Here are some unordered and barely edited/coherent thoughts:
- Don’t waste time trying to be the best at one thing. Better to be good at three. Or passably competent at 7. Being a ‘jack of all trades’ lets you get a lot of things done while also building the connections/networks to know who the people are who are really good at something when you need help.
- Say ‘yes’ to things and worry about how to manage your schedule later. Makes life more fun. Though do some basic time tracking to keep across things. (This probably only really works for people who are healthy, not married with kids and who’s ‘things’ allow them to accumulate enough wealth to not worry. So adjust accordingly)
- I’m a big fan of ‘minimal viable product’ rather than perfection- what is the lowest level of quality/effort needed to satisfy the objective. Best encapsulated by the university mantra “P’s make Degrees”. Though I would caveat that specific mantra only works if the objective to succeed as is ‘graduate uni’. If your objective is to get into Honours than it’s more “D’s make Degrees”, so adjust accordingly. While I would like to say this is because I’m lazy, it’s really more of an efficiency thing that follows from the first two items: once I’ve met the minimal product needing to achieve my aim, any further time/energy/resources spent on it will be wasted when they could instead be spent doing something else.
- Very rarely is there really an objective measure of ‘success’. When you dig into it it comes down to a subjective evaluation by those around you. Thanks Survivor for teaching me this. So when trying to achieve something, make sure you very early on give some thought about what exactly ‘achievement’ means and to who that needs to be demonstrated.
- Over think/plan and pre-test much as you can, but don’t sweat too much on all of the exact details. ‘Measure twice and cut once’ means that you are prepared, but always build in wiggle room because life throws curveballs at you and if you can’t be flexible things fall apart.
- Many deadlines are soft deadlines that can be modified or ignored, but some of them are actual hard deadlines you need to meet. Get good at identifying the latter.
- There are two kinds of work- things waiting on you and things waiting on other people. Always prioritize your activities to shift as many things from the former to the latter. Lets you be guilt free when things are delayed/collapse because you’ve done your part.