Grouping — Defying the Laws of First Principal Thinking
I love First Principals thinking. I apply it regularly and realize extremely powerful results. But it has a fundamental flaw. It's structured around logic. Its power is derived by ensuring that 1+1=2 and by preventing 1+1=1.
While I still apply first principals thinking daily, lately I have been finding myself more regularly turning to the powers of grouping to amplify mine and my teams personal potential. Grouping encourages you to stop thinking that 1+1=2, and instead encourages you to determine how to make 1+1=3 possible. Grouping has turned into a borderline unhealthy obsession of mine. It is one of my top productivity hacks and plays a key supporting role in helping me maintain the flow state.
Grouping opportunities are typically not challenging to execute against, but they can be rather challenging to identify. They are these hidden in plain sight gems that exercise both our creative and productive minds while simultaneously unlocking massive potential for our careers and businesses.
So what are some of the tricks you can apply to identify a grouping opportunity?
Categorization
I am very rarely able to identifying grouping opportunities without first writing down my OKRs for the month (or ideally quarter) and then assigning the required support tasks to each of the OKRs. Once you have done this you can see if there is an opportunity to group separate OKR tasks together so that you can complete two objectives simultaneously.
As an example, my OKRs for this month are to find 10 VCs in San Francisco to track our progress and to move 5 head of engineering candidates that fit our criteria into the late stages of our hiring process. Seemingly dissimilar tasks until I look at them a little more closely.
The fastest way to access VCs is through warm referrals from influencers. The best influencers are typically portfolio companies, or angel investors they have worked with in the past. These same influencers are also very well connected in the tech community and likely know some all-star head of engineering candidates. So rather than targeting each OKR directly, I instead targeted meeting influencers and cross both OKRs off simultaneously with an added benefit of speaking with some amazingly smart people who monumentally move forward my thought process on complex business challenges.
Increase the Size of Your Problem
Sometimes your OKR may not actually be your objective but a subset of that objective. This will likely not be as obvious as it sounds. On some occasions, it may even involve you creating a bigger problem so that you can more efficiently solve the problem at hand.
As an example, I recently became aware first hand of a problem with the Canadian startup ecosystem. We are producing a disproportionately low number of unicorns on a per capita basis when compared to other 1st world countries. There are a number of reasons for this, but a big part of it is that our ecosystem is designed to create practical 50–250M$ SAAS companies (which is perfectly acceptable) instead of architected to help our dreamers shoot for the moon. By solving this problem in parallel with reaching out to influencers I was able to more quickly gain access to these top thought leaders. The time I’m saving allows me to pursue a personal passion of helping the local startup community. An item that will pay dividends long term.
Make grouping a Daily Habit
It's hard to get into the habit of keeping grouping top of mind. To help with this, there are small grouping exercises that are broadly applicable which you can use on a daily basis to help you gain the confidence necessary to make these bold grouping moves:
- Bulk Slack and Email Response — Don’t let the continuous influx of messages break your flow. Respond to them at regular intervals like when you need a mental break. Once every 45 minutes to 1 hour is typically sufficient unless you are working actively to solve this problem.
- Don’t Open Emails — You can normally tell what an email is about before opening it. Any email that you think will take longer than 5 minutes to respond too based on the title, save until a designated period of time later when you are mentally fatigued. Don’t use your peak productivity periods to respond to things that don’t require your full attention.
Grouping is an extremely powerful technique that defies the laws of first principal thinking. 1 plus 1 can, in fact, equal 3. The impossible is in fact possible. If you are able to master this technique it will become a core part of the widely adopted working smart philosophy and will serve as a competitive advantage for your career and company.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If you have any other high impact grouping activities that can be applied daily I would love to hear about them at jvangaal@soullabs.com so that I can share this information with others and further support this powerful technique. In the near term, our productivity tool Vibely will help our users by learning from you and automatically grouping all inbound communication on your behalf saving you valuable time and allowing you to focus your mental energy on more important tasks.
