Iām not actually sure if the precise problem youāre describing resonates with me. I definitely often feel very uncertain about:
whether the goal Iām striving towards really matters at all
even if so, whether itās a goal worth prioritising
whether I should prioritise it (is it my comparative advantage?)
whether anything I produce in pursuing this goal will be of any use to anyone
But Iām not sure there have been cases where, for a week or more, I didnāt feel like I was at least progressing towards:
having the sort of output I had planned or now planned to produce(setting aside the question of whether that output will be useful to anyone), and/āor
deciding (for good reason) to not bother trying to create that sort of output
Note that Iād count as āprogressā cases where I explored some solutions/āoptions that I thought might work/ābe useful for X, and all turned out to be miserable wastes of time, so I can at least rule those out and try something else next week. Iād also count cases where I learned other potentially useful things in the process of pursuing dead ends, and that knowledge seems likely to somehow benefit this or other projects.
It is often the case that my estimate of how many remaining days something will take is longer at the end of the week than it was at the beginning of the week. But this is usually coupled with me thinking that I have made some sort of progressāI just also realised that some parts will be harder than I thought, or that I should do a more thorough job than Iād planned, or something like that.
(But I feel like maybe Iām just interpreting your question differently to what you intended.)
In a private conversation we figured out that I may tend too much toward setting specific goals and then only counting achievement of these goals as success ignoring all the little things that I learn along the way. If the goal is hard to achieve, I have to learn a lot of little things on the way and that takes time, but if I donāt count these little things as little successes, my feedback gets too sparse, and I lose motivation. So noticing little successes seems valuable.
7. Hard problems
Iām not actually sure if the precise problem youāre describing resonates with me. I definitely often feel very uncertain about:
whether the goal Iām striving towards really matters at all
even if so, whether itās a goal worth prioritising
whether I should prioritise it (is it my comparative advantage?)
whether anything I produce in pursuing this goal will be of any use to anyone
But Iām not sure there have been cases where, for a week or more, I didnāt feel like I was at least progressing towards:
having the sort of output I had planned or now planned to produce (setting aside the question of whether that output will be useful to anyone), and/āor
deciding (for good reason) to not bother trying to create that sort of output
Note that Iād count as āprogressā cases where I explored some solutions/āoptions that I thought might work/ābe useful for X, and all turned out to be miserable wastes of time, so I can at least rule those out and try something else next week. Iād also count cases where I learned other potentially useful things in the process of pursuing dead ends, and that knowledge seems likely to somehow benefit this or other projects.
It is often the case that my estimate of how many remaining days something will take is longer at the end of the week than it was at the beginning of the week. But this is usually coupled with me thinking that I have made some sort of progressāI just also realised that some parts will be harder than I thought, or that I should do a more thorough job than Iād planned, or something like that.
(But I feel like maybe Iām just interpreting your question differently to what you intended.)
In a private conversation we figured out that I may tend too much toward setting specific goals and then only counting achievement of these goals as success ignoring all the little things that I learn along the way. If the goal is hard to achieve, I have to learn a lot of little things on the way and that takes time, but if I donāt count these little things as little successes, my feedback gets too sparse, and I lose motivation. So noticing little successes seems valuable.