On designing the perfect workflow

If you've read other posts on this blog, you'll find that I am somewhat obsessed with the realm of personal knowledge management, productivity, and the entire idea of designing the perfect workflow. (In other words, the Andy Matuschak, Johnny Decimal, and Oliver Burkeman extended universe.¹) Once I have those down, I say, then I'll be able to start writing. My partner tells me that all of this sculpting and pruning that I do is really just yak shaving -- productive procrastination that gets in the way of actually doing the work. (This includes spending an hour writing a script to automate a process when you could have done it by hand in 20 minutes -- oops. I even engaged in a little bit of this right this second by trying to find an etymology of yak-shaving, which apparently stems from an email at MIT CSAIL, of all places.) In Oliver Burkeman's Time Management for Mortals, he argues that we often spend our one precious life forever preparing and refining how we might do something, rather than buckling down and simply doing a little bit of it (even poorly). This describes my obsession with workflow pretty perfectly, even if it counters every fiber of my Atomic Habit-reading, Getting Things Done-obsessed self.

There's the endless of allure of that one system to end all systems; the flawlessly thoughtful morning writing ritual to ensure a productive day of tippy tapping. There is some value to thinking about this a little, I think -- I don't know how I'd find anything on my computer without Alfred and the Johnny Decimal system, for example -- but too often it means that I'm constantly reading about self help and productivity without being productive myself. This is actually something I wonder about with so many productivity gurus, particularly on YouTube: many of them must fall into the infinite loop of being productive by producing content about productivity.

I think I may have put this somewhere else on this blog because I love it so much, but in the beginning stages of our relationship, my partner translated this bit of Ulrich Beck's Risk and Society and sent it to me as I freaked out about What I Was Doing ™, which did chill me out a little:

Here, he is commenting on ongoing developments in the 1980s, when old definitions of a good life (career, home, family) rang hollow and self-actualization became a thing (translated roughly from German, where the scathing sarcasm comes through even better):

“The consequence is that people are driven ever more forcefully into a labyrinth of self-questioning and search for self-assurance. The infinite regress of questions “Am I really happy?”, “Am I really fulfilled?”, “Who is it anyway that says “I” and asks?” leads to ever new fashionable answers that create markets for experts, industries, and religious movements. In the search for self-fulfillment, people travel into all corners of the world (following their travel guides). They break up the best marriages and enter ever new relationships. They change careers. They fast. They jog. They move from one support group to the next. Possessed by the goal of self-actualization, they rip themselves from the earth to check if their roots are, indeed, healthy.”

i.e. the true rebels in late Capitalism are those that just buckle down and ignore the siren call of self-actualization.

I've always found this quote -- and his important annotation at the end -- to be enormously comforting, as I have definitely ripped myself from the earth too many times to count (a side effect of which may be reading a lot of self-help books). Being reminded of that has been liberating: to recognize something that I no longer want to do to myself, to say nothing of the self-flagellation that accompanies the realization.

...but I'll continue writing my book after I publish this blog post, I promise. The yak has been shaved.