I had planned to take a short break last September, but a few weeks turned into a full year. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and even longer to figure out what to do about it - and even so, I’m definitely not out of the weeds yet - but today I’m going to talk a little about finishing things, prioritizing things, goals, task management, and trying to rebuild a cadence.
What happened
Things started getting really complicated for me starting in 2020, and they kept getting harder and harder from there. I thought was just a product of COVID and virtual school and work-from-home and finishing a Masters Degree - but then my kids got back to school, and I finished my degree, and I got a new job…and not only did things not get easier, they got a million times harder.
I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. How did things get harder when I had fewer hard things to do?
I thought maybe it was a problem of inspiration and that I just needed more compelling things to work on - so I picked up a few more projects, started this newsletter, and continued to reclaim some personal time in the early morning to work on them. But I continued to drag.
I thought maybe it was a problem of organization, and I doubled-down on my Getting Things Done workflow. But that didn’t get me anywhere either: somehow, the work seemed to just continue to compound - I was spending more and more of my time just managing my todo list while feeling less and less effective at working from it.
What I figured out
A few months ago, I realized that my problems hadn’t actually started in March 2020 when COVID hit - they started about eight months earlier when my son started kindergarten. Before that, he’d been in daycare, and I could drop him off and pick him up any time between 6:30 AM and 6:30 PM. They’d even feed him breakfast and lunch. But once he started at public school, I had to drop him off later, at a much more precise time, and pick him up from aftercare much earlier. This consumed a lot of my discretionary time, but I didn’t even think about it because I’d also started my masters program at about the same time and had expected to be super busy. This childcare work didn’t feel “busy” in the same way - it was much lower intensity, but it came with a constant need to be on standby.
I had lost two important things at the same time.
First, I’d lost an arbitrary stupid goal that I could focus my attention on day to day and month to month. “Finish the assignment, finish the class, finish the degree” had turned into “get everyone fed and in bed before it gets too late”. Trying to find inspiration in new projects only helped if I could keep making progress on them, and I found I couldn’t.
That’s the second thing I’d lost: my “focus time”. My family was super supportive of me in my masters degree - they’d all go to the playground for a Saturday afternoon so I could focus on an assignment, but once my degree was done I found it a lot harder to say “I’m going to go sit alone for a while to work on a project that only matters to me,” even though I know they would have supported me on it.
This lack of goals and focus was pathological, and it completely contaminated my getting-things-done workflow too. The GTD idea of “capture things so they don’t float around your head” has been really good for me at keeping me from worrying. But if I’m not able to focus, my brain just keeps churning out things I could be doing, or fun additions to fun projects in the back of my head - and these all became things I needed to then cross-file and organize. I ended up completely undisciplined: I’d be working on one thing and generating notes about something else I was thinking about, and then later I’d be polishing my todo list and discovering I’d added the same task to my inbox multiple times even though I’d already finished it.
Somehow, I had built a really effective system for capturing and prioritizing work, but without anything important to prioritize or any time to focus on it, it ended up becoming a giant fragile conglomeration of triviality.
I’m trying a couple things to deal with this:
I did a massive burndown of my personal project backlog. I have lots of notes about things I’d like to do but that I have no particular plans to do, and all those just went into a big reference document. Other work that I don’t need to do and that I’d kinda like to do but don’t actually care about doing that much I just deleted. I hit bottom on this recently: I’m working this week on finishing the last batch of “things I actually need to do someday” from my task backlog.
I also started minimizing my “work in progress” on my project backlog - setting aside new projects that were barely underway until I could finish long-running projects I hadn’t completed. This has been nice not only for focus, but for reclaiming space on my workbench and for being able to benefit from being Abel to make use of some of these projects.
I stopped taking notes on random ideas I had while working on something else. I’ve proven to myself that I can come up with these ideas again, and capturing them just became an excuse for me to not focus more clearly on the task at hand.
I’ve started claiming a little bit of “me time” some evenings - if my kids are reading or playing or working on their chores, I find a project I can work on too - something less intellectual and more physical like organizing the pantry.
Until recently I had planned with the assumption that if something is on my todo list I need to make sure I get it done. But I’m now experimenting with another kind of plan where I can record “things I could do today” that won’t roll over to another day if I fail to do them. Some things only have value in trying to do at a particular time, and this gives me a way to think about my days in a much more open-ended way.
I’ve started thinking of longer-term goals for myself: for the week, for the quarter, for the year. This has been a struggle - but it’s also helping me to think of day-to-day tasks as part of something larger that I care about, and has helped me to get some traction on other projects I care about.
Finally, more than anything else, I’m trying to stop treating things that don’t matter as though they do. The fact that I wrote something down doesn’t give it importance, and just because a past version of myself cared about doing something doesn’t mean I still have to pursue it.
I’m going to keep posting here - but I don’t know what I’ll post next, or when it will be, and hopefully that means I’ll be doing it more frequently and with less stress.
Thanks for reading!