Sept 17, 2019

I wanna spend more time with family and loved ones, but I also want to advance my career. It wouldn't hurt to have more time to myself either, I might even pick up a hobby. Finding time for one thing, means taking it away from something else. So I'm often going back and forth, trying to squeeze out more time. But that never works, and there's never enough time, so it feels like I'm failing on all fronts. I think this happens because I can't make up my mind about what's most important to me. It all seem important. And I think that's the problem I need to solve. I'm Daniel Lam and this is Inner Monkey.

I try and chip away at the various goals I have but there are just too many to keep track of. And because of this, I find it hard to pick out the important stuff I should focus on. Instead I often just try to multi-task and do as many as I can. But this causes me to spread myself so thin that I can't really devote the time or effort they require.

What ends up happening, is I just do everything really poorly. Sometimes, I make little progress on it and other times, accidentally conflict with each other and my effort basically cancels itself out. It's really discouraging to spend all that effort and feel like I'm going nowhere.

Whenever I think of something I want to do, my inner monkey makes a mental note and throws it on top of my mental pile of things to do.

It's easy to imagine that in this giant disorganized mess of notes, it's really hard to find something specific. Important things get buried; old things get lost. Searching for anything in that pile is a nightmare, so when my inner monkey looks for his next goal, instead of searching what's most important, he prefers to pick something, recent, off the top. And because what's on top changes day after day, conflicts can't help but emerge.

What I need to do is make it easier for my inner monkey to pick the goals that are important to me. And the best way to do this, is by organizing the mess he's made.

When I clean out my closet, the first thing I do, is throw out all the old junk. I'm often surprised by how much stuff can be tossed and this purging makes me feel fresh and renewed. I can do the same with the mess of to-dos.

Anything that's old and no longer relevant should be thrown out. So can any goals that obviously don't make sense or lack a clearly stated objective. I have to keep in mind that my inner monkey's a hoarder and he'll try to get me to keep everything, cause he has trouble letting go.

Ignore him and throw it away. I'm in this mess because I let him keep everything. So it needs to go. Besides, the more low quality ones I can throw out now, the less I'll have to organize later.

A trick to do this out without too much thinking, is to just write it down. Writing works because as soon as I try to write it down, I'll instantly know if it's dumb or not relevant anymore. And if I can't write down I'll know isn't worth doing.

Now that the trash is taken out, it's tempting to jump straight into sorting everything, but I find that if I do that, I'll get all bogged down by how many things I need to compare and rank; and then I give up because it's too much work to finish.

To keep it simple, I only need to care about the 10 most important goals to me. I don't have time to work on everything anyway. So I don't need to waste time organizing the stuff I might not get around to. I just need my top 10. Once I've got it, there's one last step.

I'll want to rank them by how easy they are to complete. The easier it is to achieve, the higher on my list they should go. Why? Because the faster I can check something off my list, the faster my inner monkey can feel good about the whole process and this create a virtuous cycle that will encourage him to keep working towards the next one. Plus, it just feel nice to check stuff off a list.

If I need to make any personal adjustments, this is the time. Just try to keep it to a minimum. No more than 1 or 2 changes. And no digging through the trash for more options. My inner monkey will want to get those back, but they didn't make the cut for a reason.

Now that I have everything sorted, the next time my inner monkey goes to reach for a goal, he'll reach for the ones I want in an order that's meaningful to me. And if a conflict arises, it'll be clear which one I should prioritize. If working on this podcast is the most important thing for me, I need to protect the time I've set aside to work on it. If it's not enough, anything that's ranked lower can and should be sacrificed to make room for the podcast. Period.

My time and energy is a zero-sum game, in the sense that I only have so much of it and it has to be divided up amongst everything I want to do. I can't magic up more, but if I get better at prioritizing where I should focus the limited resources I have, I can get more done and it can almost feel like magic. And this will be a big step towards living the life I want to live.