Just-In-Time PM #20: Speed as a Capability

In Part 19, I argued that continuously finding new sources of motivation was the most important challenge for knowledge workers, and that the best way to get started was to generate momentum through a series of small wins.

Although Progressive Summarization can bootstrap you to a minimum level of motivation, at some point you do need to go from faking it to making it. The mind can be tricked, but not fooled for long.

Our challenge goes from motivation to speed: how do you keep the wins coming fast and hard?

Throughout this series, I’ve emphasized again and again the critical importance of speed. Intermediate packets, downscoping, convergence, placeholding, small batches, and other techniques are all designed to help us maintain momentum.

Why is moving quickly so deeply important?

Because information decays. The actual data can be stored on disks or on paper for many years, but the essential value of that information is perishable, on multiple levels:

• Accuracy: accepted facts over time get replaced by newer, more accurate facts, through the normal process of scientific and cultural progress
• Relevance: as conditions change in society and the economy, an idea that was once highly innovative quickly becomes obsolete
• Awareness: as we previously examined, information that has been “loaded up” into our brains gets unloaded as soon as we move on to other tasks
• Memory: on longer timescales, we eventually completely forget that certain information even exists

Understanding that information is a highly perishable product, like fresh fruit or ice cream, the cost of delays starts to become apparent. Like an ice cream delivery truck hitting traffic on the freeway, the cost of a delay is not measured in minutes or hours. A delay risks losing the whole shipment.

Let’s convert our previous diagram from emojis to approximate timespans. Although states of mind vary a lot, all we need to keep in mind for now is that they don’t last forever. The segments in red represent our peak productive times.

If a project is large and requires deep focus, you’ll have to split it across more than one work session, because your deep focus time only happens occasionally: