Pick Your Target and Half-Ass it with Everything You've Got
Tuesday Thoughts #64 (View this email in your browser)
The screaming finally stopped.
Thank God, the baby's asleep. Now, can I put her down without waking her up? Tip-toeing around the house, my time is at a premium. As I wrote last week, my life has become a series of sprints.
While parenting is an abject lesson in the scarcity of time, we all have limited time and an unlimited number of dreams (or work tasks, ugh).
In a humorous, but sensical way Nate Soares tells us to half-ass it with everything we've got. The idea is to hit a quality target with minimum effort.
That doesn't mean slack towards the bare minimum nor does it mean pouring heart and soul into a task. Aim for the minimum necessary target and move there as efficiently as possible. Anything extra is wasted energy.
I think of it as C's get degrees.
The implied task is being extremely clear on what we're trying to accomplish. Then being ruthlessly intentional with our time.
Are we just trying to get through college as efficiently as possible? If you're trying to maintain scholarships, maybe you're aiming for a 90%, but that still leaves a lot of wiggle room between done and perfect.
Perfect is never worth it.
It's the difference between spending five minutes putting all the groceries away or an hour organizing the pantry (and those 55 minutes are gold to the parent of an infant).
What is the goal?
So, before you start that next task, be very clear about what you're trying to accomplish. Write it down or speak it into reality -- then go get it with reckless abandon and move on when you've accomplished it. Don't. Go. Any. Further. On. That. Task.
What is a current project or task you need to complete? What would be a "quality target" that you could hit with the least amount of effort?
Related Thoughts:
Nate had this brilliant comment on perfection:
Instead of being a perfectionist about the paper, be a perfectionist about writing the paper. Be a perfectionist about identifying good strategies, about abandoning sunk costs, about killing your darlings, about noticing when you're done. Be a perfectionist about wasting no attention. Be a perfectionist about learning from your mistakes. Perfectionism can be a powerful tool, but there's no need to point it at overachieving on metrics you don't care about.
How can you improve your process? Can you turn it into a system?
1% Better
James Clear says if you can get 1% better each day, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the end of the year.
Alice Lemee created a system to make sure she's actually doing it. This is her 1% better checklist:
It’s simple. At the end of the day, I ask myself if I completed the right habits that will compound down the line. Here’s mine:
• Did I write today?
• Did I read?
• Did I work out (or at least move my body)?
• Did I tweet?
What do YOU think?
Thanks for reading,
Scott
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