> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.
Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.
I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.
But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.
There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.
I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.
All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
I'd say for the purposes of this article anything that is required in order to have done the thing is "doing the thing".
If you need to read something to get the thing done you are doing the thing. If you already know everything to get started but still read another article you are procrastinating. If you need to sand this part to do a good job painting it, then you are doing the thing. If you just continue sanding with no benefit you are no longer doing the thing, you are now just delaying the next step
Additionally, a lot of people will describe doing completely unrelated things as "(mentally) preparing to do the thing."
I catch myself doing this. I will put off writing a job requisition by spending time on code. I will tell myself, "ugh, I'm just not in the right mental state to write a job req right now. Let me focus on some code until I'm ready." Which never works. I end up getting into a code flow state and that's all I work on for the rest of the day, or until I get interrupted by a meeting.
And then I get back from the meeting and say, "I got interrupted, I should just finish what I started and then I'll write the job reqs." And that never happens. I always pick up yet another coding task instead.
The only way I am ever able to get through admin paperwork is to just admit to myself I hate it but it has to get done, it has to get done right now, no amount of procrastiworking is going to make me stop hating it, so I should just get it over with so it's not sitting like a lead weight in the back of my head. And then when 5pm rolls around, I won't hate myself for letting yet another day go by without having the job reqs written.
Things I do to deal with the mental state procrastination lie:
- Start things. If after actually trying the thing I am truly not in a conducive mental state for the activity I can quit. Mostly evidence for this bad mental state is repeated mistakes at things I can already do. I think starting also weakens procrastination habits because you know you’re going to experience the thing you’re avoiding anyway even if you end up quitting part way through.
- Focus on whether it is a bad mental state for the activity rather than “the right” mental state for the activity. Most mental states will be good enough for most tasks. You don’t need code flow to code, even if you want it and it helps. You just need to not be in a state where you can’t figure things out or you keep introducing bugs.
- Completely reject my feelings about doing the task. If you’re in those feelings the task is a lot harder and the procrastination lies a lot easier to believe. It doesn’t matter in the short term how you feel about tasks you have to do.
- Constantly question the veracity of procrastinations lies. “Is this true?” “If it is true what can I do about it right now?”
- Reward myself after completing the task if I don’t get any kind of internal satisfaction naturally.
Painting is such a great way to explain this. I've made many mistakes painting myself, and only came to appreciate the amount of extra work involved when I looked closely at how a pro does it.
Things that have caused me to screw up various paint jobs:
- not color matching white paint to my existing white paint, causing a visible color difference
- buying the wrong kind of brush for my paint
- buying cheap brushes and then needing to dig hairs out of the paint
- not priming, which caused me to have to do multiple layers to get good coverage
- buying cheap paint, which together with not priming, caused me to have to do multiple layers to get good coverage
- buying too little paint because I did not estimate carefully and then having to pause mid-job to go buy more paint and extending the total time to more than a week (because I did not have time to finish the job the next day)
- not buying and putting down floor protection which caused a lot of extra time in cleanup and never actually getting the paint out of the crevices in the floorboards
- not taping out the windows and doors which slowed down painting and required a lot of just-in-time cleanups
- taping out carelessly with poor-quality tape, causing paint to get under the tape, and defeating the purpose of taping
- not changing clothes before a tiny paint job and needing to throw away a very decent t-shirt because metal paint does not wash out well
- buying very expensive paint for a rough paint job in my garage because I did not spend a minute to think about the final effect, and wasting a bunch of money for a poor effect
To avoid each of these mistakes you have to spend time not-painting. It's time well spent.
I've tried doing a work breakdown, and watching a pro do it, it seems roughly 0.75 units of time for prep, 1 unit of time for painting, and 0.5 units of time for cleanup. I did not count the time for researching and buying, but once you add commute, it's easy for it to be 0.5 unit of time, depending on size of job. Roughly 1.5x-2x of not-painting to 1x of painting.
You can make many software-development analogies to painting.
If we're mature experience painters, all of these things not-painting things are still "doing things".
Prep work sucks. In whatever field, I always love hearing from the greats how they make the hard work a little less sucky. Good tools, better workflows, figuring out what they can let slide, accepting the struggle and getting zen. The people who do it 80% right and manage to make peace with that always seem the most productive.
You can do a good job if you want to. But that usually required taking a step back and thinking about these 20% you didn't manage last time. Maybe you use the wrong approach, the wrong tool, maybe your tool is no longer sharp because you told yourself prep sucks. 80/20 is a good philosophy if you just want to earn a living, but a bad philosophy if you want to reach mastery (which coincidentally can translate into making a relatively good living).
The important part is, that the greats never were okay with just 80%. Their goal is usually to make the best work they can and that means improving on things they have previously done. That doesn't mean the project needs more work or resources. It means it makes best use of the work and resources available while delivering something that satisfies the masters quality standards.
Also: In some cases 80/20 mediocrity does in fact not cut it and it is just an excuse to do less work and not to think hard about things.
In most of my hobbies I feel like my growth and talent is limited by lack of volume, not my care or attention to detail. It's hard to let go and use one color instead of three, or not fix a flaw in model part nobody will ever see. I'm sure other people have the opposite challenge.
If it is a hobby then probably the most important bit of advice is that you keep doing it in a way that lets you enjoy it. If you feel you need to become better regularity (translating to quantity) is in fact important, especially if you're the perfectionist type.
Coincidentally I teach (medialab) at one of the most recognized art universities in Europe and have a MA of fine arts and my mother is a painter. In my judgement the most overlooked (or most underrated) skill when it comes to painting is perception. Being a good painter aside from the manual skill has a lot to do with seeing or being able to see, even if you're not doing figurative paintings.
Painting more and more different things can be a good way to raise your own perception skills. It is also important to revisit old works occasionally. Ideally you will immediately see what was wring (or good) with them, something you may have not perceived back when you did it. This is proof that you leveled up.
Painting is such a good example, and is one of the closest analogies to programming. You can do it fast and it’ll be done but you probably won’t like it. Or you can prep for it and it’ll take 10x longer, you won’t see anything for 90% of the time and it’ll be done in the blink of an eye.
At work I got asked for a feature a while back. We tee shirt size estimates and I said it was an XL. I came back a week later at our next planning sync and said I was going to work on it that day and we’d have it tomorrow. PM was very confused and worried about committing to an XL task in 24 hours - but I’d spent probably 3 days of the last week planning, doing requirements, writing up a spec sheet, weighing up against alternatives etc, and came up with the “simple solution” that we could smash out in a few hours. All of that time was “doing the thing”.
(Well, most of it. Some of it was just naval gazing and wondering if it really could be that simple…)
I read your first sentence and I thought "Yes, just like painting" and then you hit me with:
Painting is a good example
While I agree with your point, I believe this post is just psychological pep talk aimed at people like me (and probably the author) who dance around in endless preparation/postponing because they can't bring themselves to do the ting. It's generally an emotional issue: You are afraid of messing it up or of the consequences of the thing etc.
I wish I didn't but I need that kind of pep talk in my life
Sanding and cleaning are absolutely parts of painting. As is the wait until the paint dries.
Preparing the work area isn't. If you can get away without doing it (like if you can move the piece into some area you don't need to prepare), you should.
I think what the author means here is that doing prep work is useless if you don't follow on it. No amount of investigation, planning or organization is going to be worth anything until you finally apply it to do the actual core of the thing.
Prep can be the thing when it's an intentional, necessary part of the process. The key difference is whether you're preparing with purpose, or just endlessly circling the task to avoid actually starting
For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.
Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.