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Spending time on things that have 0 value at the end of the day? Test the method retry to perfection! This is my daily struggle to be honest. I give myself 30 minutes every every day to reflect on things I can automate and/or skip entirely. But by doing the exact opposite. And then adding back some of the things already optimized I get a sense of progress and achievement. There is one more positive with doing this exercise, I get a chance to further improve! If we don’t go overboard with it, and take things one step at a time it is actually very rewarding.
Set a timer for 30 min
This is to manage overthinking and/or not give your self enough focus. Start exploring the last couple days/weeks, what have you done to make things easier? Start writing these things in a list.
30:00
Sometimes there is no single thing that comes to mind. That is a signal to think about what take your time with a low reward. I will post a guide on how I decide on what to automate at a later time. Make sure you do not miss out. By subscribing to the newsletter!
Ask your self a couple of questions
- Why did I fix this?
- What if anything did I loose by changing this?
- What did I gain?
- Is it really easier/faster now?
Try doing it like before for one day and then ask the same questions as above again. I can bet that there are a lot of improvements to your current solution that you can add! Or maybe there are simplifications that you can do to your solution? I often find that there are things that I am not happy with in current solution. Most common thing is that I have over-complicated my first 3 tries on automation.
Let go
Don't spend time outside of these 30 minutes a day! You know that you will get back to it during the dedicated time so just relax that you will! This is a very good way to let go! Focus on the task at hand instead of thinking about a way to make things faster/easier most of your time! For me this is a key to stop getting stuck in the constant improvement loop.
Why am I talking about this?
The AI I have built (Alice, Dennis and Carl) all do this and try to adapt. Depending on the outcome of interaction they change their behavior after each interaction. The key is to keep their (your) eyes on the ball and not just add more and more. This is one of the things I have seen many times when interacting with LLM:s. They just add until they are lost. It's important to audit results both for humans and AI. And as we learn new things every day we can go back and adjust older solutions!
Strive to have the workflow to Observe > Sketch > Apply > Ignore > Repeat. After a couple of iterations you can move on to the next thing. Just don't forget that even if it's "perfect" it will probably not be forever! And between these reflection exercises just don't think of it, focus on task at hand.
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