I Was Miserable At Work For Years — 1 Fix Changed Everything

Tom Kuegler
The Post-Grad Survival Guide
3 min readMar 31, 2021

--

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

1% better.

Get 1% better every day.

If you get 1% better at something every day, in 100 days you’ll be, what?

You already know.

The past few years I’ve made one big mistake in terms of my work..

I focus on deadlines, not on progress. For instance, I’ll give myself one month to update my online course, and if I don’t update it within a month, it’s a failure. There’s a ton of traps you fall into when you look at work in the same way that I do. Let’s quickly go over them..

There’s No Satisfaction

Deadlines are really conniving constructs. They give you the satisfaction of completion before you ever actually do the work. You say to yourself “Oh, I’ll be done updating my website by the end of this month.”

Great. It’s already done in your mind, then. All that’s left is the goddamn work, which really sucks.

It’s sort of like how humans get a dopamine bump when they tell people their goals and those same people praise them for it. Great! We get all the satisfaction of achieving our goal without the hard work.

Let me give you another example: I hate outlining my articles before I write them. It takes all the…

--

--