I think it might be called creative procrastination.
You want to do something but you don’t. Not because you can’t or don’t want to, but just because your whole being is telling you that everything is not yet in place.
Something is missing.
It feels like you have not yet found the sweet spot (read about it here).
Today’s Monday Note is a good example. I usually go to Kirstenbosch every weekend and experience moments that trigger thoughts I then write about. But due to bad weather and my sister’s birthday celebrations, it did not happen this weekend.
The whole day today I wanted to write this Monday Note, but it just did not happen. I felt something was still on its way to me.
Then Richard called me and we talked about everything from the reason we bought a car to buying a laptop and building an online community. What is the reason we are doing it? What do you want from it?
He mentioned Clay Christensen’s “Jobs to be done theory of innovation” and to make it easier for me to understand, we talked about my current focus on creating a community for members of the Productivity Club. “What is the job the community must do for members?”
It helped me simplify my thinking about the present situation, and not think ahead a year by when the club could have grown to 1000+ members. That will require a different job to be done compared to what is needed now.
I then thought about the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, in which Greg McKeown says something like “it is better to make 100 meters progress with one thing than making 1 meter progress on 100 things”..
So, what’s the job I want this note to do?
To make me aware that if I need to learn how to spell ‘cat’, I do not have to enroll for a PhD in spelling, and after 3 years I can not only spell ‘cat’ but can also tell you that “the history of the cat family can be traced through the fossil record to the Late Eocene Epoch (about 37 million years ago)”, and do it year by year.
Always ask, “What’s the job to be done?”, and then choose appropriate tools and ways to get that job done.
What does your calendar look like? Is it cluttered with unnecessary fripperies? What is the job you want your calendar to do for you?
In our lives, let’s ask, “What’s the job to be done?”.
And then let’s do it.
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“I’m a big believer in putting things off, in fact, I even put off procrastinating.”
-Ella Varner