I have never once in my life actually worked down and through a prioritized list, though I’ve often made them.
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Every prioritized list for me is simple a reverse-neglect order.
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I can only do things in my peripheral vision
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How to hit the bulls eye.
Step 1: throw the dart
Step 2: paint the bulls eye
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This tweet is true, but the dark side is that there are days I fall into the prioritization trap and do zero things instead of 1 thing.
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I’m a bit like Bender. I can only do 1 thing in a day, big or small. So an easy meeting that takes an hour uses up my day just as much as a 10 hour heavy lift writing an essay. So I’m most productive when I have a series of day-sized things to do.
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Some days I do end up doing multiple things, but only when I’m being driven by other people’s priorities. And then it wipes me out. Left to my own devices I’m on the 1 thing/day plan.
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Damn what a week. I did more than one thing per day on at least 3 days. How the hell do you guys do this all the time.
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I did 1 thing on my own initiative today, and 2 small client things that didn’t require any initiative on my part. The scarce commodity is initiative I think. Reactive autopilot is merely draining, since it uses an existing fixed orientation or borrowed orientation.
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So to say you can only do 1 thing per day is to say you can only bootstrap an orientation on your own once per day. I’m currently on 1/day, but when younger I could do 3-4/day. Without even taking a nap.
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Manager time vs maker time is a special case. A manager doing 4 one-hour things and a maker doing one 4-hour thing are both likely in a single orientation throughout. Most managers only have a single “business” orientation. They run through several *situations* between breaks.
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Real breaks are the “tells” of reorientation. A nap is the most extreme reset.
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One way Covid has been hard on me is that my reset breaks used to be location changes. No third place means no second wind in a day.
Orientation = new wind 🤔
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I can’t even do a little mid-day loop walk these days because of heat and pollution.
And the “gym” instead of being a pleasant break is an annoying reconfiguration of bedroom (we have a weight bench and bowflex weights but it’s in a cramped space that takes some confit to useO
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Considering the cycling thing some life hacker types do, where for 3 weeks you’re mainly on one project. Hard to do around consulting since that’s unpredictable demand.
My work-week is 2 days earmarked for writing 2 newsletters and 3 open days.
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1-2 of those days are typically consulting, so typically I only have 1 day a week to do pure initiative things
(writing is not reactive, but is not full-stack orientation either, more like half-stack)
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Hmm. Context switching and reorientation might be one of the main affordances of public and communal spaces. If everybody is trapped indoors, general reorientation rates go way down. Public = quadruple jeopardy right now: covid, heat, pollution, trumpism.
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Yeah we should call them to-not-do lists.
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Replying to @vgr
This struck a chord with me. I just make lists of things I don’t want to do. The other stuff gets done when it comes up.
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Extended cognition!! Your brain becomes tired in a way that is physically linked to your environment. Maybe your brain wipes away the fatigue along with the old environment when it recalibrates for a new space



