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There is a time and place for the purposeful noisiness of busy. The work surrounding a group of people building an impressive thing contains essential and unavoidable busy and you will be rewarded for consistently performing this work well. This positive feedback can feed the erroneous assumption, “Well, the more busy I am, the more rewards forthcoming.” This is compounded by the insidious fact that part of being busy is you aren’t actually aware that you’re busy because you’re too busy being busy. You have no internal measurement of the amount of time you’ve actually spent being busy.
"Workaholism" is more a part of the Hong Kong culture than anything else. But is the marathon grind necessary or is it done simply because it is expected and accepted?
In fact, studies have shown that long hours at the office are often productivity and efficiency killers. Fewer hours means the fat is squeezed out of lengthy meetings, long lunches, water cooler chatter, and, yes, all of that Facebook and personal e-mail time, which suck up hours out of the average working day.
The first time you do anything it's going to suck. That just the nature of learning new things: you will make bad new things for a bit until you learn the subtle lessons of the nature of the new thing.
You can't be perfect when starting from zero, but you can learn a lot from the initial try and that is an essential step towards learning something new.
The key lesson is to not be afraid of failure: embrace it and make it part of your production process. Don't even attempt to deliver V1.0: make every external deliverable v2.0, and set out to fail on the first attempt in a way that teaches you how to not fail for the next.
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No matter how good a cook you are, and no matter how hard you try, the first pancake of the batch always sucks.
It comes out burnt or undercooked or weirdly shaped or just oddly inedible and aesthetically displeasing. Just ask your kids.
At least compared to your normal pancake–and definitely compared to the far superior second and subsequent pancakes that make the cut and get promoted to the pile destined for the breakfast table–the first one’s always a disaster.
Tufte calls this a Business Methodology Fad, i.e. it claims that a simple procedural hack can compensate for not studying the problem in detail
This post is How NOT to Multi-task — a guide to working as simply as possible for your mental health.
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