How To Actually Do The Work
When I first started my apprenticeship I joined a mentoring circle with the IT Director of the company.
He told us about the time he walked in on his son sitting in front of his computer, staring at the screen but not typing or moving the mouse.
“Why aren’t you working?”, he said. The son replied, “I am working. I just sent an email and I’m waiting for them to reply!”
The truth is, when you’ve spent most of your life being taught in school, you become extremely reliant on the educational structure. When that structure goes out the window, it can feel unnatural to just pick up tasks and do work without being told by a teacher.
In this article, I’ll be sharing my experience transitioning from school to office and explaining how to be productive in the professional environment.
Swallow The Frog
This is something I discovered about a month ago and I wish I had tried it sooner. Swallowing the frog is where you work on your most important task first thing in the morning, which creates momentum for the rest of the day.
A lot of people (myself included) leave important tasks for later in the day because they’re too tired (or lazy) to do it earlier.
I know you’ve done this before, coming up with endless excuses for why you shouldn’t work hard right now. Besides, you’ve got the whole day to worry about it!
Since writing these posts became my new most important task for the day, I’ve been waking up extra early before work to write content for this blog.
It feels good to start my working day having already achieved the most important thing according to my goals (to build a personal brand). I don’t feel tired in the mornings anymore; I feel energised.
Compared to last year when my side hustle hours were after my full-time job (7pm-9pm), I’ve already: created my website, gone live, and posted new content on consecutive days.
I know for a fact that if I had left it until after work I would have found some way to distract myself. Start swallowing the frog and you will see immediate results in your productivity.
Deep Work
Deep Work by Cal Newport is a must read for aspiring apprentices or new hires.
Essentially, deep work requires entering a state of intense concentration to complete a cognitively demanding task. Think of a software engineer who has to solve a complex problem.
We live and work in a culture of ‘always on’, meaning people expect you to be available all the time.
This has disastrous consequences for concentration because you’re constantly switching from deep work to shallow obligations.
You can go back to your coding all you want, but part of your attention will always be stuck on the previous task, message, email etc. This is known as attention residue.
My advice for apprentices is to combine the practice of deep work with swallowing the frog. If you start early enough, it’s more than possible to get an hour or 2 of deep work in before you’ve even had the first meeting with your team.
Sometimes shallow work is impossible to avoid, but by properly scheduling your day you can get the most important things done in line with your goals.
As a software engineer I should have been spending the first 2 hours of my day coding. But I didn’t. Instead I read emails, scrolled on LinkedIn, and found distractions from the hard tasks. If you want to progress quickly, don’t make the same mistake as I did.
Plan Your Day
It’s easy to lose sight of what’s important when you don’t have a concrete plan or to do list for the day. You’ll end up picking the easiest, low effort tasks to feel good about yourself.
I use Google Calendar to plan my entire day. Every single hour from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night.
I don’t need to waste time thinking ‘what should I do at 6pm on a random Tuesday…’ I know I need to train MMA. Since this is already locked in and planned by past me, future me is less likely to do anything else.
At work, I use the same principle with an outlook calendar to schedule my tasks around my meetings. At 10am after our daily team meeting, I know exactly what to get started on.
Combined with a physical ‘day-a-page’ pocket diary, you can tick off tasks as you complete them.
It seems like overkill, but if you haven’t tried it you forfeit the right to an opinion on it. I get so much more done by knowing exactly what I have to do each day and when.
It only takes an extra 2 minutes to plan, but saves more than 10x that in lost time due to lack of clarity. If that’s not a ROI I don’t know what is…
Win or Learn
One of my favourite quotes from Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations is: “The impediment to action advances action; what stands in the way becomes the way”.
When I was a developer, the main thing standing in my way of success was that I couldn’t code. It wasn’t my team, it wasn’t my environment, it wasn’t that the work was too hard, it was my lack of ability.
I thought that if I tried to work on a defect and failed, it would be a disaster. I thought I’d be letting the team down by even trying to work on something that was out of my depth.
But coding, like most things in life, is win or learn. If you come up with a solution to a problem and it works - you win. If you come up with a solution and it doesn’t work - you learn.
As long as you don’t quit, you’ll keep learning until you win.
Circling back to my man Marcus, the impediment to my action (solving coding problems) was the exact thing that would have advanced my action in the first place.
You get better at the thing you can’t do by doing it badly until you learn how to do it well. This is true for pretty much every skill you can think of: driving, martial arts, sales, writing etc.
Temporary defeat is not permanent failure. Adopt a win or learn mindset to reach your goals.
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