[PKM 0003] Playbooks prevent procrastination positively promoting perpetuous productive personal potentiation
Think less and do more
I have alot of stuff that I have been meaning to share, but haven't gotten around to it because I always find one hurdle or another to stall and then procrastinate. The problem is that I never know where to start and when I try to start I find that there's a lot of inertia keeping me from starting and—oh look there's a new video from one of my YouTube subscriptions. My goal for the weekend is to publish 10,000 words. Here is the first 879 words.
The solution that I've used to some effect (not great effect because I'm lacking on the consistency of doing it) is to create playbooks. This is similar to a sports coach's playbook, but is more generalized to anything. I originally found this concept when I was using Evernote from Jamie Rubin’s blog. The key difference and my personal spin on it is I have split my guides into HOW-TOs and Playbooks. HOW-TOs are quite self-explanatory and describes simply how to do something such as how to change your car oil. It's fascinating to know, but not something I want to do. Maybe when it's holiday season I'll whip it out and don my know-it-all cape and drop some knowledge bombs. It's nice to know trivia.
Playbooks on the other hand are the operationalized steps needed to complete something that is relevant in my everyday life. For example, one of the playbooks I (should) reference frequently is my playbook on processing photos. I've switched away from bloated pay2play software like Lightroom and am now using DigiKam after trying a number of them and found that it's incredibly lightweight and just as incredibly powerful. It's certainly not a holistic photo application. However, for managing photos I haven't found anything that can match it despite it's quirks and lack of support. Here are three tips that I use when thinking about playbooks:
Treat yourself like an intern
Every person has a million and one things that they are doing. However, they can only truly focus on one thing at a time. That's alright if you frequently rotate between a set number of things. Often we have many things that we pick up and put down only to let it collect dust and come back to it at a much later time and we've forgotten the progress that we've made and now have to start all the back from the beginning. That makes you back to the stage of an intern trying to figure it all out again.
This is where Playbooks can be beneficial in helping you not only refresh your memory, but skip the growing pains that first challenged you when you started on the activity in the first place. The playbook helps to narrow your focus and focus on what's important.
Stop adding complexity by listening to yourself
Treat the Playbook like a read-only document that you go out of your way to modify instead of adding or changing to it on the fly. When you need to execute a playbook it should be mindless, such that you don't create unnecessary friction in your execution of the task at hand. If you need to make a change feel free to make a note and comeback to it. However, if you are executing a playbook then you are trying to complete something. Don't distract yourself. Stay focused and execute. Execute, execute execute--just don't execute me.
When in doubt, trust the Pareto Principle
Completing a task often necessitates doing what is important and not necessarily doing it perfectly. It the conscious decision to cut corners on things that don't move the needle on a cost-benefit analysis. The Pareto Principle is a good rule of thumb for what can be skipped in that 20% of additional work needed to create the perfect outcome will require 80% more effort than was needed to complete the first 80% that only took 20% of the effort. Your time is valuable. Of course value is in the eye of the beholder and there are times when putting in the extra effort will pay additional dividends. However, I've found time and time again for most things (perhaps 80%) following the Pareto Principle leads to net greater total productivity and thus benefit.
I've used playbooks for along time and it's been a slow going evolution that started out as an alias for HOW-TOs that branched off into a personalized HOW-TO that is relevant to me specifically. Everyone can use the same HOW-TO, but playbooks are different in that they focus on your own personal processes and not something generic. Everyone knows how-to slow down when they see a cop to avoid getting a traffic ticket. However, not everyone needs to know that on a particular local street that is somewhat parallel to The King's Highway and thus bypasses the congestion there is a crosswalk adjacent to a school with a speed bump that has a blind corner where motorcycle cops frequently lie in ambush for the unsuspecting commuter. Now, I don't personally need to make a playbook of it because I frequent the road so much. However, if this was a road less traveled then this would be a good playbook to make.