Greetings, data-tamers!
I came across an idea a few weeks ago that I've thought about many times since then, and I want to pass it along to you in light of some comments I've received recently. But first, here's my progress for week 3 of the second quarter of my 2025 Consistency Challenge project:
- I deleted 46,653 files comprising ~7 GB
- I sorted 67,176 files comprising ~44 GB
- Overall progress: 18% (from 16% last week)
This is slightly better than the 1% increase I achieved last time. If I can keep doubling my progress every week, I'll be done in six weeks or so! Of course, that's unlikely, but I like how the math works out. 🤓
Entrees, not Buffets
I challenged you all at the beginning of 2025 to pick something to work on to improve your consistency. If you did it, or even thought about doing it, you probably encountered one hurdle right at the beginning: How do I pick something to work on?
Last month, I came across a blog post by Tim Ferriss titled For Less Anxiety and More Life, Treat Your To-Do List Like a Diner Menu. Even before I read it, I could see the value in reframing your viewpoint along these lines.
The article isn't too long, and it's definitely worth reading, but here's one of the most relevant excerpts (emphasis mine):
For many years I lived in New York – where, as anyone familiar with the city knows, there’s a kind of diner you can visit at which you’ll be handed a huge menu, bound in fake leather, with perhaps eight or nine laminated pages featuring every imaginable permutation of egg-based dishes, sandwiches, burgers, waffles and salads that the kitchen is capable of conceiving. I love these menus for the sense of crazy abundance they impart. And they help clarify a critical way in which a menu differs from a to-do list: picking just one or two items from a menu is something you get to do, not something you have to do. It’s not a problem that there are so many more things you could order than you’d ever be able to consume in a single visit. It isn’t the case that in an ideal world you’d eat them all, but because you’re not efficient enough at eating you’ve got to settle for just one or two of them, and feel like a failure. That would be ridiculous! The abundance is the point. And the joy is in getting to eat at the restaurant at all.
I can certainly attest to the fact that looking at a never-ending list of things to get done can be disheartening, or worse. Instead of focusing on how much you didn't do and how much remains, flip it around and celebrate a single accomplishment! It won't change how much you got done, but it will motivate you to keep going next time.
This approach fits perfectly with a concept related in another blog post that I read around this time last year titled I did one thing today, and I feel accomplished. This one is even shorter and doesn't include the diner menu analogy, but it highlights the result of doing exactly what Tim Ferriss suggests. Here's a poignant excerpt:
I did one thing today, and I feel happy and accomplished. Had I tried to do five things, or even three, I probably wouldn't have finished anything. So I just focused on doing this one thing today. ... So what if you didn't try to do everything? What if you did a lot less? And what if less meant one thing per day, one thing done very well? ... If I continue like this, I'll have done at least five meaningful things by the end of the week.
This isn't some superhuman productivity hack that makes you work faster. It's just a way of approaching your responsibilities that helps you avoid the endless context-switching that kills your focus and makes it almost impossible to get anything really, truly, completely finished in a reasonable time frame.
Back on the topic of the 2025 Consistency Challenge: some of you voiced concerns with choosing a good project to focus on, especially among multiple reasonable options. What do you do at a restaurant when faced with multiple appealing meals? Obviously, you won't eat more than one, so you have to choose the most appealing one and promise yourself that you'll try one of the other options next time you come.
But choosing a project to tackle doesn't feel the same as selecting a delicious meal to eat. For most of us, the food choice is about which one looks the best, while the task choice is more about which one is the least awful (or intimidating, or time-consuming, or tedious). The "Eat the Frog" method helps in this case, but that's arguably more suited to small-scale tasks on a daily basis rather than a long-term consistency goal that will take three months.
Instead, I recommend looking for a goal that satisfies either (or both) of two things:
- What will have the biggest impact on making your life better if you succeed?
- What will motivate you most effectively to continue if you succeed?
For example, you might be trying to choose between organizing a large collection of documents that has grown for a decade and sprawled into a messy hierarchy, or else learning to use a new task management system effectively. Both of these could be good candidates for a consistency challenge, but which one will have a bigger positive impact?
If you stress over the digital document mess all the time but have a reasonably good hold on your to-do list, maybe the documents would be better to tackle. However, if the messy files are just a little annoying while important responsibilities and appointments constantly fall through the cracks, working on task management is clearly a more valuable choice.
It's not always clear-cut, but hopefully this provides a framework to help you make an informed decision in the face of multiple possibilities. If you're still stuck on anything, reply and let me know! I'm happy to offer feedback anytime.
Until next week, happy data-taming!