I’ve realized another perfectionist tendency that I’ve been letting defeat me. The result has been that the big hard (and interesting) tasks are starving for attention because the little tasks are being given center stage of the always elusive and much coveted big block of time.
I’ve learned through my years of focusing on productivity with increasing responsibility that you aren’t going to be able to sit and work on a problem for 10 hours straight without lots of other stuff just exploding. The obvious solution to this is to break things up from 10 hour tasks into smaller chunks. That way the chunks can be interleaved throughout your day, and you work in layers[^1].
The problem arrises is that some tasks can’t be chunked up, they are hard, consequently they are the ones I enjoy the most. Sitting down and really thinking about a hard problem to come up with a clean solution is one of the things I enjoy most. But perversely I will resist starting the hard tasks.
