As part of The Great Stuckedness I quite often find myself with a boatload of things to do and the inability to decide which one to work on. My tendency is to throw up my hands in overwhelm and watch Youtube videos instead. When I do finally start something I rush through it, allowing distractions and the pressure of “all the other things” to prevent me from taking time with what’s in front of me. My therapist says it’s a block we need to clear related to perfectionism. There is truth to the overwhelm, distraction, and perfectionism stories but there are some core habits I wish to build on that will help me deal with this for the rest of my life.
One thing is for certain: I’m very unlikely to have a successful day when I try to just wing it.
What worked before. As a full-time employee it was always clear how my time needed to be scheduled. Project development priorities, bug fixes, team interactions, and so on all represented a full day’s work and there was more of that the next day. As a self-employed individual the priorities are not always so clear. On top of that there isn’t the extrinsic motivation of a signed contract with an associated paycheck. Similarly when I was training for Ironman races I had a coach: with that came the extra push of paying for the service along with the provided workout schedule. Sure, I let everyone know I was working towards an Ironman but the structure and accountability from the coaching was what helped with the day to day progress.
These two things - a paying job and an athletic coach - served me tremendously well. I was able to avoid much of the struggle of having to make decisions, and there was alway support with breaking up bigger tasks, prioritization, and scheduling. They also masked my weakness of not having the skillset to get consistent, hard work done on my own. I haven’t had to build that muscle. Even if it was there at the start it atrophied. I wake up thinking that I can just get on my bike or walk up to my desk and get shit done day after day: these last few years have shown me that there’s more to it than that.
Planning for Tomorrow. Over my 30 years as a software developer I realized that my best weapon against the worst bugs and most intractable coding problems was a good night’s sleep. I can’t count the number of times when I spent a full day banging my head against a tough problem only to wake up with the answer the next day.
I believe that I am able to use the same technique for “solving” the problem of getting things done the next day: the magic is that with a little preparation the sleep (and associated unconscious mental processing) does the work of burning in the vision of tomorrow’s activities. “Just sleep on it” is a real thing.
Part of the overwhelm I experience comes from the thinking and the deciding of what to do next: I can fully circumvent that by having pre-planned the day before bedtime on the previous day. For those of you who workout early this is similar to ensuring that your gear is clean and ready in an obvious place for the next morning. We are removing barriers to starting.
There is a noticeable lack of overwhelm and indecision when I plan this way. In fact there are very few decisions at all: my mind is just ready to do the things I listed out. If I do the exact same process in the morning it is less than 50% as effective. Sleeping on it is what makes the difference. With that in mind I’m going to start my first Strong99 Experiment.
A note on experiments. My plan with these experiments is to perform some basic N of 1 trials on myself to come up with techniques that will help me thrive for the rest of my life. Of course it’s impossible to control for all the variables in a single person but insofar as it’s possible I will run one experiment at a time for 30 days, trying to show evidence that a specific protocol yields a positive result.
Many of these will be quite subjective where I might get the expected result by just motivating more, but that hasn’t happened to date. They will be ‘AB’ tests where A is the initial pretrial state and B is the trial. Making it an ABA test where in the second A I return to the pretrial morass of today is a way to potentially prove/disprove the hypothesis. I’m not in it for that: I’m hopeful a given protocol is going to have a huge impact and I won’t go back to the old way :-)
Experiment #1: Pre-planning every day the night before
Hypothesis: Implementing a pre-planning protocol every night before bedtime will yield more consistent creative work, exercise, and chore completion.
Initial conditions: No consistent workouts or creative work, no consistent meditation or non-fiction reading, ad hoc scheduling. Averaging <1 workout per week. Generally doing things at the last minute.
Period: 30 days
Protocol:
- At my desk 5-10 minutes before bedtime routine starts.
- In my journal, log number of tasks completed, creative work minutes, workout minutes, and any other relevant metrics for that day.
- Capture a section with “Tomorrow I will …” statements detailing what I want to complete, eg. “read 20 pages of non-fiction”, “run 5K”, “trim the shrubs out front”, or “write ad copy for our newest marketing funnel”.
- As much as possible setup tasks that are the highest priority.
- Create a moderate list of things to complete.
- Write out a simple, flexible schedule of time blocks associated with those activities.
- Ask the question “How will I complete these tasks tomorrow?”. Do not attempt to answer it.
- prep any workout gear
I’ll give you some interim progress updates in upcoming posts and then a more detailed report once the experiment is complete.