INTxK

Kill the task before it lays eggs in your brain.

If you keep a task pending, it slithers into the back of your mind. It feeds on your neurones and starts laying eggs. And in no time you’re pacing around thinking, which egg do I kill first?

Task managers were built for managing tasks. But they serve excellently as a breeding ground. With its shiny, slick interface, you hoard what you can. Priorities, tags, labels and endless features. Perfect for letting the task grow arms and legs.

But who enjoys pruning a jungle of tasks?

What you need is fewer tasks and even less metadata.

In fact, for the majority of your day-to-day tasks, all you need is a notepad.

Keep it by your desk or bed. Tie your pen if you have to. At an opportune moment, record the task and slay it before it consumes your mind.

Your mind is your garden, and it deserves peace. How are you keeping it clean?

Why is being consistent so hard?

It might be less about having motivation and more about protecting it.

Yes. You should protect your motivation from distracting advice and demotivating comments.

When we ask for feedback, we sometimes get motivational advice that leads us away from our goal.

Other times, demotivating remarks will come disguised as feedback.

That's because most of us are not skilled in providing constructive feedback.

Check if the person you're asking for feedback:

- holds good intention towards you
- is competent to offer you good feedback

Don't forget that you have to communicate your goals well too.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-16]

A lot of us struggle with focus.

That’s because we are trying to accomplish too many things at the same time.

What is the number of too many things?

Think of your daily working capacity.

Let’s say you can work 4 hours a day with extreme focus. If you work 5 hours on any given day, the next day you might end up working 2 hours. This is your brain punishing you for hurting it.

So say you can work 4 hours a day and you’re working on 4 different projects. Each of your project gets 1 hour. What happens?

Obviously your progress would be slow. Worse yet, there’s a hidden cost. Each time you switch from one project to another, you lose contextual information for the previous project and then have to reconstruct contextual information in your brain for the next project.

It’s not obvious, but it adds friction to your brain. You might think you’re working 4 hours a day. But you’ve actually worked for 4.5 hours. That’s because your brain processed extra information when you were switching context.

Now let’s say you’ve worked on, say, 6 projects in 4 hours. But from the perspective of your brain, you have also spent worrying about the other projects for 0.5 hours in the background. And you’ve worked for 0.5 hours switching context.

So your brain has worked for 5 hours even though you think you’ve worked for 4 hours.

The next day— your brain punishes you with fatigue.

Of course these numbers are for illustration purposes only. Different people have different working capacities. But it’s proven that after waking up refreshed from sleep, we start with limited cognitive capacity to spend on brain work on a given day.

You can use coffee/energy drinks to artificially boost that capacity. But your body keeps the score. It’s basically borrowing capacity from your future self.

So how do we get more done without putting our brain under pressure?

Reduce the work-in-progress items. Instead of working on 4 different projects in one day, we focus on 1 project.

We still work 4 hours. But there is no need to switch additional context. We give our full capacity, and no additional energy is spent.

Focused work done within your capacity is more than enough. Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work’, Tim Ferriss’s ‘ The 4-Hour Workweek’, the Kanban approach to project management, and ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown— they will tell you the same thing. Do one thing, and do it well. And then keep doing it every day.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, it will get much more done than chronic overwork and burnout sequences.

It may be hard to get to that point of focus, but if you can get there, it suddenly gives you a lot of ex*****on capacity and freedom of time.

It feels unreal that you can experience these two side by side. But this can be achieved, and its productivity is at its finest.

[Mustafa, 2025-05-14]

: Do I need to track my work if I’m starting out with my business idea?
: Yes. Not tracking work is a rookie mistake.

: But what do I track?
: Anything that might be important/relevant to your future self/team-members.

: I haven’t done this before…
: Start with what your goals are, what you’re doing right now, how you are doing it, and how far you’ve progressed toward your goal.

: Thanks! I’ll try it.
: It sounds easy btw, but it can actually feel very tedious if you’re already busy doing your work.

: Oh!
: How were you planning to track your work?

: I was thinking of creating a large word document where I write down my goals for this project I’m working on right now. I was thinking of including the scope and plan for ex*****on as well.
: But what if your scope and plan changes?

: Ummm…then I update the document and create a new version?
: Technically that works, but you’ll be creating more documents than doing your actual work that way.

: Shoot! What’s a better alternative then?
: Keep logs. When you’re done with the work, review the logs and then generate a document using those logs.

: Hey!! That’s not a bad idea!

[Mustafa, 2025-05-12]