It's 530PM on Monday, and I haven't gotten a lot done. I woke up at 6AM to get prepared for a 730PM dentist appointment, which required two hours in the chair. No pain or real discomfort, but I did end up going back to sleep for four hours afterwards. I did have several new thoughts though related to the current GHDR push.This push being strategic horizons as a structured procrastination-styled alternative to factory-style productivity.
What to do about Strategic Piles?
Last Friday I had made a huge list of overwhelming tasks, and it's interesting that today I am not worried about them at all because I know that they are in that pile and are not critical. I am content to leave them there. That's a win!
Forgetting about Doing the Hard Things
One things that strategic horizons doesn't cover are unavoidable projects that do require concerted sustained effort. I've described an alternative to these called strategic piles which are like "proto-projects", but they are intended as a mechanism to make overwhelmingly large task lists managagement without requiring a lot of energy-sucking management.
I'm thinking of modeling projects as destination nodes within the GHDR Strategic Universe. A project is a fixed defination toward a strategic horizon, and once you've gotten there the landscape around you changes because you are now different. I like this idea because it turns a project into an expedition that one can gear-up for, and I think it's this kind of elevated anticipation that works well with my particular form of ADHD. Expeditions are about possibilities more than the destination itself.
Things Take Time
ADHDers are often described as having time blindness, which in my head canon is a general unawareness of chronos time. Something I need to remember is that projects take time and that I get much less done in a given time period than I would otherwise like. I used to think this was me sucking at everything I do, but I'm starting to convince myself that everything just is very time-consuming despite what people demand. So, I am thinking that as I engage with projects I use very generous estimates.
I remember a friend who used to work for Industrial Light and Magic telling me that they had allocated a month to put together their demo reel, and I thought that was a lot of time. I got to watch him develop the rough cut and build new pieces over time, and I realized that he did need that time to deliver what he wanted. A month is a factor of 50 than what I was thinking it would take. I think I will start applying the 50x multiplier to my own estimates to see how that works.
Closing the Day
I forgot to post this last night, but I had a followup idea about basements that go along with the horizon view. I'll add this to the picklejar entry on interactive horizons.