When it's hard to start, try a different approach.

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? I've been reflecting on my last work week, and one of the things that happened is, I spent a lot more time doing what's called shallow work and doing connection based stuff rather than deep work.

[00:00:38] What do I mean by that? It means I spent a lot of time in Zoom calls, I spent a lot of time messaging people back and forth in Slack. I spent a bunch of time answering support emails and just triage – triaging issues. [00:01:00] And the one great thing about stuff like this is that it gives you that hit of accomplishment.

[00:01:07] You know? It's a small task. You did it. Yes, I did. One more thing! Awesome! And every single time you fix something or do something, you know, resolve a question from a client or figure out something in a Zoom call. Or, you know, help a coworker out with a question that they have, you know, you feel good. It's another thing that you can tick off your list all the same while there is something else, something larger, harder, more difficult, that cannot be resolved in 20 or so minutes or something like that.

[00:01:50] That is getting pushed to the side. You know, it keeps getting lower and lower on your list until, oh look, the work day is over. I no longer [00:02:00] have time to do this, and then you try again the next day. Now, there's a lot of different ways to combat this, but what I've been thinking about is that they are just treating the symptom, which is something we talked about recently, and maybe the problem is, this internal resistance to the deep work [is] because we know that it's going to be hard a lot of the time.

[00:02:26] The work that we need to do, the deep work that we need to do, requires not just concentration and space and time. It also requires us to be deeply, very intensely engaged in our minds. You know, mentally. It may require us to push ourselves and learn something new or figure out a new way of doing something.

[00:02:52] This is a fairly big core component of all deep work. And sometimes you just don't wanna do the hard things, [00:03:00] right? You just wanna do the easy thing. And I think that that may have been a component of what happened for me last week, and maybe for you too, you know, it is natural. It is normal to not wanna do hard things, and I've been thinking about, you know, if that is the reason that I was even more so avoiding some of this deep work that I needed to get done.

[00:03:35] What can I do to combat that? What is the solution here? And I thought of a few different things that I wanna try this coming week. One, let's see if I can break that deep work into more manageable sections or give it more smaller objectives [00:04:00] to work towards that don't feel quite as hard. And maybe the other is:

[00:04:07] Can I come at this work from an angle that is exciting to me, that is more interesting because you know, when you find something interesting, it's really easy to do hard work for it. I have experienced that time and time again. So maybe there is a different way to come at this, a different approach that might be more interesting.

[00:04:26] It may make it a little more inefficient maybe, but perhaps it'll get me to actually do the work, which is far more important. So anyway, that is the thought that I am taking into this work week with me.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.