Some Tasks Need Your Soul. Others Just Need You to Show Up.
Quick question. Be honest.
Do you approach every single task at work with the same laser-focused, jaw-clenched, I-will-conquer-this energy?
If yes, congratulations. You are also probably exhausted, slightly resentful, and wondering why your best work still isn't good enough. The engineer who attacks a repo access request with the same intensity as designing a brand new API isn't being diligent. They're just burning through fuel they needed for the real race.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: working hard on the wrong things, with the wrong amount of energy, is still working wrong.
The real skill nobody teaches you? Knowing what kind of work each task actually demands. Not more effort. Better judgment.
The Three Buckets of Work (Yes, Only Three)
Almost every task you'll ever do at work fits into one of three buckets. Get this right and your energy stops leaking. Get it wrong and you'll keep ending the day feeling busy but hollow.
1. Light Tasks: Just Get Them Done
Requesting access. Setting up a repo. Formatting docs. Admin work. Onboarding steps.
These tasks have exactly one job: completion. They don't need your genius. They don't need silence and a ritual. They don't need a two-hour planning session. Put on your favourite playlist, knock them out in 25 to 40 minute bursts, and move on with your life.
The trap most smart people fall into? Over-engineering the simple stuff. There is something almost poetic about spending an hour crafting the perfect system for a task that just needed doing. Don't be that person. Save the depth for things that deserve it.
2. Deep Work: Where the Magic (and the Sweat) Happens
Designing an API. Debugging a codebase you've never touched. Learning something genuinely new. Writing something that requires you to actually think. These are different animals entirely, and they need to be treated that way.
For deep work, the rules change completely:
- No music with lyrics. Your brain cannot serve two masters.
- Phone in another room. Not face down. Another room.
- Define what success looks like before you start, not after.
- Block out 60 to 90 uninterrupted minutes. Guard it like it's the last seat on a flight.
- When you're done, write down what you understood. This is where it actually sticks.
This is where the gap between you and everyone else either widens or closes. Every session counts.
3. Semi-Structured Work: The Underrated Middle Ground
Discussions. Brainstorming. Architecture reviews. Strategy conversations.
These don't fit neatly into the other two buckets and that's exactly why most people handle them badly. They show up unprepared, wing it, nod along, and then leave with a vague sense of having talked a lot without actually moving anywhere.
The better approach: walk in with 3 specific questions already written down. Take handwritten notes while you're there. Then, crucially, spend 20 minutes alone afterward processing what you heard before your next thing. Discussion gives you direction. Solitude is where that direction becomes depth.
Rare Is Valuable. Depth Is Rare. Do the Math.
Everyone can walk. No one gets paid for it. Usain Bolt gets paid because he runs 100 metres in under 10 seconds, something almost no one alive can do. His rarity is his entire value proposition.
Now apply that to your craft.
Sitting with a genuinely difficult problem for 60 minutes without reaching for your phone? Uncomfortable. Rare. Extremely valuable. Most people bail at the first sign of friction. They Google it, Slack someone, switch tabs, make a coffee, and convince themselves they're still working. The ones who stay with it are building a completely different kind of capability, quietly, invisibly, one hard session at a time.
Here's the thing about learning a new skill that nobody likes to admit: it's not fun. Learning guitar is not fun. Playing guitar is fun. The awkward, slow, frustrating part in between is where most people quit, and it's also exactly where all the value lives. Choosing difficulty, consistently, even when you don't feel like it, is what turns common skills into rare ones.
Stop Obsessing Over Results. Start Falling in Love With the Process(It's becoming a cliche for me)
"Focus on the process, not the outcome." You've heard this. You've probably nodded at it in a podcast and then immediately went back to refreshing your inbox for feedback. Most people find this advice annoyingly vague. So let's make it concrete.
You cannot control whether you get promoted. You cannot control whether your code gets praised, your project gets approved, or your exam goes exactly the way you hoped. Obsessing over those things is like trying to steer a car by staring at the GPS instead of the road.
What you can control is far more interesting:
- Did you understand that concept deeply before moving on, or did you fake it?
- How many hours of genuinely focused work did you put in this week?
- Did you ask good questions or coast on assumptions?
- Did you build something today or just consume things?
Track those. Measure those. The promotion, the recognition, the results: they become byproducts of a process done well, rather than prizes you're anxiously sprinting toward and never quite reaching.
Five Rules to Keep Chaos from Eating Your Day
Structure is not a personality flaw. It's not rigidity. It's not boring. It's the invisible framework that stops your day from collapsing into a pile of half-finished tasks and vague anxiety. Here's what it actually looks like:
1. No phone for the first 30 minutes of your day. The way you start matters more than you think. Scrolling first thing is borrowing someone else's agenda and calling it your morning. Start on your own terms.
2. The 15-minute rule is real. If you can stay grounded and focused for 15 minutes, you will almost certainly stay for an hour. The first 15 are the hardest. Win those and the rest follows.
3. Create before you consume. Write something, code something, plan something, before you open a feed, read an article, or watch anything. Consuming first puts your brain in passenger mode for the rest of the day.
4. Do a 5-minute reset every morning. Three questions, that's all: What actually needs depth today? What is just admin? What can be delegated or pushed? Five minutes of clarity saves hours of confusion.
5. End each day with a quick honest look in the mirror. Did you do real work or drift? What distracted you? What did you actually understand today, not skim, not bookmark, but genuinely understand?
How to Learn Anything Faster Without Burning Out
Ultra Learning by Scott Young has one insight that most learners skip straight past: before you start learning something, spend time learning about the thing you're going to learn.
Sounds slow. It's actually the fastest path.
If you're picking up React, don't just crack open a tutorial and start copying code. First, map the territory. What are the core concepts? What are the facts you need to memorise? What requires actual hands-on practice to click? Getting this map in your head first means every hour of study that follows is filling in a picture instead of wandering around in the dark.
Young also breaks any subject into three layers: concepts you need to understand, facts you need to memorise, and skillsyou need to practice until they're automatic. Knowing which layer you're working in at any moment makes you dramatically more efficient and a lot less frustrated.
And here is the simplest test of whether you actually know something: close your notes and explain it out loud. If you can do that, you know it. If you can draw it on a whiteboard, you really understand it. If you can only describe it by reading it back from your screen, you've memorised it but haven't learned it yet. Big difference.
Silence Is a Superpower (Seriously)
This one deserves a moment of its own.
Silence feels deeply uncomfortable to most people because there's nothing in it. No dopamine hit, no notification, no validation, no noise to hide behind. Every instinct says fill it: music, a podcast, a scroll, anything. But silence is precisely where your thinking consolidates. It's where half-formed ideas finish forming. It's where the dots between two things you know suddenly connect into something you've never seen before.
People who can sit quietly with a hard problem, without distraction, and actually think it through: they are ahead of the curve. Not necessarily because they're smarter. But because they've practiced something that almost no one around them is practicing anymore. In a world of constant noise, the ability to be comfortable with silence is genuinely rare.
And we already know what rare things are worth.
When All Else Fails, Ask This One Question
Overwhelmed? Stuck? Staring at a to-do list that feels like it's mocking you?
Ask yourself one thing:
What is the simplest next step?
Not the most impressive step. Not the one that solves everything at once. Not the one that makes you look like you have it all figured out. Just the next one. The smallest move that gets you one inch closer.
Simplicity creates momentum. Momentum creates everything else.
Words Worth Sitting With
"You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — Marcus Aurelius
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." — Thomas Edison
"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." — James Clear
"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." — James Clear
"Working on hard problems is how you get good. Doing easy things just to feel productive is a trap." — Paul Graham
"The best work happens when you understand something deeply enough to see what others miss." — Paul Graham
"I'm not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat." — Kobe Bryant
"The moment you give up is the moment you let someone else win." — Kobe Bryant
Comments
Post a Comment