I don’t really agree about the Zeno thing. Yes, most projects fail near the beginning, but I think that’s because projects that fail near the beginning don’t also get a chance to fail later! Most projects contain plenty of potential failure points.
This is probably less true of projects where there’s a bunch of basically similar work that needs to happen—once you start your work and get the hang of it and get used to the idea that you’re doing this work, it gets easier. But many projects have variety all the way through—you need to email different people at different points with different questions, you have different stages at which you do different types of work, etc. Sending an email is a different kind of scary from writing a draft is a different kind of scary from editing the draft is a different kind of scary from showing the draft to someone for feedback is a different kind of scary from deciding you’re done and submitting the draft.
I guess there is a sunk costs effect where you’re more likely to try and force yourself to put up with the later difficulties just because of how much time you’ve already put in. But it’s still very possible to continue intending to do that and then keep gradually putting it off until it becomes a lot less salient to you and/or it’s not relevant or useful anymore.
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Here’s how I did the exercise:
1. Naïvely write down the major steps in completing the project.
2. Rate each step by difficulty, 1-10. (this idea is from the bug hunt, thank you)
3. Find the most difficult step and break it down into easier sub-steps, then rate each sub-step by difficulty and cross out the parent step.
4. Repeat step 3 until all your steps are of a very manageable difficulty and/or you can’t think of ways to subdivide them any further.
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Within subtasks, I think difficulty does sorta increase as I go down the list, but that’s mostly because any step of any difficulty begins with easy steps like “take a deep breath”, “create and title a Google doc”, “start an empty bullet-point list”, “set a 5-minute timer”. For me the timer is more helpful in getting me working than just writing a first letter or word—I will often write a word and then delete it out of uncertainty. And as I go down the entire list of tasks, there are easy things interpersed with hard things, just because there’s a lot of hard tasks involved that I need to prepare myself for before starting them for real.
Anyway, this is a useful technique and I think it will help me with this project :)
I really liked your take on planning. I’ve tried it on the task of “doing self CBT therapy session on my X painful belief” and found that there was another tension point that was helped by rewriting into additional steps.
I didn’t really understand your disagreement with ‘zeno thing’ - I saw it stating that most projects fail before they begin or immediately after the beginning. Regardless of truthfulness of this claim—it doesn’t mean that there are no other important failure points that would have been exposed in projects /if we were/ to start them.
But whatever failure points there are—fixing first line of failure still seems really reasonable. And I didn’t see any claims that this is all it takes for the project to succeed.
One of the most trivial examples—at the beginning of each separate step I could encounter similar levels of resistance.
I don’t really agree about the Zeno thing. Yes, most projects fail near the beginning, but I think that’s because projects that fail near the beginning don’t also get a chance to fail later! Most projects contain plenty of potential failure points.
This is probably less true of projects where there’s a bunch of basically similar work that needs to happen—once you start your work and get the hang of it and get used to the idea that you’re doing this work, it gets easier. But many projects have variety all the way through—you need to email different people at different points with different questions, you have different stages at which you do different types of work, etc. Sending an email is a different kind of scary from writing a draft is a different kind of scary from editing the draft is a different kind of scary from showing the draft to someone for feedback is a different kind of scary from deciding you’re done and submitting the draft.
I guess there is a sunk costs effect where you’re more likely to try and force yourself to put up with the later difficulties just because of how much time you’ve already put in. But it’s still very possible to continue intending to do that and then keep gradually putting it off until it becomes a lot less salient to you and/or it’s not relevant or useful anymore.
--
Here’s how I did the exercise:
1. Naïvely write down the major steps in completing the project.
2. Rate each step by difficulty, 1-10. (this idea is from the bug hunt, thank you)
3. Find the most difficult step and break it down into easier sub-steps, then rate each sub-step by difficulty and cross out the parent step.
4. Repeat step 3 until all your steps are of a very manageable difficulty and/or you can’t think of ways to subdivide them any further.
--
Within subtasks, I think difficulty does sorta increase as I go down the list, but that’s mostly because any step of any difficulty begins with easy steps like “take a deep breath”, “create and title a Google doc”, “start an empty bullet-point list”, “set a 5-minute timer”. For me the timer is more helpful in getting me working than just writing a first letter or word—I will often write a word and then delete it out of uncertainty. And as I go down the entire list of tasks, there are easy things interpersed with hard things, just because there’s a lot of hard tasks involved that I need to prepare myself for before starting them for real.
Anyway, this is a useful technique and I think it will help me with this project :)
I really liked your take on planning. I’ve tried it on the task of “doing self CBT therapy session on my X painful belief” and found that there was another tension point that was helped by rewriting into additional steps.
I didn’t really understand your disagreement with ‘zeno thing’ - I saw it stating that most projects fail before they begin or immediately after the beginning. Regardless of truthfulness of this claim—it doesn’t mean that there are no other important failure points that would have been exposed in projects /if we were/ to start them.
But whatever failure points there are—fixing first line of failure still seems really reasonable. And I didn’t see any claims that this is all it takes for the project to succeed.
One of the most trivial examples—at the beginning of each separate step I could encounter similar levels of resistance.