Weekend Upgrade provides tools to improve your productivity and communication, especially if you use Tools for Thought like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, or Obsidian.
Weekend Upgrade 9: Repeat the past
Happy Friday!
Reinventing Wheels
Every month it’s the same mess.
It’s the 31st and you have so much left to write for your monthly report. There’s the financial data—it’s ironic that you’re stressing over that, because your team is actually doing great. Sales are up. You just don’t have the exact numbers at your fingertips and you need the exact numbers for the report. Plus you have to write your monthly summary—which implies the existence of information to summarize. You’ll have to gather all that info first before you can even start the summary.
Every month you tell yourself you won’t get into this mess again. You won’t wait until the last minute to start assembling the report. You’ll gather data during the month rather than scrambling for it at the end. But every month you put that off. Because who has time for extra work when there’s already plenty of regular work on your plate?
So you do the report from scratch every time. Maybe if it were a weekly report instead of a monthly report, the process would stick in your brain. But one month is just a little too long to remember the details, which means you always make simple mistakes, or do work out of order—minor stuff, but it requires fixing and chews up valuable time.
Maybe this month you’ll learn. Maybe you won’t wait until the last minute.
Maybe….
Stop. Rewind. Ready-made Wheels
Every month it’s as easy as pie.
Sure, it’s the 31st, but the report essentially writes itself. Your weekly reminder to enter the financial data means that you have the exact numbers already tabulated. The report itself is a template—it took a few months before you had it “just right,” but now it’s paint-by-numbers. Yes, there’s the summary to write, but everything you need to know is right in front of you.
And every step of your process is laid out in a checklist, so even if you forget a step from one month to the next, you won’t make any absentminded mistakes. You won’t lose any time. You won’t miss any beats.
You’ve done this almost fifty times over the four years you’ve been managing this team. Why would you be doing everything from scratch? You made it repeatable, and you’ve already saved yourself hours if not days or even weeks during your tenure.
Missed opportunities
Most of us miss a huge opportunity when projects end. Every project has the potential to teach us about future projects. If we take a few minutes after work on a project is finished but before we archive it, we can go back through and look for patterns. And we can repeat those patterns the next time we encounter similar work.
We rarely do that, though. Partly because it feels like “extra” work, and partly because we overestimate our memories. It’s fresh in our minds now, we think, so we’ll definitely remember the process next time. No, we won’t.
If we overcome these hesitations, we can design templates that keep on giving long after that original project is complete.
💡 Study the past, and try to repeat it! 💡
👆 That’s your weekend upgrade.
Two weeks ago, my family and I had a hotel booked in Virginia Beach. It had been years since our last beach vacation, and we were excited to relax for a few days in the sun and on the sand.
One problem: we checked the weather for Virginia Beach and saw that Monday and Tuesday—half of our potential beach days—were going to be 59ºF (15ºC) and rainy.
So we changed our plans last minute. We canceled our hotel in Virginia Beach and booked one in Myrtle Beach instead. It was farther south and much warmer, and it was going to be sunny (and now that we’re back from the trip, I can confirm, it was lovely!).
Making the change from Virginia Beach to Myrtle Beach took us less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because going to one beach versus another beach is an example of two nearly identical projects. The destinations change, but what we pack to bring with us doesn’t. What we plan to do while we’re there doesn’t—at least not significantly.
We had already done most of what needed to be done. Changing destinations was simple because we recognized what was the same.
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.
Once you recognize what’s the same, how can you make use of that?
(1) Smart Templates
TfTs allow you to create templates which can house the details of past projects for future use. Here are two examples from my own work: my newsletter and my AP Productivity course.
When I produce this newsletter every two weeks, I know that I need to hit certain waypoints in order to send it out on time. While the content changes from newsletter to newsletter, the process remains the same. Which means I can use a template—I “initialize” the project twelve days in advance, and the template creates tasks on the correct dates to keep my newsletter on schedule. I use the SmartBlocks extension in Roam to create that smart template, but you could also use the Templater plug-in in Obsidian, for example. The method would vary based on your TfT of choice.
The same concept, on a larger scale, helps me prepare for each new cohort of my AP Productivity course. A smart template contains all the relevant dates for a new cohort, relative to the launch date that I provide. When I run that template, I get a full list of every task I need to complete, along with the date it needs to be done. After the first four cohorts, I am confident in the quality and value of the template, but it’s also easy to update if I ever make changes to the process in the future.
Using templates like this is one area that TfTs shine. Templates are certainly possible in many dedicated task apps, but the fluidity and flexibility that TfTs bring to the table is a huge benefit. And there’s another layer beyond that.
(2) Templates upon templates
One feature of many TfTs is called “transclusion”—a fancy word that roughly means that text “living in” one area of the app can be viewed in another area of the app. I’m going to slightly extend the transclusion concept here, but that’s the basic idea.
Now, picture this: What would happen if you had a “Project” template that listed the basic logistical startup and shutdown processes for all new projects?
And then, what if you had a few additional specific tasks related to a “Travel Project” template, and you could transclude the “Project” template into the “Travel Project” template? That way, any changes you made to all projects would be included in all travel projects, too—even though you only made the change in one place.
And then, what if you could transclude all travel projects into specific ”Business Trip” and “Family Vacation“ projects? See where we’re heading? By layering these templates upon templates, we can easily develop new project templates by “forking” existing ones. If you’re a programmer, you might recognize classes and inheritance as an analogy.
The power in layering these templates is incredible, but it all starts simply: recognize what’s the same between two projects and make a template for it. Then it can evolve over time. You don’t need to sit down and figure it all out at once.
Once you understand the mechanism for layering transcluding templates, your recurring project templates can develop organically. Need a template for “Two-week Mediterranean Family Beach Vacation”? First, I’m jealous. And second, you can create that in no time from the tools you’ve already built.
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) Look back through the last few projects you’ve completed.
What can you extrapolate from them to create templates for future projects? Once you recognize what’s the same, make some templates!
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:
History repeats itself, and so should you!
R.J.
Weekend Upgrade (by R.J. Nestor)
Weekend Upgrade provides tools to improve your productivity and communication, especially if you use Tools for Thought like Roam Research, Amplenote, Logseq, or Obsidian.
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