Lately I've been feeling an imbalance in my work. My days have been humming along productively and at the end of the week I'm satisfied with what I've accomplished, but I have this nagging feeling that my foot is on the gas and I'm not paying enough attention to the map.
There's nothing obvious that I'm missing, I just feel like I'm being a little nearsighted and not thinking about the long-term.
The past few months I've been paying more attention to the people I look up to at work, people who make grand plans, concoct ideas that will bring a lot of value and then define the work to bring them into being. How do they do it? How can I do more of it?
Maybe this is the feeling: am I providing value in the short-term at the expense of the long-term? How do you fix that? How do you even look for it?
I've never been in the habit of long-term planning. My 5 year goals are always intentionally vague. At one point I looked back at my career in five year increments, realized at each point I couldn't have much predicted I'd be where I ended up, and thought "let's just keep doing that." It's worked well for me so far, but there's always a voice in the back of my head reminding me "what got you here won't get you there."
As I'm attention-deficiently switching tabs while writing this post, I happen to see this tweet by Julie Zhuo, I think it's a sign:
To accelerate your progress on any given goal, you either need to...
Spend less time thinking/preparing and focus more on DOING.
or
Slow down on execution and spend more time PLANNING to make sure you're working on the right thing.
It's that or that gets me thinking: I need to take the time to make sure I'm
working on the right thing.
I'm not talking about individual projects - it's pretty easy to tell at a project level if the work you're doing is high value. Zooming out one level: I want to get better at defining the projects themselves, contributing more substantially to the roadmap.
I want to try to cultivate vision. I see people around me doing it and it seems to come naturally to them, but maybe this is an illusion. I should ask them 1 . I think for me this needs to involve slowing down and spending some time thinking. We have "flow days" at work where we don't schedule meetings (to varying degrees of success) and have hours-long blocks to get into deep work mode... maybe I need to do that outside work too. My free time is pretty fractured - an hour (if I'm lucky) in the morning, 2 hours (if I'm lucky) during naptime on the weekends, and a few hours after the little guy's bedtime. Along with the obligations of being an adult (shoot, taxes are due next month), I want to get enough reading, learning, time with my wife, coding, exercise... not to mention just turning my brain off for a bit.
I think what I'll do is block out some time to do some deep work for myself 2 . I'll turn off the phone, leave the computer in the other room and just do some thinking. I used to be in the habit of sitting down at a coffee shop with a pen and notebook, coming up with a topic and seeing how many ideas I could list. I think that's what I need here.
My typical modus operandi is a what's-next strategy to start taking action as soon as possible, but that gets in the way of zooming out. I'm going to see if I can apply this strategy to the problem of not being able to zoom out, block off time to stop thinking about what's next, and clear some space for cultivating vision.
It's a plan!
1: To-do list item #1
2: To-do list item #2
