A couple of weeks ago, when I got a new job, I had a burst of energy. Since, I've mostly been enjoying it, but I've also been thinking about how to keep it. I've had lots of ups and downs before, but this time I had a feeling I've only had a couple of times, of things I'd been mulling over for ages coming together (and when I've felt that before, I've usually been right, even though I've also had many much more temporary ups and downs).
What could I say to one-month-ago Jack to try to impart this to him? I think the energy is a product of only a few things:
* A burst of energy from a new interesting job
* A comprehensive centralisation of all of my TODOs and so on, so I didn't feel anything was "hanging"
* A general knowledge of good personal habits that don't impair me (like, how late it's safe to stay up)
* A lack of any ongoing march of doom sapping energy from me
* A lack of so much I need to do I literally don't have time to do it all [1]
But the thing is, I think I basically knew that before. Even if I hadn't collated it into a list, I'd said very similar things before, so simply saying that wouldn't necessarily help, I need to say how to do that.
Unfortunately, it's not something I can reliably test, but I think my advice to myself would be:
0. Until this point, spend several years mulling over what paradigms would be good in your life, even if you're unable to make the change now
1. Extricate yourself from all spirals of doom, if any. [Either just write them off, if you can, or at least take Saturday off to wind down and do the self-analysis on Sunday.]
2. Centralise all the TODOs and all of the scattered paperwork. If it's too amorphous it'll still get lost, so have a good sense for how things should be organised. For instance:
- if there's not time to do everything, at least create an empty PLACE for the most important things, so you can _start_ putting them there, rather than having them lying around
- keep the master list easily scannable. This is non-trivial, and I can describe what I did this time[2] but more important is watching for the general skills of _how_ to do it.
3. Makes sure the most worrying things are clearly encapsulated (I find contingencies for worst-case scenarios useful, because I can think "if it is out of control, what do I do" not "I daredn't think about it just in case it's out of control")
4. Make a start on doing stuff. If possible, avoid day-to-day depressing stuff...
[1] I don't think I've ever had this problem, except if I've left everything to just before a deadline, but I include it because I know some people DO have more things than they can handle, either because they have too much stuff, or are physically incapable of doing the amount of stuff they have, and that my advice probably wouldn't help if I _am_ in that situation.
[2] The current system is: one spreadsheet page for everything I'm thinking about doing at all, split into categories of 5-6. There's up to 20 "current" and up to 100 total, although many of those are homogenous lists, like "bits of household stuff to buy" and "bits of housework to do" that don't require any managing, but are still listed separately. Less than half have a significant existence. And then a second page of everything I have to do: some of those projects containing tasks I can do immediately (eg. "phone so-and-so and ask if they can do thurs", "look up prices for blah online") and not things I can't do immediately (eg. "wait for a reply from so-and-so")