September Update: Mana Points
Hey team.
I Tried Something Last Month
One of the issues I've been struggling with (surprising no one) is overcommitment. I don't just mean professionally, but across all aspects of my life. It's the cocktail of ADHD symptoms: 1) my history with hyperfocus makes me aware of how much I can accomplish when I "hit my groove" and I assume I can operate at that level on command, 2) rejection sensitivity makes it hard to say "no" to things, and 3) general time blindness that makes it hard to predict how long a task will take or how much energy it will require.
This has been a year of flame-outs for me, where I have taken on a lot of things, and, every time it looks like I'm slipping a deadline, I have doubled down rather than call something off or push something back. And it has led to a lot of personal and professional failures, and not-insignificant financial problems.
I've been staring into the abyss of this trend trying to think: how do I commit the correct amount when I am, like, neurologically bad at predicting how much work a task will take and what I will be capable of on a given day?
So I tracked it.
For two weeks in September, I tracked my "mana points" in a spreadsheet. I put tasks on a 5-point scale, with 1-point tasks being minor effort and 5-point being significant. I assigned tasks to different, color-coded categories and made plans each day (well, most days) laying out what I was gonna work on, budgeting my time, and making predictions as to how much energy they would take. And, as the day went on, I logged what actually happened, how long things actually took, and how much mana they actually drained. After two weeks, I had some hard data on where my time and energy is going, where my predictions differ most from reality, and which burn rates for energy are sustainable and which will lead to a flame-out.
What I enjoyed about this process is it was entirely descriptive. Pure research. This was not about optimizing efficiency, it was just about learning my patterns. I highly recommend doing something like this if you, like me, struggle with making feasible plans.
Takeaways
Obviously there is no objective measure of energy, so my starting assumption was that a productive day would consume about 20 points of energy, and I set my 5-point scale to that. I quickly discovered that, at that level, anything more than 15 points was exhausting, so that's how much I over-estimate my energy levels! My best days, where I got most of my list done and finished feeling productive but not too tired, were 12-14 points, and going over 15 a few days in a row led to short-term burnout.
Ongoing projects (e.g. videos, freelance gigs, podcasts, event-planning) take, on average, 30% more energy and 30% more time than I usually assume.
It turns out there is a lot more method to my madness. Days that I felt weirdly lethargic, like, "why can't I get myself to work??" suddenly made sense when I looked at the mana tracking for the week: I had gone over-budget on mana two days in a row, and had reflexively gone under-budget another two days until the average was back to about 15. I even found myself resistant to work on mornings when I knew I'd be busy in the evenings, and realized it was because the workload later that day was high enough that I needed a chill morning to not go overbudget and burn myself out. These were both unconscious processes, but, noticing them, I was better able to predict when I'd be at full capacity again.
Chores overwhelmingly take less time and energy than I think, so I don't need to dread them as much as I do. (Except dishes. Washing dishes always takes more time than I think.)
Surprisingly, emotional distress does not kill my productivity. What it kills is my executive function. I can work while stressed or unhappy, I just can't make plans. If a plan is already in place, work can actually be a nice distraction.
There is more, but the rest is a bit more personal than I wanna share here.
Generally, I think this will help me more accurately assess my workload, and I can break this process out whenever a project seems to be taking a lot of effort. I can recalibrate my predictions and maybe learn to call a project off early when it's more effort than it's worth.
Other Stuff
Anyway, sorry there was no release last month. I was... busy.
-I
Comments (24)
Congratulations! Also, this is awesome. I run my own business and struggle with all of this. I'm going to give this a shot.
Congrats! Is it inappropriate of me to ask at this time how polyamorous people handle marriage?
There are no hard and fast rules! I and the other married poly people I know just kinda make it up as we go. I have a lawyer in my polycule who writes up contracts that can get you a lot of the legal benefits of marriage while not TECHNICALLY being marriage, so you can sign them with multiple people, so that's a thing. But we're all just out here improvising!
Congratulations <3
Please, Ian. I’ve already spent dozens of hours in ADHD hyper focus building a bespoke productivity app I don’t use. My mind is already thinking how I can build another. Please…don’t put these thoughts in my head.
I’m glad you found a system that works! Your system isn’t dissimilar to the systems we use in software engineering to plan out our work. We call it Agile, with the most common style of Agile being called Scrum. When it’s implemented correctly, it’s a great tool for making sure we don’t get over invested and/or not get delayed. Also, congrats on the ring and all the joy and love it symbolizes for you!
Congratulations! Given the mana pool lead-in, I'm left wondering what buffs and debuffs the magic ring has. Probably +1 Intelligence, but Disadvantage on Persuasion checks. Don't feel too bad about being bad at scheduling. There's an entire industry built on how bad people are at scheduling and what they should do instead. One of the best techniques I learned in my professional life is based on the insight that the bigger and more complex the task, the less accurate the prediction for time and effort. Therefore, break big tasks into smaller tasks and repeat until the accuracy of prediction is consistently more than 90%. In many cases, that meant breaking tasks down into what can be accomplished in a single day, and for tasks with a lot of dependencies on things beyond your control, like learning a new skill, break tasks down into what can be accomplished in a single hour. Then do instrumentation like you did with the mana pool, and compare predicted vs. actual and adjust. Finally, with experience you'll get a feeling for the limits of your scheduling time horizon. Don't commit to a schedule that you don't have confidence in, like some stakeholder wants X done in 3 months but your accuracy falls off after less than 1 month, don't commit to that deadline. Negotiate for giving them a progress and schedule update in 1 month instead.
Thanks for the advice! I would probably have to tweak that system a little - I rely a lot on inertia, continuing the thing I was working on the day before. Finishing a task in a single day can sometimes mean having to build up momentum from scratch the next day, so I'd probably have to plan around doing half a task on day 1, then finishing it day 2 and starting the next task. I actually find, if I finish something in a single day, it's best to do, like, 30 minutes of the NEXT task before calling it quits so I have something unfinished the next morning; more often I try to stop 30 minutes SHORT of complete so I can finish it off in the morning and then ride that accomplishment to the next objective!
This is amazing. You did Spoon Theory data collection. I love it. I did something similar many years back, albeit with less precision, where I noted how many tasks I could accomplish in a day versus how many I would put on my to do list. I quickly discovered that I tended to mess up *most* of my week when Mondays had anything involving *other people* scheduled. Mondays are fine if they are just for me to ramp up for the week, but if I had a meeting or appointment or anything like that, it wrecked me. and I know you have a whole video about how you can't fix Mondays...but...I did. By *always* keeping my Monday "unplanned", I never have a stressy Monday. AND it doesn't make Tuesday the stressy day because I gave Monday fully to my own scheduling and plans so I can prepare for Tuesday meetings/appointments and not feel like I'm going from 0 on a Sunday to 100 on a Monday. also, CONGRATS!
Congratulations! Hope you and your partner/s had a wonderful day <3
Congratulations!
You were busy getting a ring installed? That couldn't have taken more than a few minutes. Get back to work! 😂😂
Congrats on the ring and on whatever else it means for you! 🥳
i am such a sucker for self-help/productivity stuff, thanks so much for writing this. in terms of energy cost, did things like social engagements get assigned an energy cost? i find it hard to gauge how much those will cost me in particular.
yeah, they were given an energy cost, but I did so little socializing that I couldn't draw any conclusions about it. sample size was too small.
Congrats, Ian!
Congratulations on both learning more about yourself, and in making a commitment to your life partner!
Congrats! Love the use of Mana for tracking life energy rather than spoons. Very apt.
Congratulations!! I read your mana post aloud to my spouse with ADHD and they just gave me a knowing rueful look.
Congratulations!! Wishing you much joy! (From someone who also just recently got a nice new ring). And I feel that about the executive function stress causing a difference in scale to become a difference in quality. There can be something cathartic about working through a workload that is structured and ready to get done. But that structuring process is a huge inflection point.
Congratulations! I hope I'm not getting too deep into your personal business, but I also have ADHD and am currently doing EMDR and DBT. There are some new (at least to me) theories in the ADHD community that rejection-sensitive dysphoria is *actually* at the very least being weighed down by painful memories earlier in your life or, at "worst", is actually complex PTSD. There are pieces of evidence to support this theory, such as a) common drugs prescribed and recommended by ADHD specialists for relieving some RSD symptoms are *actually* PTSD meds, and b) it's common for people to randomly recall memories (including myself) and physically/mentally cringe, which could be an example of flashbacks. Regardless of the specifics, rejection sensitivity can legitimately be healed in therapy. That's totally up to you, though! Just wanted to share some stuff that has recently helped me.
rest assured, I have been through a shitload of therapy. I have found RSD to be something I can manage, but not something I can heal. but I've made great improvements in the managing department!
Please tell me you didn’t chop your hand off, sheesh!
it's a patreon perk, first person to pledge $50/month gets my severed hand