Intentionality

My first full-time permanent job was as a consultant at Booz-Allen & Hamilton in their strategy practice.  I knew f&*k-all about business strategy, but I was analytical and a hard worker, and the job needed a lot of those qualities.  I found myself overwhelmed by work — 1,000 things to do every week and every day, and only time to accomplish 10-20 of them.  And the job had a constant stream of high-priority interrupts — a “crisis” at a client, a senior partner who needed something ASAP, a peer needing some urgent help, and so on.   

I think every significant job I’ve had has shared these characteristics — way more work than you've time to do, and a constant stream of high-priority interrupts bringing more work and scrambling your day.  It has always been easy to let my day get away from me, to get swamped by the interrupts, and to leave the day tired and no closer to my goals.

At my job and outside work, I have always read a lot.  Magazines, newspapers, journals, and books.  And now, of course, we are awash in content and media.   Social media apps, with their never-ending doom-scrolling.  Email.  Newsletters.  News sites.   Five hundred thirteen channels of s__t on the TV to choose from.  E-readers with voluminous online libraries.  And so much biased, manipulated, and fake content — and now AI-produced content.  It is easy to spend hours a day consuming messages that someone else has programmed, someone with their own goals.

I have fought the battle of being very intentional about what I let into my brain and what I do with my time, both at work and at home.  The world conspires to distract you, to amuse you, to engage you in someone else’s content — and the world isn’t interested in what is good for you.   And sometimes this is ok, sometimes I want to be distracted or amused.  However, I also want to be intentional about this — I want to control how much time I spend on distractions, and I want to control the content that distracts me.  

All we have on this earth is time, and it behooves us to be thoughtful and intentional about how we spend it.

My intentionality practices

I have four practices I use to support being intentional.

A colleague of mine once said something along the lines of “If you can’t say what your goal is, you are unlikely to reach it”.  I spend time each week thinking about my goals and how I want to allocate my time, and I review them daily, making adjustments as needed.  What tasks do I want to complete, what things do I want to learn about, and what do I owe people?  I use Apple Notes for tracking goals — it's on all my devices, always close at hand, and it's unstructured.   I have tried more structured tools, but I find them constraining, and I end up spending too much time fighting the tool.  I don’t think it matters much what tool you use, as long as it is always close at hand.  

I tightly control my calendar.  No one puts obligations on my calendar except me. It is so easy for calendars to get filled with cruft, to get filled with time supporting other people’s goals.  I block out time for my own goals and protect that time aggressively.  I use Google Calendar with Apple Calendar frontends — again, it is on all my devices, it is always close at hand.  I have a preference for using whatever frontends Apple jams in their devices, because I regularly use two different Macs, two different iPads, and an iPhone, and I don’t have time to go around installing and maintaining some other app on all those devices.  

I always keep a Kindle with me.   I have hundreds of unread books on it.  Weighted towards nonfiction, but with some escapist fare and some more challenging fiction. The Kindle works for me — massive battery life, large storage, minimal distractions while reading.  I always want to have reading material at hand during slack time, so that I can read something that challenges and educates, rather than playing Candy Crush or consuming whatever feed someone else has programmed.

I am constantly producing something.   Some code, a newsletter post, an analysis, a paper, a piece of art, something.  I can’t just be a sponge for information — I have to create products with my own hands and brain to understand the material I am learning, to work through my thinking.  And I don’t want to be a passive consumer — I want to be a creator and give back to the world.

That’s it.   That is what I need to be intentional — clear goals, judicious time allocation, a library of content I choose, and a tool in hand.  

Matt Yglesias said this week that “we need a cultural shift toward people being more mindful about what they do with their time.”  I could not agree more.   I have not always been great at this — in particular I have not always been great at maintaining the relationships and friendships in my life, I have not been mindful enough about them.  I am working on it!

And along with intentionality, we need a greater focus on creating and thinking.  There is growing evidence that our great technology innovations may be damaging our critical thinking skills.    We have to direct our tools, not let our tools direct us.

Shorts

When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.  Your job is going to consume a stupid amount of your time — you better like every aspect of it, down to the detailed nitty gritty.  I have always found everything about computers to be fascinating, from the competitive ebb and flow of major commercial firms, down to the way we carve and mold silicon into transistors.

The thing is, you don’t get to 3% of the market by trying for 40% and failing.  You get there by embracing the 1% and doing such a good job that the word spreads.  Progress is built in slow painstaking manner, one brick at a time.  Start now.

You could spend a lifetime just becoming an expert on rope.  I think I will study rope-making in depth; when the apocalypse comes, I figure that rope-making will be a valuable profession.