1/ Just realized you have zero opportunity to be strategic until you have more on your plate than you can possibly do. Until then, it’s just a matter of “getting it done”
2/ Once u have to choose what to do, you can start killing two birds with one stone, postponing or advancing, outsourcing and parallelizing, down and upscoping, using different forms of leverage
3/ What you accomplish can only become more than the sum of its parts if you’re exercising agency in choosing the parts, and their sequence
4/ I suspect this rises exponentially; the higher the ratio between [what you could do] and [what you do] the greater the opportunities for strategic thinking and acting
5/ The number of combinatorial sequences of tasks explodes geometrically, as each task links to (thus potentially enables) more and more other tasks
6/ This is the basic problem with “pulling back” or “simplifying” your workload when you feel overwhelmed. The first commitments you kill are the highest leverage ones, because they’re furthest out on an exponential graph
7/ What makes this difficult of course is you have to handle emotional consequences of completing smaller and smaller % of what you could theoretically do. Feels like you’re getting less and less productive at first
8/ You have to make the switch from quantity to quality of actions completed. Once you get good at choosing quality ones, you ramp back up on quantity again (and also outsource, collaborate, crowdsource lowest complexity tasks)
9/ Next step is to get really good at meta tasks: packaging up projects w/ clear deliverables, influencing outcomes w/ quick light touches, inspiring and motivating ppl who don’t have to work for you, creating extraneous opportunities for ppl who work with you beyond $
20/ Curent frontier I’m at: how to outsource project GENESIS to contractors, while holding quality standards, dividing income from project, and giving them access to core company functions (like newsletter, blog, budgets) w/out making too big of mistakes
21/ Staying in constant communication seems necessary, which is a challenge to my usual long work sessions of deep concentration
