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LM: #386: Your R&D department
It’s demoralizing to see your hard drive piling up with unfinished projects. But that’s only if they are projects you feel you should finish.
Whenever I would tinker with something, I would get caught up merely on deciding where to save it. Creating another folder would present me with a list of dozens of folders for the dead-end projects of my past.
Not a useful reminder.
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A simple but major mindset shift for me was creating an R&D department – which really consisted of creating an “R&D” folder.
Any company that makes things is going to have a Research and Development budget. Amazon famously spent all of their would-be profits on R&D, for decades.
Now whenever I start tinkering with something, I save it in a folder within my R&D folder. That does two things.
One, it forces me to recognize that I don’t yet know enough about the project to decide it’s something I should finish.
Two, it keeps my projects folder clean. That way when I’m trying to do something I’ve decided matters, I don’t get slowed down scrolling through dozens of dead or undecided projects.
It’s incredibly simple, but incredibly freeing. Create your R&D department.
Aphorism: “Antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” —Ted Kaczynski
Book: A Digital Latin Dictionary (Amazon) helps you define Latin words while reading on your Kindle.
Best,
David
P.S. Join me and the inimitable Saya Hillman for the livestream Table for Two’ish, this Thursday, September 24th.
P.P.S. If you have read Finish What Matters, please click on a star rating.
