Push and pull and pushull
Kanban is chaotic and you sometimes feel like not using it, but a lot of
realizations and aha moments come from submitting yourself to its
discipline.
In my case, here's a funny pattern I found about my musical work: the creation of value coincides with the things I enjoy to do.
That doesn't always have to be the case. In any art or industry, a task can be boring for the maker, and yet be the one that is creating the value that we want to provide. For example: spreading the mayonnaise that makes the sandwich extra delicious, is not an amusing task per se, but the result is cool.
That's why I found curious that in my case both things coincide. For a musician, the value is created when you produce new sounds. And those are the moments that I enjoy. As I mention here perhaps too often, I don't get any kick out of finding the frequency that causes a hissing in the right snare. I think the people who enjoy that kind of thing are a bit of a nutcase, tbh.
A new realization joined a few days ago: in addition to "enjoying/not enjoying", there is another important variable to be considered: push/pull.
Pull is the kind of tasks that drag me to the guitar or computer with excitement: "wouldn't it be cool if..."
Push, on the contrary, are those tasks that I have to "adultly" oblige myself to do, and which can use all the productivity tech and tricks I can get a hold of: countdown timers, Parkinson's law, kanban boards, vision boards, pointing to myself with a gun...
The tricky part, and it has been a great lesson in flexibility, is that some tasks that start as pull can become inadvertedly push. Unless you notice and accept this rule, procrastination lies that way.
Maybe it's because the initial enthusiasm wears off ("honeymoon effect").
My battery runs a bit low these days, so I've created a time window for Push tasks. Knowing when a Pull task becomes push, and therefore waits its turn for that window, has been liberating.
(Another connected thought is that the tasks that are enjoyable can also be tiring... we're so used to work in bullshit, that we almost feel bad for being tiresome in something we enjoy doing...)
In my case, here's a funny pattern I found about my musical work: the creation of value coincides with the things I enjoy to do.
That doesn't always have to be the case. In any art or industry, a task can be boring for the maker, and yet be the one that is creating the value that we want to provide. For example: spreading the mayonnaise that makes the sandwich extra delicious, is not an amusing task per se, but the result is cool.
That's why I found curious that in my case both things coincide. For a musician, the value is created when you produce new sounds. And those are the moments that I enjoy. As I mention here perhaps too often, I don't get any kick out of finding the frequency that causes a hissing in the right snare. I think the people who enjoy that kind of thing are a bit of a nutcase, tbh.
A new realization joined a few days ago: in addition to "enjoying/not enjoying", there is another important variable to be considered: push/pull.
Pull is the kind of tasks that drag me to the guitar or computer with excitement: "wouldn't it be cool if..."
Push, on the contrary, are those tasks that I have to "adultly" oblige myself to do, and which can use all the productivity tech and tricks I can get a hold of: countdown timers, Parkinson's law, kanban boards, vision boards, pointing to myself with a gun...
The tricky part, and it has been a great lesson in flexibility, is that some tasks that start as pull can become inadvertedly push. Unless you notice and accept this rule, procrastination lies that way.
Maybe it's because the initial enthusiasm wears off ("honeymoon effect").
My battery runs a bit low these days, so I've created a time window for Push tasks. Knowing when a Pull task becomes push, and therefore waits its turn for that window, has been liberating.
(Another connected thought is that the tasks that are enjoyable can also be tiring... we're so used to work in bullshit, that we almost feel bad for being tiresome in something we enjoy doing...)
