Some very good feedback and comments from last week on Continual Readjustment — thanks for that, it's very good to see how the work here is actually being read, interpreted and used. Please do keep the good comments coming, especially about how you're putting things into practice.
The first thing you'll note this week is that the Continual Readjustment thing worked just fine; the weakest link of Declare/Complete being at 0 moved to 3 this week, which was good enough to get going.
Now, let's talk about another usage of this type of control:
The Canary in the Coal Mine
You'd be forgiven if you thought this week had a couple bad days in the middle, and maybe a train-wreck on the evening of the 15th that set off a cascading spiral of things breaking.
But you'd be wrong — this was one of the most productive weeks I've had in ages.
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Let's talk about why I build the Lights Spreadsheet.
It didn't start as an idea for a spreadsheet, and the lights came later.
Instead, my last two days in Toronto (back on the 18th and 19th of April), I decided there was only one thing I wanted to figure out:
What is the list of stuff that I really should be trying to do every day? The stuff that "pays for itself" and is, under normal circumstances, never worth missing out on?
This list of stuff will be different for everyone. But eventually I narrowed it down to those 17 points you see above. It actually took a lot of time of thinking, looking over journals, debating individual points (I had another 5-10 items that were candidates for the Lights Spreadsheet), and finally setting up the phrasing and rough order of how I'd look to manage and measure them.
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There's basically three times people get off track with their routines, habit, and how they run their life: when unusual events or extenuating circumstances happen, when things are going badly, or — most counterintuitively — when things are going well.
The first two cases are easy enough to understand: if you're traveling and don't normally travel, your schedule gets screwed up. If you have to care for a sick relative, your habits fall off. This is normal and understandable, and there's a variety of literature on how to try to navigate it (restart habits right away when back on a normal day, try to get in lesser "placeholder" versions of the habits, etc).
Likewise, when things fall apart due to illness, fatigue, burnout — well, the best advice is to heal up and rebuild gradually. There's not much else that can be said. If your body and mind are broken down, all the clever tricks and nuances in the world can't help. It's generally upstream preventative maintenance that's the answer there.
The final case becomes the most interesting, and it's the one I hear people talking about the least. And that's when things are going great.
It's always tempting and to some extent unavoidable to start skipping fitness, napping, and general routines and sanity-checks if you're in the most productive workflows of your life.
It might be foolish from some long-term perspective, but it's unrealistic to think it'll never happen. If you're on fire in a collaborative work session, set of meetings, whatever, you're less likely to break them off to go nap or go to the gym, unless you're very dedicated and have built your entire life around those habits. (And even then, it's still possible to skip if the payoff is big enough.)
There's no real sense fighting against this too hard, since everyone will do it now and then. The key is if you can recognize it before it gets out of hand.
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Before I travel or go on an unusual schedule, I now prepare to try to keep my habits in line, or agree on how I'll compromise them and what day to get firmly back on track. Easy enough.
I've also accepted that illnesses and bad things just happen, and you might "lose" for a period while recovering. I do what I can during those times; I recommend you do too. But it happens.
The real value is in noticing when I'm hitting the gas hard and not stopping to do any maintenance on the car — and this is where the lights spreadsheet shines.
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You’ll note the effect on this annotated version — napping, taking a walk, time spent on enjoyable activities all get shaky (in addition to not much time spent doing routine admin work), and then it starts to turn into a cascading effect of a bunch of things get sloppy.
It was very much still a non-issue at that point, but I can see the red lights spreading rapidly. The natural implication is that I should slow down a little bit, and take some time off — which I did on the 18th, taking a long walk around Istanbul, getting a massage, doing some enjoyable stuff that had to be done anyways (buying new boots and getting a haircut), etc.
Then, with Week Nine in the books, I turned to trying to hit the lights particularly on-point at the start of Week 10, clearing up the accumulating backlog of admin, and taking the time to nap, budget time for at least a half hour of doing something explicitly enjoyable (internet surfing never counts towards this), and so on.
***
That’s this week’s takeaway: you can set up your controls in such a way as to give you advance warning of problems happening. For my part, seeing the red lights start to spread rapidly makes me slow down and give a day or two to managing my habits and keeping my affairs in order. I answered a lot of email, paid bills, took walks, handled admin, rested a bit, etc.
All of this is obviously the correct call on long-term time horizons, but can be missed in short term blitzes. It’s useful having an advance warning system for when a cliff might be there.