Happy Friday!

The Stress of Getting Started

You’re at the beginning of a major project, and you can feel your old pal anxiety working his way back into your gut.

The project is big. There are lots of moving pieces, lots of potential pitfalls, and lots of steps that need to be in the right sequence for the project to succeed.

Normally, lots of steps wouldn’t make you anxious, but there’s a problem: Not only do you not know the order of the steps yet—you don’t even know what the steps are.

Okay, take a deep breath. If I made you anxious with those first three paragraphs, let the anxiety go. Because I’m about to do it again! (I’m such a sadist.)

Imagine another scenario. This time, you’ve been asked to write a chapter for an important anthology in your field. You know the topic well, so you have a pretty good idea what you want to say.

But the blank screen… ah, it taunts you. Each blink of the cursor pokes and prods your ever-growing angst.

What’s stopping you? You can picture the finished product—dimly, admittedly, but this is a topic you know well, for heaven’s sake. Why can’t you put the first words on the page?

What do those scenarios have in common?

Whether it’s parceling a project into actionable tasks or divvying a document into multiple drafts, we struggle to cut work down to size. We understand there’s value in breaking the work down, but we don’t always know how to approach it.

There’s an additional problem in these scenarios: the All-or-Nothing illusion. We often categorize projects as either Done or Undone, as though there were no stages in between. That can cause you to procrastinate: If you can’t immediately intuit the correct order of steps in your project, or if you can’t sit down and write the perfect chapter from scratch, then you feel like you can’t do any work at all.

To parcel projects or divvy documents, we have to convince ourselves that some work is preferable to no work. Thankfully, there’s a way to tackle these problems, and that’s what this weekend upgrade is about.

💡Get into the right mindset for work 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

To be clear, I do not mean a generic mindset like “Don’t give up” or “Keep on keepin’ on.” This weekend upgrade is not about discipline or willpower.

Here’s what I do mean: you can parcel projects into specific actions and divvy documents into multiple drafts if you approach each work session with the appropriate expectations. Rather than getting stuck because you can’t see a path from where you are all the way through to the end of the work, you can create intermediate goals that clarify what you should be focusing on at the moment.

I use these four mindsets to define my expectations and create those intermediate goals, which allows me to work more efficiently and effectively:

(1) Brainstorm mindset

(2) Organize mindset

(3) Make mindset

(4) Refine mindset

I call this approach BOMR (pronounced the same as “bomber”). Below is an overview of the BOMR mindsets, which will help you break down big projects and multiple-draft processes.

Brainstorm

Use the Brainstorm mindset when you’re at the beginning of your work and you’re not sure where to start.

If your goal for the first work session of a complicated project is to produce a finished, polished product, you’ll give up before you start. But if your goal is gathering resources, “mind sweeping”/“brain dumping,” throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, and that’s all you aim to accomplish in that session, then your work will be productive.

That’s the Brainstorm mindset: Gather resources and generate ideas—with no editing or filtering!

The outcome should be a disorganized pile of ideas and proto-tasks, plus a task telling you what to do next: either further Brainstorming or the next mindset, Organizing.

Organize

Use the Organize mindset to make sense of Brainstormed content.

Organizing is ordering, structuring, outlining. It’s the phase where you can indulge your urge to edit and filter: Now that all the ideas are out in front of you, you can decide what stays and what doesn’t.

When you’re in the Organize mindset, you take what you Brainstormed and structure it until it can serve as scaffolding for the Make mindset.

The outcome should be a well-ordered list of ideas or tasks (or both), plus a specific task telling you what to do next: either further Organizing or moving on to the Make mindset.

Make

“Make” is a deliberately broad term. The Make mindset applies whether you’re building a physical product, writing your chapter for the anthology, or creating most anything, really!

Making is the phase where you take the skeleton of your outline and put the meat on the bones. It’s often helpful, while Making, to pretend you have no outline at all, as though you’re working from scratch. You’re not, of course. The ideas you Organized will inform what you Make, but you’re free to discover new possibilities as you go.

The outcome should be a functioning prototype or a working draft, ready to be iterated on or delivered as is, depending how polished it is. You should also have a specific task for further Making or for moving on to the Refine mindset.

Refine

Use the Refine mindset to test, probe, tweak, “punch up,” or polish whatever you created in the Make phase.

Refining is making sure the product is ready to deliver. Refining is recursive. As you test, probe, and tweak, you’ll find gaps. You can return to the Brainstorm, Organize, or Make mindsets as needed to fill those gaps.

The outcome is a finished product. You should also create a task to review the whole project for lessons learned: you may discover processes that will make similar projects much simpler in the future.

How can Tools for Thought help?

If you’re new to the Weekend Upgrade newsletter, I explore how processes can be created in Tools for Thought (TfTs). TfTs are apps optimized for linking your ideas, thoughts, notes, etc.—apps like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, Obsidian, and Craft.

Processes are either bottom-up or top-down. Bottom-up processes allow sense to emerge. They help you discover new things or explore new pathways. Top-down processes are prescriptions for efficiency and effectiveness. They tell you what to do and when to do it.

Both bottom-up and top-down processes are necessary in a functioning productivity system, and Tools for Thought can handle both. There’s an important consideration here, though: dedicated task apps are often just as good as TfTs at guiding you through top-down processes. If it’s just a sequence of steps, you don’t need the power of Roam Research or Obsidian.

But most task apps are hopeless at handling bottom-up processes. Bottom-up, then, is where TfTs shine. And BOMR is a bottom-up process.

Brainstorm, Organize, Make, & Refine in your TfT

The Brainstorm and Organize phases are the bread and butter of TfTs. You can gather resources and capture ideas easily. You can source from books, URLs, previous projects, your brain—anywhere really—and gather all that into your project. And you can structure or recombine what you’ve gathered into an outline or task list with very little friction.

Depending what you’re Making, the Make and Refine steps may be in other software (or in your woodworking shop or warehouse, with no software at all!). But even if that’s the case, using your Tool for Thought for the Brainstorm and Organize mindsets is a gamechanger. Not only does it facilitate your thinking and planning for your current project, but it also makes it simple to extrapolate what you discover to similar projects in the future.

One easy way to use BOMR in your TfT is to create a specific tag for each mindset: #brainstorm, #organize, #make, #refine. That will help you now by reminding you what you’re focusing on, and in the future by making the content easy to access whenver you need to.

When you stress out at the start of a new project, it’s usually because you’re aiming for a target you haven’t defined and you aren’t ready to aim for yet. By defining the expectations for a work session using the appropriate BOMR mindset to create intermediate goals, you make it far more likely your work will move in the right direction.

What do I do next?

(1) Take 2 minutes and answer this question: What’s one thing I learned in this newsletter that I can put into practice right away?

By committing to a specific action, you make it much more likely you’ll do it.

(2) In your Tool for Thought of choice, create tags for #brainstorm, #organize, #make, and #refine.

It’s important to clarify your specific goals for every work session, and choosing a BOMR mindset tag is a useful way to do that.

If this was valuable for you:

Share the newsletter with someone you think would also get value from it! https://rjn.st/weekend-upgrade-newsletters​

Until next time, friends:

Use BOMR to define your expectations and establish intermediate goals.

R.J.

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P.S. Cohort Five of my AP Productivity course will launch on July 8, with special focus for users of Roam Research, Obsidian, or Amplenote. I’ll be opening Early Bird registration (15% off) early next week. If you’re interested in that—or in the new AP Productivity: Essentials or AP Productivity: Crash Course self-paced courses that will release soon—go to rjn.st/ap-productivity-course and sign up for email updates. I won’t send additional emails to the Weekend Upgrade list.

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