How I Get Things Done
Preamble: I get up to a lot of activities and produce a substantial amount of creative work outside of a full-time job. The vast majority of the time, I feel neither busy nor stressed. In getting to this point, I’ve done a fair amount of observing and experimenting. Some of the results of that are recorded below. The intention is not to prescribe to others how to be engaged with life and do more meaningful activities, but to catalyze some rewarding personal reflection for the reader.
Hack 1. Why I get things done: I have a cluster of motivations acting over time. This is important for me because, on a given day, at least one source of motivation might be weak. Having several from which to draw upon decreases the risk of having no motivation, whatsoever.
These days, my work, both paid and unpaid, is motivated mostly by love, generosity, and the desire to be useful in the improvement of society. I used to be much more strongly motivated by fear-based emotions, particularly anxiety. I was quite afraid of never being or doing “enough”. Actions from that foundation tended to be at least unsatisfying and sometimes even damaging. I don’t do things to accumulate an impressive Wikipedia page someday, though I have been sorely tempted by prestige in the past.
A concrete example in my life is the motivation to propagate the incredible love and generosity shown to me by my parents in my childhood. I was seriously mentally and physically ill from ages ~8 – ~10, and my parents did an enormous amount of emotional and logistical work with a team of medical professionals to bring me back to health. I continue to be so moved by their gifts, as well as those of all of the teachers and mentors who have invested themselves in me over the years. I want those gifts to keep rippling outward into the world instead of ending with me.
Hack 2. Choosing what to (NOT) do: I don’t do projects that are not meaningful to me or that are fake substitutes for what I really want to be doing. An example of a fake substitute would be reading a book about, say, programming, if what I really want to be doing is programming. Instead, what I have done in the past is to choose a programming project whose results other people cared about and learned what I needed as I went. This approach is more intense, and that is partly the point; the intensity of having skin in the game while learning helps me learn more quickly and effectively. At the end, I have solid skills and products, not just hazy memories of reading a book.
This is basically a form of eliminating distractions, where distractions are forms of work that aren’t important to me. They are especially tempting because doing them gives the illusory feeling of being productive. By contrast, some days I will only work on a meaningful project for a few minutes. But those few minutes to me are better than hours of distraction-work, especially if they were minutes spent challenging myself.
Crossing out all the distractions eliminates almost everything I could be doing. To quote Drake, “Ain’t much out there to have feelings for.” This is hugely liberating, because now I can focus on just a handful of deeply meaningful projects.
Hack 3. Cultivating energy: You hear a lot about time management. Not so much about energy management. But I see them as distinct yet inseparable. It takes me longer to do something when my energy is low or not otherwise matched to the situation at hand than when it’s aligned. I find focusing on optimizing my energy for particular tasks more practically useful than strictly budgeting time. This is partly because I have an easier time controlling my energy than how much time I have for things. Example: I use the good-energy ~30-minute gap between meditating and leaving for my job in the morning on a challenging bit of a project.
What I mean by ‘cultivating energy’ is doing some meta-work to bring about the internal conditions that enable execution of projects. In my life, this means devotion to physical and emotional fitness. I exercise a lot and am committed to eating healthy food in healthy portions. Daily reflection and meditation helps me to maintain internal positivity and stability.
Hack 4. Building a solid week at a time: Instead of focusing primarily on having a good day, I focus more on having a good week. By this approach, individual days are important but they’re not worth getting discouraged about. A day lost washes out in the end. A day gained is also not enough; it takes real time to make real progress, and it rarely shows up on the scale of a day. A good example is weight loss. People care about losing pounds, not ounces. Pounds are lost on the scale of at least a week, not of a day.
With this principle in mind, what I do as a life habit is to sit down with a physical planner each Saturday or Sunday evening and take stock of the last week in order to carve out plans for the coming week. I write down the things that I want to hold myself accountable to. This is not a planner for writing down appointments, but goals. Given what I want for the week, I divide it up by the day according to my schedule. Then I check things off each day as I go through the week.
Example day:
coffee and meditation
15-30 min of focused effort on a project
run ~30 min to work
work 7.5-8 hours
run home
eat dinner
~1 hour focused effort on a project
purely fun activity: climbing, reading, or online dance class
Dysfunction in my life has mostly resulted from setting the parameters on the above structure to the wrong values. For example, there was a period of months when I didn’t take a single day off schoolwork for leisure. Mistake! I burned out. These days, I still do intense projects and exercise on the weekends, but they get no closer to job obligations than enrichment toward fun professional projects I might like to do someday.
Some final thoughts: Importantly, I do not have children. I’ve also very deliberately rewired my life so as to be based in the downtown of a major city, so I don’t have lots of travel time baked into my days to get places. My partner and I would like to adopt in the next few years, so the kids fact could change, having profound consequences for my life. But (perhaps naively?!) I think my basic template for well being is both flexible and robust enough to allow me to keep creating, tinkering, and researching. It will probably be my methods and particular choices of projects that are impacted. My partner is also very supportive and the more domestically-focused of the two of us, which enables me to devote would-be time spent cooking, customizing space, etc. to other pursuits.