A Mason's Work

Hi management is a kind of diverse set of skills.

There's lots of ways to pursue managing your 24 inch gauge and managing time in general.

But one of the things you come up against fairly quickly as you're growing your time awareness

is very likely two different perspectives.

One is patience.

Patience is a sort of key skill when it comes to making sure that you're not rushing to the outcomes of your efforts.

When we talk about being patient it's about understanding that there is a probabilistic relationship between our effort and our outcomes, not a deterministic one.

If our outcomes and efforts were deterministic, right, then when you lift the weights once you would have the outcome that you're looking for.

Or more succinctly, if you were to plant a flower and do all of the things, you would, if the world was deterministic, you'd be able to tell what day it would flower on.

And so the world isn't quite that way, it's probabilistic, right?

So there is a range of probabilities and patience is the ability to understand that while there isn't a one to one relationship between effort and outcomes in most cases, there is a benefit to understanding that the outcomes will appear as a result of your efforts.

The other sort of time management function you want to be aware of and many of us have felt this as well and it's procrastination.

So the difference between patience and procrastination is again with patience, you are abiding your time waiting for an outcome, but you are pursuing some level of action or effort.

procrastination, you are delaying the effort or action with either the anticipation that the outcome might eventually come of its own or the risk would be passed or what have you.

And therefore you wouldn't have to undertake the effort.

The effort itself is the sort of part that you're avoiding in a procrastination kind of model.

In a lot of cases, the reasons we procrastinate are varied, but they are more often than not either in the ambiguity of the work ahead of us.

It's you we don't quite fully understand it.

Or in some cases, the work is not broken down into small enough pieces or we expect that the effort itself will be at some level, excruciating.

So you're avoiding pain by procrastinating.

Other folks that might procrastinate would do it for reasons that may be related to mental neurodivergence or what have you.

In my younger days, I had a tendency towards bringsmanship.

So things would have to go pretty crazy before I would pull it out at the last moment and essentially devote 100% of my focus 100% of my time and resource at the last minute, a great sort of personal expense and frenetic energy and that in and of itself provided some level of enthusiasm for me to overcome the agony of the work.

But your relationship between how you work and why you work and all that kind of stuff, notwithstanding, it's really important not to confuse being patient procrastinating and vice versa.

And you'll know you're doing one or the other if you're working or not.

This is a simple answer. I have told myself wonderful stories in my day to day life about how patient I was being when in fact that was just a mask for procrastinating.

And in other cases, I have not applied patients where I needed to trying to get immediate outcomes from the effort.

One in fact, that's not the way it works, particularly in situations where it's complex or there's other people involved. There's nuance.

Those kinds of situations really call for a lot more patients than that might be easy to muster sometimes.

But as you are moving forward to manage your 24 inch gauge and it is a tool with a ton of depth.

If you find yourself stuck, figure out, are you procrastinating or is this a situation that requires patients or any other combination of opportunities that that tool provides, including things like better time management, things like scheduling, working, breaking down your work into smaller pieces, that kind of stuff.

But yeah, that's the time management nutshell for today's episode.