The scope of “adulting” — everything you have to manage to not feel like a failure at life in general — is more elastic, with higher novelty, than ever before.
The obvious answer to “Have you thought of everything?” is “Of course not.” Any sufficiently worthy problem is either novel enough, or particular enough, that the map is about as big as the territory. You won’t be able to find a book, blog, or mentor who can tell you if you’ve thought of everything you need to. That’s why projects need human project managers, not just project management software or checklists.
Whatever our job roles, in the rest of our lives, we’re all project managers. (Or at least, we should be. The scope of “adulting” — everything you have to manage to not feel like a failure at life in general — is more elastic, with higher novelty, than ever before. That’s why the cognitive load is so high. That’s why even the youngest of us feel so burnt out.
What is the scope of adulting? What is the scope of being a good person living a good life full of meaningful accomplishments?
There are plenty of great goal-setting frameworks, but they mostly take it for granted that you know what’s important. I think it’s really hard to figure out what’s really important. In fact, I regularly discover that things I thought were important aren’t. And I regularly “discover” things that are really important that I was blind to before. So I cannot simply set aside some time each year to have a big think and set my goals.
The effort estimation problem — “How much is this going to take?” — is really hard for novel problems. And, as Jeff Bezos illustrates here about what it takes to get good at merely a handstand, our intuition is often wildly wrong about the scope of even modestly novel endeavors.
In our last blog, we talked about what it means to live a deliberate life and some of the challenges one might have when trying to set up their deliberate life. This blog post is about thinking about your deliberate life and how to scope it, so you can set goals. Let’s help you begin your deliberate life design - we’ve created a template that you can use to guide scoping your deliberate life.
This is part 2 of 4 of a series, so we’ll be providing you with a set of questions that we use for helping design our lives. Feel free to make a copy from our Google Doc here, and fill it out. At the end of the series, we hope each set of questions will help you live a more deliberate life, too.
Using this list of questions will help you think about ways to think about scoping your goals in a way that will help you achieve and measure them.
1. What is the breadth of a meaningful, deliberately designed life?
1.1. Can you enumerate the domains of your life? These might be (time and productivity, work, relationships, home, learning and development, media and entertainment, travel and transportation, health and self maintenance, self exploration, finances)
1.2. What should you try to design/create a strategy for and what should you simply be present for?
2. Are you working with the right primitives?
2.1. Consider Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points
2.2. Consider the ingredients of context in your environment:
a. Your space
b. The people you’re with
c. How you organize your time
d. Your tools What’s capturing your attention
e. Why you’re there
3. How can you make tradeoffs between goals without knowing how hard it will be to achieve them?
At Fulcra, we seek to galvanize and empower that they can achieve their goals and de-siloed data about your life, such as the sources listed above, can help you observe and understand your life from a real time or retroactive data-driven vantage point. You can then use that data to measure and make changes in your life, or measure what matters. Our Context app and Data Service will help you accomplish this.
Our next blog post will be about helping you overcome the hard part of knowing what you want.
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