It’s been a crazy few years. I was going to say few weeks, then few months, and then I thought about it and realized that there’s no reasonable starting point more recent than a few years ago. Since then I’ve been traveling non-stop and have had very little stability.
If you rarely travel, you might dream of getting away from it all and going on vacation. But when you travel constantly you fantasize about being in one place for an extended period of time. And while my life has mostly been a collection of quality time with friends over the past couple years, I’ve been yearning for some time in one place.
The problem is that I’ve been relatively unproductive over these past couple years. Major progress has come from isolated concentrations of time, usually on a cruise ship, where I’ve worked hard to complete projects. My median day is shockingly unproductive, especially in the past year.
Now I have around two months in one place, then a cruise, then no plans. That is by far the most sparse my travel schedule has been in years, and I’m excited about it.
Work can be divided into two categories. There are the things that are important to do but which don’t actually push you forward. Those are things like paying bills, keeping a calendar and todo list, and answering emails. And then there are the big pieces of work that create actual progress, like long-form writing and programming.
I’ve found that unless I have the little stuff done, I can’t work optimally on the big stuff. My mind keeps reminding me to do the little things, and I don’t feel like I have a nice big clean slate of time.
So my first job now that I have all of this free time is to get back to “bare metal”. I’m doing things like going through my inbox and making sure I have no more pending emails, making sure my calendars are synchronized properly, making calls I’ve been putting off, and adding things in my mind to my todo list.
The goal in doing these things is to create a mental state where I can think about nothing but my main project for days on end. I’ve found that I need that sort of focus to really make big leaps of progress.
It’s tempting to jump right into my big projects now that I have this time, but I know that in the long run I’m better off working on the small stuff. Today I got my calendars synced up properly, caught up on a couple phone calls, and added a bunch of stuff to my todo list. Nothing groundbreaking, but hopefully it’s the precursor to some groundbreaking work.
I’ve got another ten days or so in Japan, and my goal for that time is simply to get back to bare metal. I want to have nothing in my mind or todo list other than big important work.
If you’re having trouble moving forward on something important, look beneath it to the supporting structure. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is seemingly unimportant work.
###
Photo is the wall next to Ong Tea in Bangkok. I bought some pretty solid Dong Ding Oolong there for around $12.50.
Really excited for these next couple months of solid work. I’ll be going on a cruise in April and may write my next book then. I also have a fun little book I’ve written that I’ll release in the next couple months.
Leave a Reply