I’m excited right now. This blog, which has now grown into a full site, has already proven its weight in gold. I started it so that I could gain mastery in Boredom is my Goal as a life philosophy. Although I feel like that’s happening, it’s helped me to channel my focus into accomplishing all of my other life goals.
The latest example comes from the last two posts and the one I’m writing now. The first post was organizing my projects into a consolidated and more straightforward approach. I now have visibility into my core life ambitions. During the process, I realized that I was overbooking myself so I eliminated some fat by removing some projects.
The second post was about defining out my approach to the project organization and setting up a weekly self-accountability system. Yesterday (from when I wrote this post), I posted my first weekly update. While composing the update, something started bugging me. Today it hit me. I’m still overbooked purely based math.
At work, I have established my teams in a similar organization pattern that I'm now doing in my personal life. When I first started, I would assign one engineer to one project. That seemed logical. But I quickly saw that the result was that too many projects were ongoing and when project scope deviated or expanded, no one had time to assist. After a few discussions with the team, we shifted to a two engineer to one project approach. This approach changed the game for them. It helped to develop collaboration but also limited the number of focus items. Easier for the leads to track. Easier for engineers to help each other. We completed projects quicker which countered the fact that fewer projects were ongoing.
I was at that same moment personally. I had four projects: building an Earthquake Kit, setting up a new set of IRAs, taking my food and exercise to the next level, and starting a new philanthropy effort from the ground up. Let's look at the math of that. I have a full-time job, so I'm looking at maybe 5-20 hours max a week. Split between four projects, and that's 1-5 hours a week per project. Spread that out over five weekdays and two weekend days, throw in everything else like family, this site, reading, and other non-project activities, and it's obvious it's too many projects to juggle.
The lack of progress against all projects would demotivate me. I would try to focus on only one or two projects. Feel guilty about ignoring the rest, try to binge-work to close some out to get progress, burn myself out, and be right back into wishing I could live a Boring life. I had set myself up for failure and writing everything out made that painfully obvious. It was time to trim down even more. Let’s take a look at whose four projects.
The first to go is taking my food and exercise to the next level. Although I could lose about 10 pounds, 10 pounds isn’t going to do anything drastic. I already eat healthy enough plus my wife is on a big healthy eating kick, so that helps. I can also exercise more, but it’s been raining every week for months. Since my exercising involves being outside, it’s a bit hard to get into an exercise routine. This project is out.
The Earthquake Kit is pretty essential considering I live in earthquake country. However, I’ve made that gamble since I moved to Los Angeles 9 years ago and I’m willing to take that risk a bit longer. This project is also out.
That leaves IRAs and Philanthropy. I’m tempted to reduce this down even more, but I think this will be fine. The IRAs project will be a lot of waiting; waiting for the accounts to open, waiting for the funds to accumulate, waiting for the funds to transfer. Which then puts the Philanthropy project as the main focus. That feels right.
I’m excited to see where my ambition energy goes from here — baby steps to greatness.
(Written 2019.03.11)
The latest example comes from the last two posts and the one I’m writing now. The first post was organizing my projects into a consolidated and more straightforward approach. I now have visibility into my core life ambitions. During the process, I realized that I was overbooking myself so I eliminated some fat by removing some projects.
The second post was about defining out my approach to the project organization and setting up a weekly self-accountability system. Yesterday (from when I wrote this post), I posted my first weekly update. While composing the update, something started bugging me. Today it hit me. I’m still overbooked purely based math.
At work, I have established my teams in a similar organization pattern that I'm now doing in my personal life. When I first started, I would assign one engineer to one project. That seemed logical. But I quickly saw that the result was that too many projects were ongoing and when project scope deviated or expanded, no one had time to assist. After a few discussions with the team, we shifted to a two engineer to one project approach. This approach changed the game for them. It helped to develop collaboration but also limited the number of focus items. Easier for the leads to track. Easier for engineers to help each other. We completed projects quicker which countered the fact that fewer projects were ongoing.
I was at that same moment personally. I had four projects: building an Earthquake Kit, setting up a new set of IRAs, taking my food and exercise to the next level, and starting a new philanthropy effort from the ground up. Let's look at the math of that. I have a full-time job, so I'm looking at maybe 5-20 hours max a week. Split between four projects, and that's 1-5 hours a week per project. Spread that out over five weekdays and two weekend days, throw in everything else like family, this site, reading, and other non-project activities, and it's obvious it's too many projects to juggle.
The lack of progress against all projects would demotivate me. I would try to focus on only one or two projects. Feel guilty about ignoring the rest, try to binge-work to close some out to get progress, burn myself out, and be right back into wishing I could live a Boring life. I had set myself up for failure and writing everything out made that painfully obvious. It was time to trim down even more. Let’s take a look at whose four projects.
The first to go is taking my food and exercise to the next level. Although I could lose about 10 pounds, 10 pounds isn’t going to do anything drastic. I already eat healthy enough plus my wife is on a big healthy eating kick, so that helps. I can also exercise more, but it’s been raining every week for months. Since my exercising involves being outside, it’s a bit hard to get into an exercise routine. This project is out.
The Earthquake Kit is pretty essential considering I live in earthquake country. However, I’ve made that gamble since I moved to Los Angeles 9 years ago and I’m willing to take that risk a bit longer. This project is also out.
That leaves IRAs and Philanthropy. I’m tempted to reduce this down even more, but I think this will be fine. The IRAs project will be a lot of waiting; waiting for the accounts to open, waiting for the funds to accumulate, waiting for the funds to transfer. Which then puts the Philanthropy project as the main focus. That feels right.
I’m excited to see where my ambition energy goes from here — baby steps to greatness.
(Written 2019.03.11)
