I’ve found that doing postmortems on all my projects is extremely helpful for keeping the long term perspective in mind. I think this is probably because it forces me to make all my projects discrete entities over time, forcing me to step back, reflect, and adjust my course instead of clustering them all together as “work” in my mind.
This carries the added benefit of giving me lots of information about my workflow and how it fluctuates under various conditions. For example, I’ll usually record the costs of the project (Money, Neutral Hours.), any external variables (time constraint, multiple projects at once, working with or without people, etc.) and any factors I constructed (How well does a donut per $X/Nh incentivize me to do a certain kind of work, what happens to my comprehension and test scores when I study with naps or interval breaks or whatever.) Additionally, this makes for a convenient way to optimize different activities for certain outcomes by way of experimentation.
I’ve found that doing postmortems on all my projects is extremely helpful for keeping the long term perspective in mind. I think this is probably because it forces me to make all my projects discrete entities over time, forcing me to step back, reflect, and adjust my course instead of clustering them all together as “work” in my mind.
This carries the added benefit of giving me lots of information about my workflow and how it fluctuates under various conditions. For example, I’ll usually record the costs of the project (Money, Neutral Hours.), any external variables (time constraint, multiple projects at once, working with or without people, etc.) and any factors I constructed (How well does a donut per $X/Nh incentivize me to do a certain kind of work, what happens to my comprehension and test scores when I study with naps or interval breaks or whatever.) Additionally, this makes for a convenient way to optimize different activities for certain outcomes by way of experimentation.