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:

  • If you’re not succeeding, try being earnest

  • How to do good work and give good advice

• A trilogy on vulnerability:

  • How to be vulnerable correctly

  • vulnerability at different scales (individual, group, society)

  • my dating profile, tragedy of the commons, excuses

• Lessons in life that took me a while to learn:

  • 26 things I've learned as a software engineer, grad student, data analyst, video editor, and animation student

  • 6 lessons from learning to dance, learning to see by learning to unsee

• How I approach learning things:

  • Why video is better than written content

  • being a hacker vs an academic part 1 and part 2

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

1. primes me to be more aware of dumb things and

2. 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!