Tag: Work Habits

Everything as a Joke

Sometimes things get too serious.  Subtle stresses build up, multiple to-do lists compound in the back of the mind, over-analysis creeps in, and the smallest misunderstandings or miscommunications cause deep consternation.

Most of us aren’t working our fingers to the bone in the field anymore. Most of us have thinking jobs.  Sounds easy.  In many ways it is; I wouldn’t trade it for a life of hard labor.  But it is taxing to think through every idea you encounter in a day, decide what’s worth while and what needs to be discarded or altered, reformat it, repackage it, and transmit it to the appropriate party in the right tone.

If you work in a field all day, you know that you need to give your body sufficient rest between shifts.  You also need to give your body other forms of activity like sports or recreations.  It’s not so different when your work is mental.  Your mind needs rest.  Your mind also needs other forms of recreation.  It needs to be engaged with the world in a way that is entirely different than what your daily work demands.

Humor is the best medicine for a worn-down mind that needs more than rest.  It allows you to fully engage your mind, but from a completely different angle.  It’s like changing the view, or putting on a new pair of lenses that reveal an entirely different world in front of you.  It’s a shock of fresh, cool water for a dehydrated brain.

Take a chunk of time to deliberately see everything as a joke.  Go scan your Facebook feed, the headlines, your RSS reader, your inbox, or your neighborhood.  Think of it all as hilarious.  You’ll be surprised how often it actually is hilarious, but you failed to notice in serious mode.  Make fun of everything, laugh at everything, take nothing seriously.  It’s a very powerful catharsis, and you might make some healthy discoveries in the process.

Switch the Default to Neutral

Yesterday I talked about the virtues of remote work.  The point was not to prove remote work is better, but to change the default assumption.  The default position in nearly every firm is that workers must work together in an office.  The prospect of remote work is treated with special scrutiny, and it must prove especially valuable to be tried.  Meanwhile, the default of on-site work is given no scrutiny whatsoever, simply because it is the default.  What happens if we change our default to neutral?

Not just in the case of remote vs. on-site work, but in every choice between methods or worldviews there is much to be gained by switching the default away from the status quo and to an open position, ready to compare alternatives side-by-side.  One needn’t go out of the way to see the merits in a different point of view so much as back off a little from the currently favored view and see how it stands up to scrutiny.

Probably the most difficult areas to have a neutral default are those involving authority.  We tend to assume the best about authority and make it the default position, while we fear the worst about freedom and put it on trial.  Consider prevailing views about the state and state provided services.  The idea of fully private roads, or protection, or adjudication, or education, or charity are immediately met with skepticism and myriad objections in our minds.  They are compared to our idea of how things should be, and almost never to how things actually are under state monopoly.

Our default position is that a single authority is better at most things, but how often do we zoom out and analyze from a neutral default?  What happens when you compare government controlled postal delivery with private in a detached way, as if a disinterested observer from another planet?  What about other services?  The default position deserves analysis equal to that which we give to new ideas.

It’s not only government authority we default to.  I’ve found that as a parent, my default position is that raising kids on the power of my authority and say-so is better than giving them free reign and treating them like rational agents.  Turns out the default is wrong.  No, kids are not fully capable of making sound choices, especially at a very young age, but I’ve been amazed at how well – indeed how much better – they do when I back off and leave more choices in their hands.

The first time I heard radical ideas about unschooling, free schools, unparenting, and other laissez faire methods of interacting with children, I demanded answers to all the hard questions and difficult situations that may arise.  I examined every angle and poked holes in weaknesses I saw in each approach.  Had I ever been so rigorous in examining the more regimented style of traditional education and child-rearing?  Had I put my default assumption, that kids need order imposed by external forces, to any real test, mentally or in practice?  I was having a nice romance with the default position and failing to see its weaknesses, to the detriment of myself and my kids.

Sometimes you have a default for well-developed reasons: you have examined multiple options and found one far superior, so until further notice, it will be the default.  This makes sense and needn’t be abandoned as an efficient way of giving new ideas the basic smell test.  But ask yourself how many of your defaults fit into this category?  It’s surprising how many default assumptions we’ve never actually examined.  We assume our assumptions exist for good reason, but many do not.

Upon examination and experimentation, we may well arrive at the status quo as best option.  But if we never take a close look at our assumptions we do ourselves a great disservice.  You needn’t excitedly embrace every new idea or temper your skepticism about it.  Simply change the default position to neutral.  Be careful; your whole world may change.

Signals vs. Output

At a time when transportation and communication were incredibly costly if not impossible, large firms where everyone worked in the same building at the same hours greatly reduced transaction costs.  Today, there are cases where transaction costs and other costs of doing business are actually higher when colleagues work together in the same building.

In a large, complex workplace full of professional obligations, hierarchies, duties, friendships, tensions, and coordination problems, signals can become as important as outputs, sometimes more.  What you produce is one thing – so long as you create more value than the next best alternative for the cost, you’re good for business.  Except you don’t work with calculators, you work with humans.  What your colleagues perceive to be your value – or worse yet, your activities – will determine your compensation and responsibilities.

In order to make sure you are in good standing, you have to produce not only what’s on your job description, you also have to signal to your coworkers that you are valuable, and a generally decent person with whom they want to work.  A common signalling mechanism is to talk to your coworkers a lot, about work and non-work related things.  Another is to hardly talk at all because you’ve got your face buried in your monitor all day looking like you’re really focused.  Another is to send lots of emails or call lots of meetings.  Of course if you’re not producing anything, these signals will only get you so far.  But it’s surprising how far they can get people in some work environments.  That’s where this business of being in the same building comes in.

It’s a lot harder to get away with signaling value instead of producing it when you are stripped of the shared office environment.  You can’t be seen at your desk looking busy because you’re not seen at all except via video conference.  You can’t chat up your coworkers unless you have something specific that warrants a call or email.  It’s more cumbersome to call meetings, so you have to think more carefully about whether a meeting is needed before doing so.  Emails can fly with ease, but without the face time, you risk having them misinterpreted and have fewer ways to gauge if they’re annoying people; this tends to make them more risky and costly.  In other words, many of the signalling options are not open to you, so productivity is the major way to measure your performance.  This is good for value creation.

Many people see the downsides of remote work – loss of camaraderie, loss of easy pop-in conversation, technical problems with conferencing, etc.  These are real costs, but they are the greatest in the initial training months for new hires.  After a modicum of familiarity with the people and processes of a workplace is achieved, these costs go way down.  As far as camaraderie, a growing number of people seem to maintain some of their best relationships via Facebook today, so it is not impossible to achieve a pretty deep level of kinship among remote workers who might get together in the flesh on occasion.  As for those pop-in conversations, those are actually more of a cost than a benefit.  When you don’t have the ability to invade someone’s office for five minutes any time you’re walking by, you find more efficient ways to bundle your questions together, or you ask via email which allows them to respond when it makes the most sense, or you call or text if urgent.  Communication prioritization tends to emerge, improving efficiency.

Another objection is that some people just aren’t wired for remote work and couldn’t get anything done outside an office environment.  It is absolutely true that individuals have different work habits and different ways of getting in the creative zone, but this objection strikes me as far-fetched.  If an employee really can’t produce anything unless they are seated in a room full of other employees, maybe they’re not getting anything done anyway.  The people that coworkers worry about working remotely – “Oh man, if that guy worked remote, I’d never get responses from him and he’d be at the beach all day” – are probably people they should be worried about in the physical office.  If a person couldn’t produce without all the trappings of the building, chances are good they are not producing with them, but rather taking advantage of all the signalling devices remote work does not offer.  Perceptions are easier to control in an office, therefore the cost of producing less is lower because you can make up for it with signals.

If you call a remote employee and they don’t answer in a few minutes, you start to wonder if they’re working at all or just gallivanting about town.  The inability to see them around during the day raises suspicions when they are slow to respond.  This forces them to build trust by a reputation of quality and timely work to stave off any negative perceptions.  Contrast that with popping in to talk to an on-site employee.  If they’re not at their desk, you don’t think anything of it.  You know they’re in today, so you just assume they had to step out for a minute.  Just by being in the building and being visible, they buy themselves a little more good-will and can get away with a little more.

Clearly there are some kinds of work that make remote locations far more difficult, and some make it impossible.  But the technology available today makes remote work incredibly attractive to employees and employers (check the cost of office space in any major city).  Most workplace cultures haven’t really adapted to this shift in transaction costs and still place a premium on being in the building; to their detriment.  There are great and growing benefits to remote workers – and taking it a step further, to contractors for many if not most roles – and firms would do well to explore them.  Try making one department remote for a month and see what happens.  You might be surprised.

Want a Better World? Make a Profit

A few days ago, I noticed a post on Fast Company’s Co.Exist titled, “Is Working on Wall Street Actually the Most Ethical Career Choice?”  The post is about a project called 80,000 hours that is trying to get people to think about how best to spend the average 80,000 hours they will be in a career.

Somewhat refreshingly, the project encourages people to consider going into high-income careers rather than the non-profit world.  It describes the outsized impact you can have by funding several causes vs. working in one.  But the premise remains: to do good, it’s nonprofits that provide the boots on the ground.  You might have to bite the bullet and take a high-paying job so that you can support such efforts, but it’s very clear that aid and charitable organizations are what make the world a better place.

What’s so odd about this perspective is that all the evidence in world history reveals just the opposite.  There has not been a single, massively transformative development driven by charity work.  But millions upon millions have seen the end of poverty, disease and plague; we’ve seen lifespans extended, air and water cleaned, culture, art and beauty preserved and enhanced, and lives saved by profit-seeking enterprises.

Working for profit is, in a free-market, always a win for others.  Profit is a signal.  It reveals when value has been added to society, as measured by the subjective values of those in society.  Resources are purchased for a price.  That price is what the resources are valued at for their next best use.  Profit-seekers then do something to the resources.  They apply ideas, time, other resources and labor.  What comes out the other end is sold.  If consumers willingly pay a price high enough to cover the cost of inputs plus some, profit is made.  What does that profit signify?  It signifies value created.  It shows how much more valuable the resources are after the transformation than before.  It shows, in dollars, how much better off people are because of the enterprise.

Of course dollars are not a perfect measurement of value.  And of course economic value is subjective and changing.  But there is no perfect measurement, and there is none clearer, cleaner, or fairer.  You can ask people what they value, but when they willingly trade their dollars for it, it speaks volumes.  Any uncoerced exchange that generates profit should be hailed as a wonderful benefit to the world.

Sure, you can make a bunch of money so you can give lots away to causes you believe in.  That’s a wonderful thing.  It feels good.  It can help some people in tangible ways that are fulfilling to be a part of.  The truth is, whether you like it or not, you’re doing more good for the world by the activity that makes you the money (so long as it’s not subsidy, tax, or regulation supported) than by the activities you support in giving it away.

I highly recommend this excellent article by F.A. Harper on “The Greatest Economic Charity“.

Never Have a Magnum Opus

In yesterday’s post, I said,

“I’ve also found that viewing a post as the beginning of my own understanding of the topic, rather than my final word or magnum opus, is intellectually enriching and produces a wealth of new ideas down the road.  But more on that later…”

Now is the later.

My son spends hours every day producing artwork.  Sometimes he will go for several days on a single theme: a new super hero or comic book he’s created.  He is lost in the world he creates as he produced dozens and dozens of drawings, each with elaborate back stories.  Inevitably, whatever theme he’s on comes to a sudden and unexpected (for me, anyway) halt.  He gets a new idea, abandons his previous project, and moves right on to the next.

As a father, of course I find his creations delightful and I have a strong urge to capture them as whole works and preserve them.  He asked me once to help him turn his book of 30 different wizards and sorceresses (“Wizopedia”) into a website.  I was excited to help and began digitizing his drawings and typing in his dictated details on each character…for the first two characters.  Then he got bored and abandoned it for new ideas.

At first, I saw this flightiness as a weakness in him.  Perhaps it is to a certain extent and he’ll need to learn to see some things through to completion.  But the more I think on it, the more I see it as a strength, and the more I want to develop the same tendency in myself.  My son is not concerned about an artistic legacy at this point.  He’s not concerned about a shiny, neat and clean completed work to present to the world so he can bask in his accomplishment.  He’s not trying to create his magnum opus.  He creates for the sheer joy of it, and when he doesn’t feel that joy in a particular project, he moves to where he does.

When I think about the most interesting people, who’ve created the most interesting art or analysis, so many of them produced things until the very moment they passed.  Some of the greatest academic minds produce interesting ideas into their 80’s and even 90’s.  Contrariwise, there’s something sad about a person who produced a magnum opus, and then spent the remaining years living on that legacy, protecting it from being misinterpreted, and making sure the world was aware of its brilliance.  It seems perhaps the best thing to do after creating is to let your creation out into the world and, in a sense, walk away from it and start creating something new.

When I think about my life, I try to imagine it as an upward trajectory through time, rather than a great peak followed by a slow decline in my twilight years.  I want my greatest ideas, moments, experiences and creations to be those at the end of my life.  It seems natural that this should be the case, at least until the physical body’s aging prohibits it, as we accumulate more knowledge and perspective through time.  That is, if we don’t stagnate.

Rather than a single epic project, it seems a more interesting and challenging goal to see one’s entire life as a great work.  Let your whole catalog of creations, from beginning to end, be your magnum opus.  Never peak until you die.

Grow Up Slowly

About a year ago, I had lunch with a very successful couple.  The husband had made a great deal of money early in life on a business start-up in a big city.  After running the firm for a time, he sold most of his shares and the family moved to a picturesque rural dwelling.  He spends but a few hours a week involved with his business, and the rest of his time is spent pursuing his passion for music and a great many other things.  His wife is busy pursuing her passions in art and other cultural affairs.

I asked what prompted such a dramatic change at this early phase in life, especially when they could have easily continued with managing the business, or started another.  They said, in complete agreement, “We moved out here because we wanted our kids to grow up slowly.”

I told my wife about the conversation, and those words have stuck with us ever since.  Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of it.  We haven’t fully internalized it, but I know it was important for us to hear and consider while raising our own children.  It’s easy to get stressed when they don’t walk right at the average age for walking, or don’t read or ride a bike or swim as early as your friend’s kids.  It’s easy to try to cram their heads full of practical and theoretical knowledge and get them up to speed quickly.  You imagine what you would be if you had been more learned early on.  Or you simply want them to gain independence quicker so you won’t be as limited as a parent.

These are not necessarily bad desires, but this business about letting them grow up slowly just resonates on a deep level.  There is something beautiful about the naivety of kids; about watching them try things they’re not prepared for; about how unaware they are of just how real the world can be.  When they learn organically, on their own time, it’s amazing to see.  Feeling free to sit back and soak it in as a parent is truly wonderful.

Even as I am trying to learn how to let my kids grow up slowly, I’m beginning to understand the benefits of slow growth for myself.  While reading the fascinating book, How They Succeeded, I came across some interesting words by Alexander Graham Bell.  The author and interviewer asked, “[I]s not hard study often necessary to success?”  Bell replied,

“No; decidedly not. You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them. It is perseverance in the pursuit of studies that is really wanted.”

I’m the first to say that just getting things done is the key to success.  Does an action bias contradict Bell’s words?  I’m not sure that it does.  Perhaps in the realm of action, haste is a great virtue, but in the realm of thought, slow growth is preferred: act fast, think slow.  Not the best slogan, but there’s something to it.

The things we need to get out of the way – certain credentials, experiences, legwork, etc. – just need to be hammered through.  But the really important stuff – our life philosophy, an entrepreneurial venture, a new paradigm, a book – needs to grow slowly with our experience and knowledge.  It needs persistent mental activity, but not forced completion.

Since blogging every day, I have found occasions where I have nothing for the next day’s post.  There are two ways to remedy the problem.  The first is to quickly scan the news feeds, inbox, or bookshelf, come up with something, and type it.  The second is to search for ideas that have been incubating for a long while, often subconsciously.  A drive, walk, or talk with a deep-thinking friend can help me discover nascent ideas I didn’t even realize were under the surface.  Those tend to be better than the posts I think up and crank out on the spot.  I’ve also found that viewing a post as the beginning of my own understanding of the topic, rather than my final word or magnum opus, is intellectually enriching and produces a wealth of new ideas down the road.  But more on that later…

Bell concludes on the topic,

“Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a fevv days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years. A horse is often a grandfather before a boy has attained his full maturity. The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. That intellectuality is more vigorous that has attained its strength gradually. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider, and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation, persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.”

I Write Because it Changes Me

In the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) is told by a friend that, despite the mockery of his atheist colleagues, his prayers for his sick wife are having an effect.  Lewis, however, is not concerned with whether or not prayer “works” in altering the universe:

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.”

This is a powerful bit of self-honesty.  Lewis felt no need to respond to philosophical or theological objections to his actions.  He wasn’t praying to convince God, he was praying because he knew the value to him of this activity, regardless of the outcome.

I have made a point recently to remind myself of why I write; not to change my audience, but to change me.

There will never be a shortage of people who offer objections to ideas I put to paper, or critique the way I choose to communicate those ideas.  If my goal were to win over as many people as possible to my point of view, this would be incredibly stressful.  Every objection would require a response or a change in my future behavior. It’s not a particularly fun or productive way to live.

Feedback is wonderful.  It creates a connection between creator and consumer that results in better content.  But feedback is only helpful if it doesn’t make us bitter and we don’t worship it.  If it hurts us to hear and we begin to create things motivated entirely by the need to stick it to the “haters”, we’ll produce lower quality content and be less happy doing so.  If we overvalue feedback and rethink every word to predict every possible way in which it might be misinterpreted, we’ll produce boring content and have less fun in the process.  Both of these responses put the feedback of others in the drivers seat and you, the creator, in the passenger seat.  Don’t let that happen.

Take in feedback, enjoy it, laugh at it, use it, but don’t pay it too much attention.  Remind yourself that the reason you write (or read, or speak, or paint, or sing, or…) is because it changes you.

Homestead Your Interests

Homesteading is an age-old form of gaining common-law right to property.  A piece of land that is unowned or abandoned can become yours if you improve upon and maintain it for a period of time.  In the American West, pioneers would find a parcel of land they liked and stake it out as their own.  So long as they built fences or signposts or boundary markers of some kind and generally maintained the property, it was considered theirs.  Smart pioneers would homestead more than they could gainfully farm at first, looking to the future and leaving open the opportunity to expand their operation.  We may not have vast stretches of unclaimed land today, but the need to homestead some metaphorical acreage is still very real.

You have a body of knowledge, expertise, and a set of activities that define you.  This is your brand.  I’ve written before about the danger of being hemmed in by your brand, especially if it’s a successful one.  But how exactly can one prevent it?  By homesteading more space than you can currently occupy.

If you really enjoy architecture and keep in the back of your mind the idea that someday you may put a lot of yourself into it, whether vocationally or avocationally, you need to stake out a territory that includes architecture, and keep the underbrush trimmed so it doesn’t begin to encroach on your homestead.  Maybe you’re a lawyer, and all your friends and associates know you as the law guy.  If you keep your passion for architecture under the surface for twenty years, never letting it see the light of day, it will be a lot harder to make a sudden switch from law to design.  People will find it odd and see it as a frivolous deviation from your brand.  You will feel a lot of pressure to prove that you’re serious about it.  It will take a monumental amount of courage and resolve to make the move, and you will have to steel yourself against the reactions should you fail at first.  It’s like homesteading a virgin wilderness full of hostile flora and fauna.

If, on the other hand, you staked out your creative territory early in dimensions far beyond just lawyerdom, and you maintained your property line with the occasional foray into architecture, the opportunity to make a move later will be far more real and the transition far less daunting.  Maybe you keep copies of popular architecture magazines around for inspiration, and to let visitors see that you consider it a part of who you are.  Maybe you write about it from time to time, or offer amateur architectural tours of your city.  Maybe you keep a design table in your house and draw up blueprints.    Whatever it is, if you maintain the fringes of your property, it will be a lot easier to occupy it should the opportunity arise.

I make myself post a song or a poem once a week on this blog.  It feels a little odd sometimes, and It’s a little embarrassing.  But I love creative writing and keep in the back of my mind the possibility of composing short stories, recording songs, or working on film scripts as something I may want to put more of myself into someday.  I feel like it’s somewhere in me, but not yet ready to fully occupy my energy.  If I go on only producing what currently comes more naturally, commentary and prose, one day I’ll feel the urge to emerge creatively and it will feel like such a drastic transition it may be overwhelming.  I want to trim the weeds back at the corners of who I am by a little creative writing here and there.  I want it to be public, so that a later switch won’t seem quite as out of left-field to the observing world.  I’m under no illusion that posting a song once a week means I will be taken seriously should I become a full-time songwriter; far from it.  It won’t be quite as scary though, and I’ll have a little more confidence being used to putting my creative side out there.

Think about who you are, what you love, and what far-fetched dreams you entertain.  Draw a generous property line that includes even the most out-there interests.  Homestead it, and keep title to your identity with regular maintenance.  You never know when you’ll want to expand your brand.  If you never do, who cares.  You won’t have lost anything by keeping your boundaries wide.

Just Get **it Done

There are a lot of traits and skills that can make someone more valuable professionally.  All of them pale in comparison to one: finishing.  One can make up for a lot of deficiency in skill and experience with hard work, but not the other way around.

By ‘hard work’ I do not mean work that is painful or boring or time consuming.  Certainly hard work can be all of these things, but if you’re measuring work by how much it hurts or how long it takes, you’re spinning your wheels.  Hard work is work that produces something ‘hard’.  It creates a tangible result, and a good one.  What matters is output, getting things done fast and well.

It is true, there’s a trade-off between ‘fast’ and ‘well’.  While it is very important to do a job well, once it meets a certain level of quality you’ve got to complete it and move on.  A lot of people may disagree with me, but I’ve observed that probably eight times out of ten, timeliness is more important than additional degrees of perfection.  The key is to learn something each time about how you could have done it better, that way the quality improves with each project and the time to completion does not decrease.  If you simply get things done, on time, every time without a lot of drama, and learn as you go, you will develop and excellent reputation as a highly valuable individual to work with…and herein lies the danger.

Your reputation is more important to your value in the eyes of others than is your actual product.  It couldn’t be any other way, as no one you work with has time to follow every detail every day of what you do.  If you come through reliably, especially on some big tasks early on, you will begin to get a reputation as someone who gets things done.  The longer you live up to it, the stronger the reputation becomes.  At some point, you’ll see diminishing returns to hard work.  Your reputation will be strong enough to survive a missed project here or there.  When you are most secure in your professional role you are most vulnerable.  The comfort zone is the danger zone.

The danger is not that people will suddenly realize you’re no longer getting it done.  That may happen, but I’ve witnessed people who continue to get by on a legacy of past work for years.  It seems some people can spend the better part of their careers getting work because of a reputation formed decades before.  The real danger is that you’ll stop creating value.  This is a tragedy, not only for any persons or organizations who pay you to produce, but for your own well-being.  Do not underestimate the deep human need to forge and create and hone and toil and complete.

The more praise you get early on, the more you need to be alert to the temptation to slack.  You’ve never “arrived”.  You always need to work hard.  That is what separates the good from the truly great.  The good get a well-deserved reputation and then do what’s necessary to maintain it.  The great put their nose to the grind ’till the end, even if their reputation would be OK if they didn’t.  They continue to evolve what they produce so that it is more and more what they love, but they keep producing.

What can you do to better your career?  Young or old, experienced or inexperienced, just get **it done.

Too Quick to Close

I am an obsessive finisher.  Loose ends and unfinished projects drive me nuts.  Things in progress do not excite me, they stress me out.  I’m always looking to cross things off, get them out of my mind and move on to the next thing.  I think this is a major asset, but it has come to be a liability as well.  The more complex and long-term what I do becomes, the more I’m fighting against my own habits and instincts.

When I complete a phase of a project and pass it on to someone I’m collaborating with, within days I’m impatient and contemplating just finishing it myself even if it’s imperfect.  I want to close the case.  This results in a lot of complex, messy projects either being dealt with in too much haste, or potential projects never launched, because it is not clear how they would be completed.

I’m trying to learn to love the process and be comfortable waiting.  I’ll probably never be one of those people who has 10 books going, 25 internet tabs open at once and 50 emails they’ve read and not responded to.  I’m trying to get more comfortable with the idea though.  Most of the time, people with many things live at once are in that position because they are not very good at deciding how much time each project really warrants and when things aren’t worth any time at all.  I’m good at that and I wouldn’t trade it.  Realizing how much information is best completely ignored and how many emails should be deleted is powerful.  But in my haste to purge low value tasks and complete valuable tasks, I often miss out on the richness that can come out of a slow-growing idea or a longer collaborative project.

I want to wrap this post up nicely, but maybe I’ll just leave it here…