They tell you to be ambitious, which is generally good advice, because it requires you to think about your life enough to want something in particular instead of wanting everything in general. Wanting everything in general is a contemptible state, which I define as a state that would be largely unchanged after massive but precisely executed brain damage.
I’ve never been short on ambition and I’ve never been short on goals, but as it turns out this isn’t a good thing, either. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I wake up and am so buried by the assorted things I want to do that I can barely get out of bed. Here, for example, are some of them:
- actually learn all the mathematics I was supposed to have learned as an undergrad
- revise all five of my CW2008 stories
- finish my “Shatner vs. Norris” screenplay
- make web sites for Wilson and Heifer
- codify my graphical notebook language
- re-learn Spanish, Italian, and German
- watch those game theory lectures
- research BSoD
- write a St. Hubbins prototype
- familiarize myself with the WordPress codebase so I can write BrainHarvest mods
- develop a grammar for basketball play-by-play stats so I can parse them into a SQL database
- build a .net app
- build a Cocoa app
I could, without exaggeration, sit here for the next hour and come up with more stuff that I want to do, and intend to do, and in many cases have started to do before abandoning it for another thing I wanted to do. And this isn’t even counting all the things I think I _should_ be doing but am not doing. That list is probably even longer.
So, as is my custom, I have taken something admirable and turned it into something pathological. And, as is my custom, the pathology isn’t something that I can simply walk away from, which is why I still contend that I’d have an easier time kicking heroin than eating right: with heroin you just stop, and that’s really hard, but once you stop you can just never ever do it again. But you can’t just stop eating – you have to eat and eat and eat, and each time you eat is an opportunity to fall off the wagon. In life, for me at least, the ‘small’ things are way harder.
So I’ve been trying to think of an operating system for myself, a process to help me straddle the frontier separating the one kind of shitbagger from the other. Here is what I’ve come up with so far:
- Generate a list of goals. The goals must be medium-term and specific.
-Generate a list of small projects, through which these goals will be realized. By ‘small’ I mean projects that will be finishable within two working days, using “working day” to mean whatever time I have to reasonably offer during that period. For example, during some periods a working day will be six hours; in others it will be only one hour. Projects must be defined accordingly.
Example: “Mock up a St. Hubbins GUI” is a good goal: it’s bigger than a single project, but not too big. It’s specific enough to motivate specific projects (“represent thought chunks as physics-based spheres in JME”) but general enough to allow some wiggle room. Size and specificity are what separate a goal from a project.
Example: “Research BSoD” is a bad goal. What does it mean to “research” something? That could mean anything, and it has no clear end point. “Orient myself in contemporary thought re: social production” is better – you know the domain, and within that domain you could come up with a handful of projects to satisfy the goal. “Project 1: generate SP reading list.” “Project 2: read ‘The Wealth of Networks’” “Project 3 – x: read other sources on list.” “Project x + 1: generate St. Hub pages on how social production intersects BSoD universe.”
- Work on only one project at a time. In other words, you’ve got to finish a project before you can start another project.
- Have only a few active goals at a time.
- Keep track of the projects and goals as they are finished.
- Keep track of the projects you’ve thought of that you haven’t got around to working on yet, but only up to a point. You don’t want to have too many pending projects, because intending to do too many things makes you feel overwhelmed, and then you wind up not finishing anything.
- The same thing goes for goals: the list of goals should only include goals having to do with projects you’ve worked on recently, or are planning to work on imminently. If you haven’t recently finished a project pertaining to a goal, take the goal off the list. You can put it back later, if circumstances warrant.
If I do this, at any given point I will know:
What I’m working on
What I’m working toward
What I’ve done
What I’m going to do
This is pretty common sense stuff, but common sense is a malady I do not generally suffer. I think this scheme will help – all I need to do is, well, DO it. You can have the smartest and best-motivated system in place, but in the end it always comes down to doing stuff. The only trick I’ve ever found to help with doing stuff is to get on a streak of doing stuff. Well, that, and to surround myself with other people who were also doing stuff, preferably the same stuff I wanted to be doing. Which is both good and bad: good, because when I actually _HAVE_ surrounded myself with other people doing the stuff I wanted to be doing, my record for doing stuff was between good and great. Bad, because my life is a chronicle of failure in that regard.
So here are my first two goals: 1) Figure out how to change this, and 2) Figure out what my other goals should be, and then come up with projects for those goals.
I’ll let you know how it goes. Maybe that will be the third goal.