Nietzsche: The talent of some men appears slighter than it is because they have always set themselves tasks that are too great. — Human, All Too Human, Section Nine: Man Alone with Himself – Aphorism # 538
(2024dec12) A couple of friends have told me that they found the project management section of my book Introspect to be incredibly valuable. It might seem somewhat ironic that I haven’t put together a nice blogpost about project management, but in a sense it’s because I’m typically busy focusing on more important projects. Nevertheless, I have a moment as I’m doing some general tidying, and I figure I might as well… edit and update this post bit by bit. Which is itself one of my PM principles. Do little touches from time to time.
Another VPM principle is, try to make your project people-shaped. Let’s get meta. What would it mean to make this project (of updating this post) people-shaped? I’d have to pick a person that I’m writing for. The best person I could write for right now is myself. I would like to write something about project management that helps me get better at project management. Maybe that’s not even the right phrasing to use. Super broadly: I’d like to get more of my highest-value projects done, better, faster. Where do I start? Right now my natural algorithm is telling me, get a quick estimate of how much time you have in this current session. As I write this at 940pm, I know that I ought to go to bed a little early today, since I have two consultations scheduled tomorrow. That means I’m going to be working for maybe an hour tops. That’s not a lot of time. What can I reasonably do in an hour? I have lots of tabs open. I could close a bunch of tabs.
A lot of my tabs contain atrophied intentions… (hey, i wanna write something about atrophy)– messes are cluttered intentions… okay it’s time to wrap up and go to bed…
✱ everything past this point is unedited old stuff i may get around to tidying up later✱
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Some people dick around aimlessly their whole lives, while others build rocket ships and cathedrals.
Several people have told me that the above sentence made them uncomfortable. It reminds them that they haven’t accomplished much, and they worry that they’re going to be one of those who “dick around aimlessly their whole lives”, which is anxiety-inducing.
Now… slow down – I don’t think that’s dicking around is necessarily a bad thing.. Your life is yours, you didn’t ask for it, and you are free to do whatever you like with it. I’m not interested in passing judgement on people who aren’t accomplished. There are all sorts of variables that might come into play that make it harder for people to do things. Systemic inequalities, injustice, etc are all real things.
Also, there’s a lot to be said about how dicking around can be unexpectedly productive! But if you’re only dicking around because you expect it to be productive, ironically, that takes the fun and magic out of it. So there’s a sort of paradox here, and you likely need to see the humor in it and laugh about it in order to step outside of its vortex.
That said, I believe it’s possible for most people to transition from being aimless to doing and making things that they want to be doing. If you want to, this is something you can work on. And I’m here to help!
Raw intelligence don’t really seem to be the core variable that makes the difference here. What seems to make the difference is something like “executive intelligence”, ie the ability to get things done, which is made up of a bunch of smaller skills. One of the skills is to make small and correct promises. Another is to assess reality as accurately as you can with a limited amount of resources (time/energy).
You need to know how to focus on things properly. How?
You need to know how to plan. How? Plans are worthless, but planning is priceless. Mike Tyson allegedly said that “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
You should somewhat articulate your desires before you start investigating them. Like just make a list. Make moodboards. These are relatively fun things to do.
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I’m not a natural at project management, I’m self-taught, my methods are very clunky. Jinky, janky, junky.
You should define your projects clearly. It should be definite, observable, clear. One of the best projects I set out to do for myself was “write a million words”, which I broke down into “1000 posts of 1000 words”.
I’m still confident that I’m going to finish the project – I’ve spent almost a decade on it, I’m about 80% done, and I’m not going to abandon it.
Funnily, as I rewrite this section of the book, it dawns on me that I’m not nearly as good at project management as I would like to be – because if I were better at it, I would have finished this book by now. But I keep getting “distracted” from the matter at hand. Because I’m trying to do a lot of things at once, and I have a lot of things on my mind, and this is generally not advisable if you’re trying to get some specific thing done, like write a book.
The problem is that each section of the book – especially this section – is something that could be expanded into a whole separate book. Reality has a surprising amount of detail.
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Speedrunners
(visakanv.com/1000: consider the speedrunners)
I don’t know if you play video games, but I’m going to talk for a bit about speedrunners. Speedrunners are people who play video games with the intent of completing the game at record speeds. In a sense, what I’m hoping to do with this book is to help you “speedrun introspection” – and it’s not that you should try your best to get to the “end” as fast as possible – it’s not even clear that there’s an “end” – but that understanding how skilled performers and practitioners do what they do is something that can give you insight into your own practice.
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As I mentioned in the 100 pushups thing with baby steps, it feels good to complete mid-sized projects. You build confidence, you build competence, you expand your concept of what is possible. Writing many blogposts has helped me build the confidence I need to finish this book.
Doing anything at quantity + volume is automatically interesting. Things become more interesting once you’ve done a 100 of them. You start to develop a familiarity with the craft. You start to notice patterns in your output.
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Plans are worthless, planning is priceless
a todo list is a phantom projection of a possible future over the present. you can think of it as “scaffolding sketchlines” that you don’t necessarily have to follow. the sketchlines are useful even as you disregard them. draw them in pencil rather than ink
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Bottlenecks, resource constraints – theory of constraints is one of the most powerful and useful concepts I’ve learned. I’m going to credit my friend Tiago Forte here for introducing me to this concept, though it does predate him
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“Once you know what you want, how do you get it?”
This is partially a question of project management. I’ve done a couple of youtube videos about that, and it’s also kinda slightly outside the scope of this book.
There are lots of ways of approaching this question. One way is to say, you have to make a plan. Well, how do you make a plan? You might have to do a little bit of research. I tend to warn against doing too much research, because that can end up stifling you into paralysis.
So the important thing about making a plan is to quickly-ish figure out what the next actionable step is. What’s one small thing you can do, right now, that will put you in a slightly better position to get what you want? Suppose you want someone to date. Okay, are you on the dating platforms? You might have a philosophical opposition to online dating, but I wouldn’t worry about such big picture things too early. Are you on the platforms? Are your profiles updated? Can you get a trusted friend or five to look over your accounts and give you feedback on them?
Work backwards from the goal.
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projects require collaboration
I don’t like the dictionary definitions of “project”. They do tend to say “usually requires a lot of time” or “over a period of time”, which is correct, but I think these definitions still don’t capture the essence of it. A project is something that cannot be completed by a single individual in a single session. Which means that a project is something that, by definition, requires collaboration.
I find this to be a useful and compelling definition of projects. It instantly gets you thinking about how well or how poorly you are collaborating, both with yourself and with others.
When thinking about this, I realized that people feel powerful or powerless in proportion to their project management skills. if you struggle to collaborate with yourself and/or others, life can feel small, frustrating, like a cruel ordeal, full of suffering.
Whereas if you’re good at collaborating, with yourself or others, you can be a part of larger things, whether it’s writing a novel or playing in a band, and these experiences are deeply humanizing. Collaboration is humanizing! A simple and profound idea.
an underrated quality of babies and young children is that they give other people an excuse – including total strangers! – to collaborate in an impromptu production of “let’s help this kid have fun”
Have you ever had the above experience? It’s very pleasing!
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Project management, I think, is one of the most important life skills that I was never quite taught. In a sense, it’s the skill by which you learn all other skills.
References mentioned in the video:
Consider the Speedrunners [0714/1000]: http://visakanv.com/1000/0714-consider-the-speedrunners/
thread about my 1000pullups project: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1086256753988096001
Jennifer Dewalt, who built 180 websites in 180 days: https://leanin.org/news-inspiration/180-websites-in-180-days-how-i-learned-to-code
thread of friend meetups: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1002195033380929536
karenxcheng learns to dance in a year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w
47-year-old disabled veteran learns to walk again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9FSZJu448
the following is an unedited draft reposted from google docs:
What have I tweeted about project management
Doing anything substantial requires project management.
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