Jargogled Impressions.

<Rambling alert>

Why is it so hard to sustain something and continue with the ‘messy middle’ of executing a project, a side interest, a passion, or even chores that need to be done? The literature available on human will power and motivation tells me that you must start with the why, and if the why is not powerful enough, no matter how much system and processes you build into the project, it will be hard to sustain if you are really not into it.

For example, I wanted to write this blog series more regularly, and there are weeks when I feel like I have found my momentum. But then the week goes by and so does the energy and the motivation to write. Energy isn’t something I am going to cover today, because that is another can of worms waiting to tip over. Somehow, managing your energy, not your time makes a lot of sense but does not translate to anything materially different in how I think about my typical day. Maybe there’s something there about eating the frog that I am not getting and as such cannot seem to get by the basics of managing my energy. But there are moments or specific times in the day when my energy peaks and others when it volleys. If I am to listen to the mantra of managing my energy, then maybe I should focus on doing the highest leverage tasks during the moments when I am at my productive best and then leave the neural or overhead tasks to the more lethargic periods. This is in line with the L-N-O framework that is much bandied about in the product management world.

But this framework fails when you are not prioritizing things enough. The starting point for the framework is to know which activities are the most leverage-able and then prioritize your energy and time in that direction to get the most impact from it. But when you have too many balls in the air, with no clear preference or understanding of the relative importance, then the framework falls flat in the face. To be effective, you need to dial back a level and start with the list of things you have on your plate and then ruthlessly cut and edit and refine and prune them to what makes sense. The Duning Kruger effect has a bigger role to play in all this than I realize because I end up over-allocating my energy and my time and that leads to a cascading effect on not being able to do pretty much anything on this ambitious list.

How do you prune your list? What approaches can work and what systems need to be in place for the pruning to be a constant and self-healing approach? For sure there would be additional events streaming into your life which would result in the list becoming bloated in due course of time. This would require a standard system in place for pruning the list. And that is why you should maintain a separate list of ‘inbox’ ready items that are not thought out, not committed to, and not really as important at the very point of the idea generation. Inbox is where you should capture your raw, un-edited ideas and with a clear articulation of what it is and what more needs to be done to clarify it further. Only when you review the inbox at the end of a specific period of time, is when you must take the time to clarify the item, understand its importance, outline the steps needed, the decisions that need to be taken, and the next best action on the item. If all this is done, it will take time, and most often you will end up not doing the action (mistaking it for an overhead task). But you would be better off if you treat this activity as a highly leveraged task because it can clear your head, form the building blocks of the project, and outline clear and decisive steps you can take on the item. The step could indeed by deleting this from your mind space because you deem it to be not important. And that is a great step forward as well!

Savvy readers may detect this pattern of thought comes from the GTD stable of thinking about work. And they would be right. GTD has influenced my thinking a lot, and since work has only piled up since then owing to a lot of external factors and environmental changes, I can only still thank GTD for helping me keep my head on my neck and not letting it fall off in the face of an onslaught of things to do, and of projects to manage, and of my side interests to not fall through.

That said, everyone has their own degree of adaptation of the GTD philosophy, and I don’t think anyone can master the whole system. The system gets adopted to suit the unique needs and circumstances, and if diligently enhanced and customized, can become a roust operating system for life. Alas, with my implementation, there is a lot of technical debt that has accrued to my system, there is a lack of strategy that impacts the performance of the system and where the focus should be on improvement. It’s adoption is lacking in many respects, driven partly by the architectural trade-offs that happened during solutioning. The only way to get out of this baggage is to start afresh and build a new system on the deathbed of the older one. Otherwise, the legacy trade-offs will continue to dog your operating procedures. Sure, you should incorporate the learnings and do a complete retrospective of what worked and what did not, all this is essential for specifying how and where you want to refine the system and what outcome you expect from this investment, of time, of energy, and primarily of attention.

Attention is all you need. This is true on so many levels. If you create a system that lets you be attentive to the most important and the most impactful of projects, the system has done its job.