I’m not actually sure if the precise problem you’re describing resonates with me. I definitely often feel very uncertain about:
whether the goal I’m striving towards really matters at all
even if so, whether it’s 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 I’m not sure there have been cases where, for a week or more, I didn’t 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/or
deciding (for good reason) to not bother trying to create that sort of output
Note that I’d count as “progress” cases where I explored some solutions/options that I thought might work/be 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. I’d 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 progress—I just also realised that some parts will be harder than I thought, or that I should do a more thorough job than I’d planned, or something like that.
(But I feel like maybe I’m 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 don’t 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
I’m not actually sure if the precise problem you’re describing resonates with me. I definitely often feel very uncertain about:
whether the goal I’m striving towards really matters at all
even if so, whether it’s 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 I’m not sure there have been cases where, for a week or more, I didn’t 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/or
deciding (for good reason) to not bother trying to create that sort of output
Note that I’d count as “progress” cases where I explored some solutions/options that I thought might work/be 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. I’d 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 progress—I just also realised that some parts will be harder than I thought, or that I should do a more thorough job than I’d planned, or something like that.
(But I feel like maybe I’m 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 don’t count these little things as little successes, my feedback gets too sparse, and I lose motivation. So noticing little successes seems valuable.