What to Work On

Working hard all day doesn’t matter if it’s on the wrong tasks. The most critical factor in your productivity is what you decide to work on.

The question of what to work on is under-discussed. There’s plenty of advice on getting work done: setting up good habits, creating productivity systems, project management, and planning. Yet, there’s relative silence for the crucial decision of which projects to pursue.

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Finding a Path and Walking It

Much of life boils down to figuring out a path for yourself and then getting yourself to actually walk it.

We often fail to stick to our plans because we’re not confident in our chosen path. And we fail to find paths forward because we don’t try enough things to find our footing.

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Coming Up With Ideas

In practice, most ideas—even groundbreaking ones—tend to be derivative or incremental. Even ideas that look original usually start out as a permutation on something already extant. Given background and context, even the most radical suggestions look like incremental steps.

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Ruling Out, Ruling In

A fundamental distinction is between having too many ideas or too few.

Having too many ideas creates the problem of prioritization. Evaluate your current activities and cull those that don’t make the cut.
Too few ideas can leave you feeling stuck.

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Making the Choice

A threshold for action is a crude way for filtering your projects. Advice to “do less” or “do more” misses the crux of the issue. Which efforts should you drop? Which ones should you undertake?
Having adjusted your threshold, and hopefully immersed yourself in a rang...

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