Over-optimism and eating frogs | #27
attempting to do smart things in smart ways for smart reasons
Welcome to The Pole #27 - a newsletter where I document my 1,000 day accountability challenge to get better at illustration, motion graphics, marketing, project management, and regulating my psychology.
If you’re new here (sup!) and want to know what I’m about, (the struggles that have defined my life, questions I think about a lot) here are some past issues:
My philosophy on doing creative work:
A trilogy on vulnerability:
Lessons in life that took me a while to learn:
How I approach learning things:
And now, this past week’s sawdust:
This 1,000 challenge was a good idea
I started this 1,000 day accountability challenge a week ago and I’m realizing how good of an idea it was.
It’s making me hyper aware of all these little things that drain my productivity.
To be clear, I don’t mean that in the spirit of “argh I’m inefficient and I must become more useful to society”
The spirit is more like,
I enjoy doing things efficiently and for a worthwhile goal
When I’m doing dumb things for dumb reasons in dumb ways, I resist doing them
If I want to or have to do them, but I resist doing them, part of my effort has to go to making myself do them (as opposed to actually doing them), and that induces burnout
Therefore I should strive to do smart things for smart reasons in smart ways
And doing this challenge
primes me to be more aware of dumb things and
forces me to confront them
For example, here are some dumb things I’ve been doing:
constantly having a bunch of browser tabs open (super demoralizing, makes me feel like I don’t have a handle on my life, anxiety inducing) and not having a system letting them go
not having my day planned out upon waking (I don’t mean every minute fleshed out, but having a small actionable list is SO HELPFUL)
not having a centralized place I can see everything I have on my agenda
consistently being over-optimistic in how much I put on my plate for the day (and therefore feeling like I didn’t “meet expectations”)
having ideas at random times and not having a low-friction, easily accessible place to write them down before I forget them.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this week is this:
I’m not an “Eat The Frog” kinda guy (where you do the hardest thing first thing in the morning). That’s a recipe for procrastination for me.
I'm totally a "do the little things to get momentum and then start the big things" type of guy.
I’m still adjusting to this new cadence, so this newsletter came a little early (Wednesday as opposed to Friday). So I’ll see y’all next Friday, 9 days from now, ideally with more actionable takeaways!
ooh I love the point about not having so many tabs open. I am the queen of having tabs open, especially when my friends post cool things on the internet and I want to save them to read later (I have 3 tabs open of links to your stuff now!!).
But closing tabs really do be giving me some relief. Thanks for the reminder!