Happy Friday!

Thinking with my fingers

My collaborator and I once wrote a musical for a small production company in Chicago. We would write a draft, fly to Chicago for a table read, get glowing feedback, plan out a few tweaks, then fly back to Morgantown (WV) and write a new draft. Rinse, repeat.

After a few table reads (and a few reasonably expensive flights!), we told them that it was time to move from table reads to a staged reading or a workshop. We could make more changes, sure, but they were becoming changes for the sake of change rather than in service of the story. We had reached the point that we needed audience feedback to make any further sense of what was working and what wasn’t.

I tell that little anecdote because this twelfth Weekend Upgrade feels the same way to me. I’ve been “thinking with my fingers,” to borrow a phrase from my favorite productivity pen pal, and now it’s time to “put it in front of an audience.”

Which is to say: (1) I believe there’s considerable value in what I’m about to share, but (2) I don’t think I’ve mined all of it myself yet. Read it, engage with it, share it if you like, and join me in the mining of this productivity concept.

And now, back to your regularly-scheduled newsletter….

I want

It’s common in musicals—particularly in traditional ones—for the main character to sing what’s called an “I want” song. It’s almost always the first major solo that the main character sings. The idea of an “I want” song is to define, for the audience, where that character is starting and where they want to go: their personality, their mindset, their background, their obstacles, and so forth.

The reason for an “I want” song is simple: when an audience clearly understands a character’s intentions, it’s easier to root for them. Characters that don’t have clear wants are more challenging to understand—which isn’t a bad thing, per se. It just makes the storytelling more complicated if the audience doesn’t understand the main character’s goals.

Now let’s follow that analogy. An “I want” song, and its clarity of intention, is related to our own wants in life. If we are clear about what we want, it’s easier for us to “root for ourselves”—to positively and effectively take action and move in the right direction.

But what do I want?

…how can you know
Who you are till you know
What you want, which you don’t?
So then which do you pick…
​—Stephen Sondheim in “On the Steps of the Palace” from Into the Woods

The problem is, our personal “I want” songs are not easy to write!

We try to set goals, we try to “Start with Why,” but so often we find them too distant. Like Cinderella in Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods, we don’t know “who we are” until we’ve defined what we want, but we also don’t know “what we want” until we’ve defined who we are. A classic Catch-22, it seems.

There are only two problems in life….
Problem 1: You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it.
Problem 2: You don’t know what you want.
​—David Allen

My friend Gustavo reminds me often of this David Allen quote, and he’s right to do so. It’s powerful in its simplicity, and it points to a useful way to bridge the gap from our “who we are/what we want” Catch-22 into something more useful.

If we categorize our wants, corresponding (roughly) to future timeframes, we can make sense of the work we’re doing—and, critically, why we’re doing it. We can start with what we want to do right now and build upward, and then identify and capture our bigger-picture wants as they emerge.

Viewed from this perspective, a productivity system is fundamentally an expression of our wants at different timeframes in the future. If we explore those wants systematically, over time we will build workflows that tightly integrate with the work we do and the way we think.

💡Discover what you want: now, tomorrow, and this week, month, year, or lifetime 💡

👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.

The six Levels of Want below describe a bottom-up approach to understanding your bigger picture—your purpose in life. By starting our exploration up close and moving outward into the future, we’re more likely to arrive at what we really want to be doing with our lives, rather than what we think (or society suggests) we ought to be doing.

Levels of Want

What do I want to do right now?

We start here, in the Ever-Present Now. The answer to this first question is the one thing you can focus on right now, in this moment. By specifying exactly what I want to do and committing to it, it’s easier for me to focus and set aside distractions.

In my productivity system, this is handled in the “Log” section. I track what I’m doing as I do it, and provide myself a nice trigger for starting and ending work—opening and closing the Log entry.

Why start here? Why start now? Because it’s the only moment I have any real control over. “Start with why” is ineffective for many people because it’s big and broad. We get overwhelmed. We freeze.

But if we can develop a systematic approach to right now, we can build up to the big picture. And deciding what to do now—while not always easy—is at least more accessible than setting lifetime goals from scratch.

What do I want to do tomorrow?

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything
​—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Why do we bother planning tomorrow when not one single day from the past two months has gone according to plan? What’s the point?

For one, if you have a plan, it’s easier to recover from the inevitable interruptions that will occur. It’s also a lot easier to maintain the thread of your projects when you keep a list of the things you intend to do. If a day goes seriously off the rails, your list will help you triage what didn’t get done and keep projects from getting lost in the shuffle.

Maybe most important: the planning is the critical part, not the plan itself. When unexpected things happen, you’re better equipped to adapt. You know the territory. You know what you’re trying to accomplish.

In my system, my Agenda is where my tasks meet my appointments—and where my past, current, and future selves intersect. By engaging with this second Level of Want, I expand beyond “right now” and into the next twenty-four hours.

When you plan tomorrow systematically, “right now” also gets easier. You create a positive feedback loop from now to tomorrow to tomorrow’s now to the next day and so forth. You get into a rhythm.

What do I want to do this/next week?

This is the “review and calibrate” level, the bridge between the immediate and the aspirational. In GTD, this is where the wheels fall off for most people. They can make task and project lists, and they can usually decide what they want to do day-to-day, but the week level is hard to discern.

That happens for two reasons. First, the Weekly Review as presented in GTD is, admittedly, kind of a lot. My solution has been to distribute aspects of the standard GTD Weekly Review into different parts of the week. After all, they’re just recurring actions—they don’t actually need to be done all at once.

The second reason can be addressed with the bottom-up nature of these Levels of Want. If you are consistent with your “now” and your “tomorrow,” you’ll be shocked how much easier your “week” becomes. When your daily rhythm is off, your weekly rhythm will be way off. But when your daily rhythm is mostly functional, there’s a lot less mess to tidy up—and a lot more value in planning ahead—at the weekly level.

What do I want to do this/next month?

I use “month” here a little loosely. This isn’t so much a timeframe as it is the Projects level.

Obviously, projects vary widely in their actual time requirements. But it’s useful to think of the specific outcomes you’re attempting to accomplish at the month level, and that’s where Projects are invaluable. In my system, I insist that Projects have clearly defined outcomes. After all, if I don’t know what I’m trying to create, I’m unlikely to successfully create it.

The month level, then, is really these questions: What are you “shipping” this month? What are you delivering—to others, or to yourself? What specific outcomes will be accomplished in the next four weeks or so?

When you’re clear about the specific outcomes, you’ve created the pivot point between the Process of now, tomorrow, and this week and the Purpose of your Goals and Priorities.

What do I want to do this/next year?

If you’ve built successfully from “now” up through “Projects,” you’re set up for the “Goals” level.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you can’t have a goal before you start working. It’s fine to have some big picture ideas in place at the start. What I am saying is this: we tend to start working while we’re looking at the big picture, and that’s not likely to be productive. It’s too vague to be immediately actionable, and we’ll freeze because we’re overwhelmed. Ask the “now” question first, and let it build from there to the longer timeframes, even if you have a goal in mind.

Goals answer questions like these: What are the waypoints you’re working toward? Do you want to travel more? Do you want to be healthier? Do you want a promotion or to land a job at a different company? Do you want to spend more time with your family or friends?

The synergy between Projects and Goals can be self-reinforcing or it can be toxic. If your Projects are pointed toward your Goals, you’ll do amazing things. If they’re not, or if you have no direction at all to work toward, you’ll be lost and unfulfilled. Take the time to systematically review your Projects and ensure they reinforce your Goals.

What do I want to do in my lifetime?

I call these answers my Priorities. What are your dreams? What are the most important things to you? What do you want people to say when they eulogize you at your funeral?

When you’ve worked your way up the Levels of Want from “now” to this top point, you’ll find two things:

(1) You’ve built a functional productivity system. You can always ask these questions when you need clarity at any level, and the answers will help you take action. It may not be a robust system, but it will work.

(2) You can now work top-down as well. The clarity of Priorites, Goals, Projects, etc., will help you better direct your choices “now.”

Earlier, I pointed out the positive feedback loop between “now” and “tomorrow.” That concept holds for this entire system. The Levels of Want are a sequence of interwoven feedback loops. When they’re synchronized, you’ll do amazing things! When they’re not, you can ask these questions as needed to re-synchronize them.

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.

If you want to make sense of the Levels of Want, you have to answer the prompt questions from time to time. I use Roam Research, my TfT of choice, to prompt me when to respond to questions about my day, my week, my Projects, and so forth. I’m free to do it on an as-needed basis, of course, but also having a regular reminder in place means I’ll never go completely off the rails.

Most important, when you do answer the Levels of Want questions, TfTs make it easy to align them with your actions.

TfTs let you align your wants

When you wrap a word or phrase in [[double brackets]], your TfT of choice treats that as a reference to a page (or file, or whatever your TfT calls it). If you wrap those double brackets around the names of specific Projects, Goals, Priorities, and so forth, you are now in a position to interweave the Levels of Want effortlessly.

Say I’m answering the prompt “What do I want to do tomorrow?” If I refer to a specific Project (i.e., wrap it in double brackets), I can then use the Project’s backlinks to review my most up-to-date thinking and planning. Or I can learn from my thinking and planning over time. This creates, in effect, an additional “dimension” to my planning. Not only am I determining what I want to do tomorrow, but I’m also creating a cross-referenced record of the Projects I’m engaging with and, if needed, the Goals those work toward.

This is the mechanism of the feedback loop I mentioned above: cross-referenced Levels of Want reinforce the relationship between your intentions and your actions. Any time I refer to aspects of multiple levels, I build a web of relationships that can further direct my work in the future—and that I can review if my work changes or slips off track.

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) Spend a few minutes layering the Levels of Want into your recurring actions.

Answer “What do I want to do right now?” multiple times a day, “What do I want to do tomorrow?” every evening, “What do I want to do this/next week?” once a week, and so on. Schedule them accordingly.

And, if you like, respond to this email or “at me” on Twitter (@rjnestor). I’d love your collaboration as I mine this analogy more deeply.

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:

Figure out what you want, and go get it!

R.J.
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P.S. Later today I am releasing AP Productivity: Essentials, a self-paced version of my flagship course AP Productivity: Cohort. If you’ve been interested in the cohort course content but you’re more of a self-paced person, check it out: rjn.st/ap-productivity-essentials.