big things I've accomplished in the past and the process.

In high school, my American History teacher said he'd bump anyone up a full letter grade if they could memorize Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream Speech." In his 9 years of teaching, only one student had successfully memorized and recited it to him. The speech, when giving by Martin Luther King Jr, runs about 16 minutes.

I saw this as an opportunity to move from a B to an A. The only reason I thought I could do it is because someone else had. It wasn't a rational decision, as I wasn't a great student then.

After several weeks of staying up late and speaking the text out loud hundreds of times, the last week of the semester came. I pulled the teacher aside while the class was reading and rattled off the speech for 9 minutes straight, word for word. I memorized the whole damn thing word for word.

From Wikipedia --

"It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass [donkey] that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other."

In other words, don't just stand there between good alternatives, doing nothing, until opportunities have passed you by. If two things are really equally valuable, just pick one and go get it first. 

Or as Jason Shen said yesterday, "When you're paralyzed and not moving, you're spending part of your time thinking, 'Is what I'm doing the right thing? Should I be doing something else entirely?' But you often wind up doing nothing, which is the worst thing possible."

Pick something, keep moving.

Jason Shen has achieved tremendous success in athletics, technology entrepreneurship, writing, and living an outstanding life. To promote his recent GiveGetWin deal on The Science of Willpower, he sat down to tell us how he started learning about willpower, the state of what's known scientifically about how willpower and the brain work, and how you can start improving your life right away by implementing a tiny habit, thinking and systems, and using some powerful thinking tools. Enjoy:

Developing Willpower by Jason Shen, as told to Sebastian Marshall

Willpower has been an undercurrent in my entire life. In gymnastics, you have to use your willpower to overcome your fear of an activity and go for the skill you want, to get over the fear, to push yourself to finish your conditioning and strength training a part of you doesn't want to…

It didn't come automatically to me. When I was a student, I wasn't automatically self-disciplined. There were actions I knew were useful, like doing my homework in one session without getting distracted, or not throwing clothing on my apartment floor. But I wouldn't always do them, and I didn't know why.

I started to learn those answers during a student initiative course at Stanford called The Psychology of Personal Change. That's when I first started reading academic papers on the topic. In academia, willpower and self-discipline is often called "self-regulation," and in 2009 I started to get really serious about it from an academic perspective -- and saw gains from it in my personal life.