I failed my August experiment. Miserably.

Make no mistake, I adhered to my principles, default to action and rescue yourself, but unfortunately I fell into the pit that I typically (read: always) do. I overengineered things.

I’ve come to acknowledge a couple things:

1. Personal Knowledge Management is a special interest.
2. My goals for the next year are massive.

If you’re looking at those things like I am now, you know that’s either a great combination, or a disaster waiting to happen. Roll for initiative; I got stuck with the latter.

I’ve been keeping things incredibly lean, and it’s made working noticeably smoother. I typically use the Pomodoro method and work in 2h deep work blocks, and having less places to check and things to keep an eye on has been fantastic.

That said, once I got through the first couple days, things started to fall apart. When I’m adjusting to a new schedule, the last thing I need is for an alarm to not go off. Of course, this is exactly what happened. I skipped over the blocks I’d missed and went straight into what was scheduled next. It threw my whole day off, and I’ve since acknowledged a third thing:

1. My deep work blocks are best left loosely or unstructured until the day of, but my routines are best rigidly adhered to.

I’d never thought to consider that as a source of success/failure, so I planned my day how everyone else appears to: I did the opposite. Deep work was rigidly planned, and routines were structured, but I’d play them by ear each day.

Evidently after that, disaster ensued and I fell off track until I saw this video from Chris Davis, followed by this video from Dominic Hart.

The combination of the two videos got me thinking differently again, and a quote came to mind: “The way forward is not in the way you’ve done things before.”

So, I’m admitting defeat.

August Challenge: 1, Me: 0.

And I’m okay with that. The reality is, this is how I always do things. I challenge myself to take on an exorbitant amount of things across a widely varying playing field, and end up overengineering until everything breaks apart. There’s a lot of people I know in tech that see similar outcomes often, so there’s a part of me finding comfort in that knowledge.

I’ll be back soon with my updated direction. For now, it’s been nice to sit with the failure.