Sep 02 2019 What’s Up 08/2019

Mov­ing out of my Home Town

I’ve been liv­ing in a small city in the south of Ger­many for all of my life. With the ex­cep­tion of a cou­ple of va­ca­tions, I don’t re­al­ly know big­ger cities.

Ad­just­ing to new sur­round­ings, I be­lieve, is very im­por­tant for per­son­al growth. That was al­ready the case when I moved out of my par­ent’s place.

Now I am leav­ing the com­fort of Kon­stanz, a place to which oth­er peo­ple go for va­ca­tions that beau­ti­ful, to Mu­nich, that in com­par­i­son you def­i­nite­ly heared of. While just for half a year, I am look­ing for­ward to it a lot.

There, I’ll be back to home of­fice there, to work on Vhite Rab­bit<{tag}vhite-rab­bit>’s many projects, which brings me to…

Es­sen­tial­ism

, the dis­ci­plined pur­suit of less, by Greg McK­e­own.

A cou­ple of weeks a go, my broth­er sur­pris­ing­ly sent me this au­dio book 1. I did not know him as a per­son­al de­vel­op­ment kind of per­son, so not on­ly did the fact that he lis­tens to this kind of au­dio books sur­prise me, but al­so what a great rec­om­men­da­tion he had made!

The gist (but go lis­ten or read) is that one should be do­ing less, but bet­ter work, es­pe­cial­ly work that max­imis­es one’s own pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, hence in ar­eas where you are able to gen­er­ate dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly more out­put than oth­er peo­ple and leave ar­eas oth­er peo­ple can do (or do bet­ter) to oth­ers.

So, I start­ed fo­cussing our ef­forts at Vhite Rab­bit…

Lean Vhite Rab­bit

Vhite Rab­bit had over 20 open projects.

We are two founders plus a back­ing hob­by-team of now 5 peo­ple.

How did this hap­pen?

The an­swer is twofold: when­ev­er we’d “aban­don” a project, we’d in­stead “pause” it. Be­cause of this, we would ev­ery now and then go back to these projects af­ter all, maybe out of bad con­science or out of hope that it would suc­ceed af­ter all.

This caused a “work­ing in all di­rec­tions, get­ting nowhere in any” sit­u­a­tion in which projects were not com­plet­ed, but we on­ly pro­gressed in them. Worse even, we nev­er worked on a project with the men­tal­i­ty of “fin­ish­ing”, but on­ly “pro­gress­ing a bit”.

In­stead, we are now fin­ish­ing projects one-by-one to fi­nal­ly re­turn to our main project.

Sum­ma­ry

Stress­ful times, but good things are hap­pen­ing and work is as al­ways su­per fun. I aim to re­duce the amount of things I work on si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, gain­ing bet­ter fo­cus on few im­por­tant things. Let’s see how that turns out in the fu­ture.

Was last blog post’s <{file­name}../2019/2019-06-02-whats-up-2019-06.rst> sum­ma­ry. Took me an au­dio­book be­fore ac­tu­al­ly putting this plan in­to ac­tion and un­til it’s ef­fects show, it will take time.

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Es­sen­tial­ism - The dis­ci­plined pur­suit of less, Au­dio­book.