The Things Worth Doing
You will mostly know the Things Worth Doing when you encounter them. The words that are on the tip of your tongue when you wake up but you cannot quite put to paper. The dream that you never set out towards but is always in the back of your mind. The skill you would love to learn but never prioritize the time.
We all feel these things. That indescribable pull towards something bigger than ourselves. Something that you know is right, but you can’t bring yourself to set down the path towards. Why is it so intangibly hard to begin? Why can’t we focus when we know it’s the right thing to do? We all know that our time is finite, so why can’t we spend it pursuing things that matter?
I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse. — Ovid
We are surrounded by evil. It feels like everywhere you look there are bad people and sad news and corrupt ideas. It is easy to do evil. It is also easier to spread evil ideas, which is why they always feel so pervasive. Good deeds and noble ideas require tenacity, will, and blood; evil acts appeal to our laziness and selfishness. Our basest negative instincts are easier to server than our best.
We must set our minds to do good and follow through. We must swear promises to ourselves and make sure that we have the time and the energy to make good on them. We must follow strategies to help us identify the Things Worth Doing and put ourselves in the best position to accomplish them.
My productivity journey
When I started down the path of productivity optimization, I was getting nothing done. Through a period of about six months I was completely blocked. I’ve had periods of ups and downs in productivity throughout my life, but this was the nadir. I couldn’t do a single Thing Worth Doing.
I would go to the office and browse the internet, unable to produce work output. I’d stare at my code but my mind couldn’t focus long enough to put my fingers to the keyboard. My concentration was shattered and it didn’t seem possible to recover.
The worst part about my life was that I wanted to work. I wanted to work more than anything. I would talk to my partner and friends about it. I would stress about it all the time, just a constant buzz of anxiety in the back of my mind from the moment I woke up until I closed my eyes at night. “Tomorrow, I’ll be productive” I would think every night. I would plan out strategies and agendas for the next day. My daily task list would still be 100% untouched by the same time the next night.
I was at a loss. Up until that point, it hadn’t been hard to get things in life that I really set my mind to. How could I be obsessed with getting work done every hour of every day, yet be unable to?
Looking back, I think there was a tangled combination of factors. I should have been reaching out to smarter people. I should have been pursuing more healthy behaviors. But above all else, I think I didn’t have the right strategies.
Since then, I’ve completely turned around my approach to productivity. Instead of creating tasks and struggling to execute, I now set targeted goals and achieve them through a highly organized system of planning and execution. Since my ill-fated half year in productivity hell, I’ve spent a huge portion of my free time reading, thinking, and speaking with others about motivation.
Through this Medium publication, I aim to publish articles on theories & strategies anyone can use to discover their best self and accomplish some Things Worth Doing. I’m not here to cast judgment on whatever your goals or concept of “best self” entails, nor do I claim to be the foremost expert in this field. I’ve simply spent so much time with this topic floating in my headspace that I think it’s time to give back. I want to create the resource I needed in my own empty, unproductive period.
January 2nd means generating that feeling of opportunity and tenacity you feel on the second day of every new year. On that day, more clearly than any other, I always get an overwhelming sense of knowing exactly what the Things Worth Doing are and how to work towards them.
Let’s capture that excitement every day.
Hi I’m Eric, a freelance business intelligence engineer and co-founder at Magnifai. I’m interested in building analytic tools paired with beautiful design, especially for opportunities utilizing data for activism. I write about data analytics and productivity & motivation on Medium. You can also feel free to reach out or connect via LinkedIn.
