Decision fatigue
One thing I've noticed in my career is that I'm a much better decision maker in the morning.
When rested, I bring the energy, I solve the problem. I used to say I worked exactly twice as fast in the morning as the afternoon. Maybe it is due to being tired from working that morning, or it's a post-lunch crash.
Either way, I know for sure: by the time I get home that night, I don't stand a chance. No room for anything. Personal projects, side-hustle, alternate career as a writer be damned.
It was easier when I was fresh out of college, but by now it's too hard to not just veg on the couch until bedtime.
The difficult part about the limited use of that morning brain is that your side-hustle probably needs it more than your day-to-day. You need your full brain to make big-picture decisions, to push a whole project a step forward. In my experience, most day-to-days are pre-defined at the previous planning meeting, and now is time to execute that plan.
One method that worked for me in the past was finding odd times during the day
to put the when-I-get-home plan together. If I landed at home with an outline
for a blog post, I could finish it pretty easily. The hard part is already done,
and my tired brain has plenty of room for well-defined glue tasks. Well-planned
work is easy - just follow the plan. (And hopefully, plans can be automated as
well.)
All of this is building to make the case for a TODO list that tells you what to do, given the circumstances. I want to be able to opt-in to a task that fits my current mental state.
It should know that it's Wednesday at 2 pm, and that I'll be more productive doing a series of small tasks by 5 than continuing on the long-running task I'm burning out on.
It should know that given the up-coming week, I should take time to run Monday
and Tuesday morning because I have a scheduled Happy Hour on Tuesday night and a
day full of meetings on Wednesday, and my goal is 4 runs per week. (This one is
a reach, but you could at least imagine it auto-including a running day or not
based on whether you're slipping on a habit.)
On Thursday at 8, it should let me opt-in to a 20 min task that will benefit my novel and re-energize me a bit. It should provide me with all the relevant context for doing that task, and then kick me out when the pomodoro is up.
Key to this is Yodo somehow pulling this information from you. You need to tell it a task is a 20 minute one, or it needs to otherwise find a way to know that. Hopefully, that will all happen at planning/review time.
One thought that is recurring lately is about Threads of Work.
Decision-making fatigue is real! Hopefully soon, Yodo will be making suggestions for you.
Backlinks
- For a briefer overview of Yodo, see: yodo, the application.
Capture promises everything! Write those ideas down, we'll process them later. But how much does it cost to process it all?
Is a huge list of inbox items a good problem to have?
How do you decide what to work on, what to focus on?
Too much capture can lead to problems like Decision-making fatigue. Solutions might include things like Yodo, an application that tells you what to do.
Related: Is Yodo worth the overhead?
Trying to get a handle on larger game dev topics as I encounter and tackle them.