Some of the links below take you to my personal site, patrickdfarley.com, where I’ve written on these topics before. I may migrate those posts to this site in the future.
Productivity skills
A generalist needs to be good at productivity. If you have a half-dozen different projects that you want to spend your time on, you need to be good at getting the most out of your time.
But generalists are often lucky, in that their different interests exhaust different parts of their minds and bodies. So while your “creative mind” is resting, your “analytical mind” can run, and so on. A specialist will work for several hours on their specialty, become exhausted, and then go do something leisurely; if they kept working instead, they’d eventually burn out. But a generalist can pivot to a different project and find renewed energy for it.
Context-switching has its advantages, but it takes structure to keep everything running smoothly.
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Goals and Systems – Generalists should have some structures that direct their productivity. They can use systems of recurring behavior (like “make a drawing every day”) to grow skills or maintain physical/mental health. They can also use explicit goals (like “submit something to this art contest”) to motivate themselves toward milestones that are important to them.
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Meta-balance – Generalists should also have unstructured productivity every now and then—just following your motivation, wherever it leads, for as long as it lasts. It’s powerful, but it needs to be kept in balance with structured productivity, or else the rest of life tends to fall apart. Additionally, productivity itself needs to be kept in balance with consumption—sometimes you do burn out from everything you’re doing, and you just need to watch some TV. Finding the right balance between two things is up to you and your experience, but knowing which things to balance in the first place is what I try to help with.
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AI fluency – Generalists are uniquely poised to benefit from recent breakthroughs in AI tools. Use AI models to carry out the specific parts of your project that aren’t your specialty. Generalists can be “casual CEOs” of their own projects by employing an AI staff to do part of the work.
- Taming the Manager – Do you spend so much time making plans about when and how to allocate your work, that you run out of time to actually do it? You know what you should be working on at a given time, but instead of doing the work, you continue to deliberate over big-picture / planning decisions. I call this pattern of thought the “Manager.” By contrast, the “Employee” does most of the hands-on work without worrying about the big picture, thanks to the Manager’s direction. Chances are, the disposition that makes you a generalist also makes you an over-Manager. As productive generalists, we have to be good Managers, but we also need to be able to call the plan “good enough” and be the Employee.
- Handling Laziness death spirals – Laziness/procrastination has a kind of independent momentum to it. When you’re having an off day, even if you consciously commit to getting back on track, the rut tends to find its way back to you within a couple of hours. Fighting it with raw willpower can make it worse. I list three courses of action you can take to safely and quickly get out of a laziness death spiral.
Life planning skills
Some projects naturally require a lot of continual focused work: you can do them, but you have to set aside long blocks of time when other projects will take a back seat. This kind of planning can be a pain. Generalists want to switch tasks every day or week (or hour!), but sometimes that’s a poor recipe for progress.
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Goal setting – Although goal-setting is covered under Productivity skills, this post is more about long-term goals. A lot of things in life can only be done if they’re planned a year in advance, or longer—starting a business, moving to a new location, running a marathon, etc. Generalists need to be able to set structured, long-term goals that they’re prepared to maintain. This can be difficult because of all the tradeoffs you face.
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Micro-retirements – Generalists sometimes need to take things “off the table,” sometimes permanently. If you’re predisposed to take passionate interest in new things, you need to be able to drop older things sometimes; skillful time-management can only juggle so much. I’ve found that using the mindset of “retirement” in these cases is more comfortable than “forcing myself to quit.”