January 14, 2022
Decision quality
Do not equate the quality of a decision with the result of that decision.
For example: If you decided to drive home drunk and you happen to make it home safely, nobody would say that the “positive outcome” means you made a “good decision” in that scenario.
Yet, we so often apply “hindsight bias” to our decisions: We look back at the decisions which resulted in a poor outcome as being bad decisions and the decisions with a positive outcome as being good decisions.
Source: Thinking in Bets, Shawn Blanc, https://shawnblanc.net/2022/01/thinking-in-bets/
We make decisions with the best information available. If that choice doesn’t pan out, it’s not a quality problem in the decision, it’s a lack of information. Circumstances change. Context matters.
Failure, also, is how we learn. Choosing to try something new is how we grow.
Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/decision-quality
Links
December 30, 2021
The Insinuation of Stasis
Screen shot of my yearly templates
Well… 2021 is ending and it’s been a really tough year for me. The lack of momentum from 2020 and the glimmer of hope before resurgence all lead to a year of… stasis. I’d go so far to say that the Stasis full replaced my original yearly theme of “reinvigoration” such that, were I the sort to grade my efforts toward a year theme (I’m not, they aren’t pass/fail things) I’m pretty sure I’d flunk it.
Like.. I didn’t even read a full book? The pandemic lockdown mindset insinuated itself into everything in 2021 and became an excuse to just… not. Very little writing, art, exercise, house & home build, and pretty much anything. I don’t think I even got much large work stuff done where I feel I had considerable more focus.
But these themes are about direction setting, not specific goal accomplishment. So I may have been more stasis-minded than reinvigoration-minded, but that’s ultimately ok and nothing I can change now. There’s only setting myself up for the next year.
Pictured above is the template I use for yearly planning. The idea is to set directions in increasing levels of specificity to help guide where I go in the year. I’ve included the template text below the line for folks that are interested.
This is how I use it.
The Sky
The sky is the largest, biggest thin that matters in your life. Vocation. The thing that generates your energy, that rallies you, and the thing that insinuates everything that you do. For me, this wasn’t something I really figured out until I’d been doing these yearly preps and review things for a number of years.
So, if you have no idea what you’d say is The One Big Thing that matters to you, don’t stress it. And really, it’ll refine or change over time. It should. You grow. What matters to you should grow and change with you.
Flight plan
Each level increases in specificity to help refine what you want your year to resemble. I start with a single word to define the year. Incidentally, these become the titles for my yearly printed journals. 2020: The year of Community (lol)
My theme journals going back to 2012
- 2019: The year of Cultivation
- 2018: Refinement
- 2017: Self-improvement
- 2016: Loss
- 2015: Virtue
- 2014: Self-discovery
- 2013: Order
- 2012: Metamorphosis
Honestly, the more vague, the better. I think there’s actual value in having to think about what the word means when you review things. The word may take a whole new meaning. Cultivation was going to be about building relationships. It turned into a year of permaculture gardening and nature.
I answer some questions about the theme trying to help put some historical perspective and motivation but, again, don’t stress the content here. I don’t want the word to take too specific a meaning.
I trying to organize the things I want to focus on into broad areas. But I’ll tell you a secret… I occasionally do this last and group the projects or other ideas into areas at the end.
Scandalous….
Cruising altitude
This is the scaffolding for progress. What projects, focus, skills, or thing to do you want to do in a year. They should be bigger than “clean the garage.” But cleaning the garage could be part of a larger “get my physical space better organized.”
These are probably the most concrete thing to come from this thinking process and can be the Stuff What I Work Towards in the year.
In my case this is the Virtue and Project tracking work I do day-to-day. I have found, through the 2015 virtue project, that they become a really helpful engine for all the other things I want to do in a given year, month, or week.
I also try to start linking these things to the areas defined above. This is more about seeing where I’m spending my time. Maybe I only have one regular thing going for “increase overall health” and too many things in “organize spaces” and want to adjust the quantity of things you’re doing for an area.
Concrete things you want to do, like cleaning the garage (20,00ft), the steps to accomplish (10,000) and the related stuff from above. You may or may not have a lot here yet. It’s fine if you don’t. Just start.
Bringing it together
I ultimately build check-ins and reviews of each level in a time frame that makes sense for each. I review my projects weekly, partly because this includes stuff at work and I need to stay atop those of I want to HAVE a job, but also because the projects and tasks are the most dynamic.
The areas and cruising tools are every month or so. Probably not less than quarterly. Right now, the structure for the review is pretty free-form except for the daily task stuff I do at work. I kinda want to build better strategies for this review to be better about progress so that’s probably something I”lL try to do in the next few days while I work on the rest of the template stuff.
Like sticking the discrete stuff into a set of text files and can I manipulate with iOS Shortcuts to step me through the more concrete review parts - like run a shortcut for the quarterly that grabs all the stuff defined at the higher levels and asks me questions about them?
The End
IDK, something like that… Maybe gather the individual projects and tasks that work towards that out of my task manager? That would probably require some extra stuff logged in my daily procedures so I can dig that out quickly.
Something something over-engineering….
But any way you slice it, the last two years have been less than ideal and I’d like to change that. But “like to change” is very different than “actual change.” The latter needs active effort.
We start here.
The Sky
A Vocation
Ideally, this stays similar or refines over the years.
Last Year’s sky
Flight plan
The single word or idea to guide the year
The Year Of….
SUMMARY IMAGE?
Related quote
In summary….
A very short summary statement
Why this?
What brought this on?
What is it about this thing that you trying to accomplish?
Why now?
Did something trigger this?
The areas of focus for the year Like life, health, creativity, or whatever
Area 1 - brief definition
Area 2 - brief definition
Virtues where you should spend most of the time {Virtue list}
Specific projects to accomplish for the year
Project - virtue - area
Project - virtue - area
Actions, Items, low-level concepts to work
- Item - project - due
- Item - project - due
Where am I starting?
Where would I like to be at the end of the year?
Are there problems you’re trying to solve?
Permalink: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/the-insinuation-of-stasis
General
October 28, 2021
On allowing for processing
Etienne considers himself a more introverted person. Like Wortman Ploetz, he says he’s ultimately become more productive while working from home.
“I felt more in control of the management of my time,” he says. “For example, I think we’ve all been through this: you finish a meeting and you’re walking back to your desk and someone spots you and you have a conversation. And you lose the time to process the meeting you’ve just finished, and reset. That doesn’t happen anymore. Now, I can have my moment of reflection in silence, without disturbance. With things like Zoom and Teams there are even ‘do not disturb’ settings; you literally can’t message me.”
Very much this. When people are focusing so much on getting back to the office because being around people is how you innovate, that’s how extroverts work. Extroverts can create new idea connections through conversation with people. It’s the sounding board metaphor.
Introverts process ideas differently. Introverts can be more creative, more innovative, when allowed to sit and think without distraction.
The workplace was created for extroverts, by extroverts.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210713-why-introverts-excelled-at-working-from-home
And it biases contribution attention to the loudest among us.
Work
October 18, 2021
On executive awareness….
Interesting report I suggest you read.
Two out of every three executives (66%) believe they’re being “very transparent” regarding their post-pandemic remote-working policies. Less than half of workers (42%) agree.
Similarly, 81% of executives say their company’s leadership is “transparent about sharing new developments that affect the company.” Only 58% of employees concur.
I personally think that executives should be far, far more open on decisions that affect the company. Not necessarily is it “do what employees say” but talking about where you think things are going and WHY.
My recent experience has been a lot if “we are being transparent. Here’s a wiki” followed by policy change that wasn’t even in the wiki as a thing going on.
Transparency is not just announcing things at full company meetings…
Findings from the Pulse survey show marked differences between executives and employees—from return-to-office preferences to perceptions of transparency to employee experience and how workers are feeling:
• Most executives (66%) report they are designing post-pandemic workforce policies with little to no direct input from employees.
• While two-thirds of executives (66%) believe they’re being “very transparent” regarding their “post-pandemic” policies, less than half of workers (42%) agree.
Honestly, it feels like a lack of empathy. “Well, I like it this way so everyone must.”
Source: https://futureforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Future-Forum-Pulse-Report-October-2021.pdf
Work
