I remember my father doing his work as early as possible.
When he got a new project or proposal to work on, and he had let’s say 3 weeks as deadline to deliver, he worked on it from day one and completed it within the first few days or weeks (depending on the complexity). The point is that he got it done now and not later. The completed work was then laying on his table for the remaining time, ready to be presented or even being modified.
That’s in contrast to what I experienced with projects in general where they would take up as much time as you would give them, as the work was spread out over the available time frame or even pushed back towards the end.
When I was still working in the building industry, we were planning and supervising a lot of commercial projects like shopping malls and office buildings. I remember that no matter how little or much time we had to complete the project and open it to the public, the last weeks, days and nights were always the same busy.
I recognise that this habit of doing the work that is important to me now vs. later has a huge impact on how satisfied I’m with it, and if it gets done at all.
If I take for example RFA with the two areas of 1. product development (writing code) and 2. marketing, there is definitely steady progress in the product development but too little in the area of marketing.
Writing code, working out complex issues and coming up with ideas how to build a great product come much easier than doing marketing. I start my day with writing code, and I can’t stop doing it (because I love it so much), which means that I push marketing (which isn’t my favourite thing to do) to later.
Yesterday we released the All-in-One Door Family v2, which got me a flood of emails and positive feedback. I wrote answers all day long, and continued with the remaining responses this morning.
This was customer support & marketing at the same time and I truly enjoyed catching up with so many happy customers, many of them loyal to my products for 10 years or more.
It has been a no brainer and felt effortless to write all those personal responses, helping them out, sending them download links if the weren’t included in the automated update email, etc.
… I guess I went a bit off topic now, but all that came to mind when thinking about doing things now vs. later.
It’s the love to doing the work which makes it to be in the now vs. the later bucket, which means for me to find love in activities that I want to shift from the later into the now bucket.