Identification of Force Multipliers for Success

When working with my clients I often tell them that there are only 4 types of job related skills they should focus on:

1. Minimum Viable Skills - The skills they absolutely need to get a job done, and/or get hired for a job.
2. Force Multipliers - Skills that will make their entire process more effective
3. Bottlenecks - Skills that are the slowest point in their whole process.
4. Competitive Advantages - Skills that make them less replaceable or more specialized.

Tangentially related, but as you're thinking about effective skills to focus on, a rather useful framework that my clients have used to great effect.

You should really share the things you found to be force multipliers! You spend a lot of time explaining how hard they are to find and then you don't even share yours :)

One thing that I suspect has been a force multiplier for me: I have a digital notebook, and I managed to train myself for a bunch of the pages to "hook in to my life" at certain situations. For example, I have a page for when I get home from work, for when I get up in the morning, for when I go to sleep, etc. And also pages for when I encounter specific failure modes like being insufficiently alert, needing to take a break, etc. (As a way to train this habit, I suggest training the proto-habit of writing down a description of any failure mode you notice yourself entering for later review.) Then whenever I read about a new technique that seems worth using, I figure out the specific situations where it's worth using and put it on the appropriate page. Unfortunately I have been getting worse about using my pages as time goes by.

Most self-improvement interventions seem to fade away eventually, but one that has stuck for quite a while for me is a Chrome extension I wrote to block the "related links" sections you see on webpages. This seems to have substantially cut down on the amount of time I waste online. (The key may have been to change my "oh, that looks like an interesting link" habit in to an "oh, I should add another rule to my extension to block this kind of link" habit.) I was interested in it specifically because it seemed like a painless way to make myself more productive that would not reverse itself, and that has turned out to be the case so far (have been using it since late January). I'm quite interested if people have other ideas for these sorts of not easily reversible capacity gains. And if enough people are interested in my extension I could probably release it. (You can view the code here but at this stage you'd probably have to read the source to get it to work. It also does lots of other things aside from blocking "related links". My overall objective was to add enough drag to my internet use in various ways so that I would make everything I did online intentional instead of mindless.)

Better nutrition, exercise, and sleep are also arguably force multipliers.

This may only work if you're me, but ...

My workplace performance took a huge upswing about a month ago. My boss sat me down and told me that I was annoying and upsetting various management people - who had no lack of annoyance factor themselves, but were after all the management. He told me to engage the public relations skills I'd shown in my volunteer work with Wikipedia.

Turns out this was the magical key - just by thinking of my emails as PR communications, and thinking of my job title not as "senior system administrator" but as "senior system administrator and operations team public relations", I'm charming and delighting people while the substance of the message remains the same. (Recent example: leaving a high-up marketer delighted and pleased that we'd blocked their broken effectively-open-relay "email a friend" form when it had been used for a spam run, and that the company would not be email blackholed a second time.) And it turns out that about half the job is in fact dealing with others.

Now I just need to remember to keep up with the machine-tending that is the first half of my job ...

This sort of optimization is a pretty foundational concept for software engineers. These are things that have helped my career as a software engineer and made me more effective in my job (not exactly the same thing, but related!):

Basics

• Touch typing. This should go without saying, but I've worked with people who hunt and peck and it's painful to watch. But you don't have to type really fast to get most of the benefit, since other bottlenecks will start to dominate. In my experience a pokey 50 WPM is more than sufficient.

More Advanced Mechanics

• Gain fluency in a powerful shell, a good text editor, and an expressive "scripting" language
• Learn a modern version control system such as git
• Set up an environment that works for you and keep improving it – this is very much along the lines of Nick5a1's systems mindset. Keep your dotfiles in version control.
• Don't repeat yourself. Learn to refactor code to remove unnecessary duplication.
• Keep configuration decisions out of code
• Understand dependencies among different pieces of code and know a few strategies for simplifying them (the pub/sub or event bus pattern, dependency injection, etc.)
• Know how to deal with asynchronous operations using both callbacks and promises – NodeSchool has a great tutorial for server-side JavaScript.

Soft Skills

• Keep a todo list (I keep my own, or you can get really good with your issue tracker)
• Keep a log of things you've done (bonus if you can generate the log automatically from your todo list)
• Keep notes on how you solved tricky problems
• Understand your role (you're not a designer or product manager, but you need to know what they care about to work with them effectively)
• prioritize the product, then others' goals, then your own (this is usually the most effective way of furthering your goals)
• insist on regular one-on-one meetings with your manager
• before answering a question find out why the question was asked

Social skills. Without them, any other skill has the problem that you can't "sell" it.

Making notes. Otherwise everything you learn, and don't use for a longer time, will be soon forgotten.

And obviously, rational thinking.

Getting things done. Being able to set goals and work towards their achievement is one of the core skills that are very useful and towards which I didn't put enough attention in my school time.

One of my tutors used to say: "Learn your tools!" It may sound very basic, but some examples from my own (computer science oriented carrier) are: Learn to use Git (including more seldomly used functions like git log). Learn to use some advanced IDE like Eclipse. For some purposes, using the Terminal is faster than clicking through the finder/explorer/nautilus/... As mentioned, typing fast is usually very handy.

Usually, one tends to rely on learning by doing, but often this does not let you find the optimal solution but rather the first one that works at all, so maybe it is good to force yourself every once in a while to learn from manuals etc.

Meditation and metacognitive training in general.

Self link: http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/how-to-do-foregroundbackground-meditation/

I have made some unsubstantiated claims in the "I’ve given you some reasons to meditate:" bullet in the link above. More generally, there is plenty of evidence that meditation does good things to you.

One Force Multipliers I can think of is to strategically search and use synergies.

This can be complex business synergies - which can be hard to find - but also combining simple tasks in space and time, e.g.

• doing as many purchases as possible on one day (possibly with support or a large car or running additional errands)

• doing gymnastics while doing household chores

• with children: combine routine appointments like haircut, physician examinations, courses, friend visits (but leave buffers)

During (the German equivalent of) middle and the beginning of high school, I studied mathematics at my local university. This helped me not only to learn more efficiently but also to think more systematically. (Maybe physics is an even better choice, because having studied physics one has good job opportunities in all kinds of business areas indicating that the physicist's skillset is a very large and generally useful one.)

This massively helps me to acquire new knowledge, because mathematical formalisms are used not only in mathematics but also in physics and especially computer science.

Also, learning to program is a good idea if you have not already done so. As Steve Jobs said, "“Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” I think the ability to program to be of great importance whenever one has to judge the precision of a text or a proposal but also your own understanding - I can always ask myself: "Could I theoretically turn this idea into a computer program or at least a mathematical formalism?" And during this thought process, I can develop ideas, indentify imprecisions and find ways to eliminate them.