Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.
~ Francis Chan
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Fear →
What came before →
I have several projects where there’s no end-game. (I’d argue all of my passion projects have no end-game.) The process of doing the creative work is the entire point. Do the thing, because doing the thing is some combination of “I enjoy it”, “I can rationalize the necessary parts I don’t enjoy” and “it’s making the world a better place.”
So you start. You do these trivial first actions, because they’re so stupidly easy, and then you’re working on the task. You’re inside the compound. You’re no longer trying to “get started.” Most of the resistance is gone, it’s clear enough what to do next, and it feels good to continue.
~ David Cain from, The Right Now List
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Rest. Reflect. Recalibrate. …was a wonder-filled takeaway from Trust Yourself by Melody Wilding. There was a little diagram of those three in a circle: Rest pointing to Reflect pointing to Recalibrate pointing to Rest. I am forever and ever imagining my projects as some sort of steady-state of affairs. Start the thing and then “just” do the thing. Forever. Forever? No. “What came before?” is, for me, the wrong question. How am I honestly feeling about whatever-it-is right now? That’s right. That just is. That’s how I am today. Okay, what comes next? Do I need to rest, reflect, or recalibrate?
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A cup of tea →
These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial. The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
~ Arnold Bennett
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Tasks, broken →
Just like with a real egg, you only have to damage the task’s exterior a little bit in order to transform it, to make it ready for step two, and it doesn’t particularly matter where on its surface you do that. As soon as the egg is cracked, it becomes a different object — one that tells you what to do with it.
~ David Cain from, How to Get Started When You Just Can’t Get Started
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Usually, I begin a task by envisioning what “done” looks like. It’s critical that I sit with that vision of done and be certain I want it in my life. I cannot do the majority of things I imagine tackling. Too often, my vision of done actually has me in a worse place: Becoming the sad maintainer of some complicated system is a common side effect of my imaginings.
If I’m buying into the vision though, there’s nothing like feeling you’ve taken a big bite out of the task. When working with others, I used to spend too much effort selling the vision. Which then leads to a lot of explanation of how we’ll get there. It turns out that if I’m supposed to be helping (or *gasp* leading) it’s better to get everyone involved doing. Doing something. Anything. Suddenly, it’s all hands on deck and we’re making light work out of the task. It’s much easier to course correct once we’re moving.
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Time to think →
[…] The problem is that too many workplaces expect their knowledge workers to pull the proverbial lever – today in Microsoft Office form – 40+ hours a week when they’d be better off doing things that look lazy but are actually productive. The result is that most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think […]
~ Morgan Housel, from Lazy Work, Good Work
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That’s an insightful point from Housel. I’ve no real idea if the “too many workplaces” part is true, but my personal experience is that I am quite often doing things which don’t look like productive output. I don’t want to write (say, or even think) “which look lazy” because writing (saying, or even thinking) that reinforces mis-construing productive thinking as that-other-thing I’d prefer to avoid reinforcing.
I’m told that I get a lot done. Sometimes I’m told that I get an inconceivable amount done. I’ve been asked if I have a clone. (To which I reply with a wink and a smirk, “If I did have a clone, how would I get that other myself to do what I myself already don’t want to do? No, it’s just the one me.”) For me, doing the productive thinking—although there’s room to quibble about how productive it really is—is the easy part. It’s easy like: I couldn’t possibly stop thinking like that, all the time. My problem is that I cannot also get myself to do enough proverbial lever pulling.
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I’m triggered, now what? →
The more fun your work, the less likely it is to set off these triggers. You won’t struggle to focus—tasks will attract your attention because they’ll be far less tedious, frustrating, challenging, and so on. There are a lot of strategies for overcoming procrastination. But making a project more fun disables a bunch of procrastination triggers at once, while also making your work more enjoyable. It’s a great strategy.
~ Chris Bailey from, How to stop procrastinating by making your work more fun – Chris Bailey
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Great little article from Bailey with great points about the really common things that trigger procrastination, and some ideas on how to beat each one. What’s been working for me for a while is something inspired by Yoda’s comment that, “named your fear must be, before banish it you can.” I can tell when I’m procrastinating; perhaps not always, but definitely often. At the point of realization, I play the name–game: “Craig, what exactly is it that you don’t want to do?” Then like the school guidance counselor always trying to talk me out of sabotaging myself into detention, “Are you sure that’s the thing? Be specific.” Upon realizing I’m still in their office, “I don’t think you’re as sure as you think you are. Can you explain it to me like I’m 5 years old?” Until eventually, it’s so blinding clear what I need to do (or skip, or change, or screw up 3 minutes of courage, or whatever) that I just freaking stomp that procrastination.
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One reason why I journal →
When we conjure up what it will be like to start a new practice, form a new habit, knock an item off a bucket list, we see the fun but not the work. We see an image in which all the drudgery has been edited out, and only the montage of rewards left in.
~ Brett McKay from, «https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/sunday-firesides-do-you-like-the-idea-more-than-the-reality/»
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Great points from McKay. I often enjoy inverting problems like the one he’s describing. Let’s say I thought a lot about the idea and the reality and decided far in the past to start something—for example, a daily podcast of me reading quotes. Then the inversion of the problem McKay is writing about would be to figure out, in the present, if my current experience of the reality matches what I expected the reality to be, back when I made the decision. Because, if I don’t do that, how do I get better at making the idea/reality choice McKay is discussing?
This is one reason I journal. For every project (and much more) in the last decade I’ve journaled about it. An idea begins to appear repeatedly in my journal entries. Sometimes it grows into my laying out the expected reality—the work this is going to require, the physical and emotional costs, the expected outcome(s), the rewards, etc.. Then I regularly reread my old journal entries and see how much of an idiot I was. ;)
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So many paths →
In early January, I started regular co-working sessions with a friend, Sumana Harihareswara. She read that post from 2013 about wanting to write more, and emailed me to see if I wanted to form an accountability team to work on our writing together. She’s making progress on her book, and I’m writing more here: we’ve been able to get a lot more done together than trying to work solo and power through.
~ Jacob Kaplan-Moss from, Coworking With a Friend to Write More – Jacob Kaplan-Moss
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There are many paths to the top of Mt Getting Stuff Done. If you find yourself currently off the beaten path, this article is a nice trail map. It mentions cadence in the sense of “don’t break the chain” or “routine is your friend.” I want to talk about a recent epiphany I’ve had about a different way to look at cadence.
There are several things I’m currently doing which require ongoing, incremental effort. And for a long time, each of them to varying degrees, just wasn’t getting done to my satisfaction. I had repeatedly set goals, blocked out time, etc. Recently—unrelated to my points here about cadence—I’ve been making superlative progress on these things. (Because, reasons.) And I find that now I can see the cadence is much faster than it needs to be to reach my long-term goal. When these things weren’t getting done at all, I had an idea of the amount of work that was required to make meaningful progress. Now I can see that I can actually slow down. I’ve known, for these projects, just a teeny-tiny amount of work, would work. But I didn’t really believe it, until I had a cadence, and truly apprehended how teeny-tiny I could actually scale my efforts and still make meaningful progress.
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How to be productive →
For me the pattern is now perfectly clear: the later I come at the task, the more time I’ll spend dancing around it before beginning in earnest. If I can make contact at an earlier hour, the urge to dance away from it is diminished, because I only have so many dance moves, and I’ll run out long before lunchtime.
~ David Cain from, 9 Things I Learned About Productivity This Year
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About once per year I trot out a, HOLY CRAP!
This entire article is jammed full of insights, only one of which did I quote above. I’d say that I have learned those same things. But absolutely I have not learned them in a single year. Where’s my time machine? I need to get this to my 16-year-old self.
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Or soon every day will have gone by →
… and soon the day has gone by and we wonder what we did with the day.
~ Leo Babauta from, Interstitial Ritual: Finding Focus & Mindfulness in Your Day – Zen Habits Website
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I marked this for “read later” back in December 2021, and am just getting around to reading it. I know that many—most? all?—of the amazing coincidences I find in my life arise from my innate, monkey-brain drive to see patterns and causation where none actually exists. I don’t care. It’s a nice coincidence that I’ve just gotten around to reading this, while in the past couple of weeks I’ve been simplifying and focusing on a small number of things that I want to be working on.
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