Becoming a doer: 4 practical questions to get stuff done
It’s not what you know, or what you say you’ll do, it’s what you’ve done. For a dreamer like me, this has been an important lesson to learn, and a journey. My INTJ personality tends to strategize and to make big plans. It also gets easily distracted. Asking a few questions about my work, over and over, has helped me get more things done.
- What are the options? If I’m facing a challenge, or a project, I first use my imagination, I role play, I try to visualize how the situation would look if it was completed and ask myself: what are the options to get this done? Generally speaking, I find that a few minutes of creating alternatives can save tens or hundreds of hours later by pursuing the wrong path. For example: can I hire somebody to do this? can I subcontract it? Outsource it? Can I convince a partner to take it on? Even deeper: do I really need to do this? What happens if I delay? Can this problem go away or become irrelevant?
- What is the most practical choice? OK, this would be the ideal way of doing it, but this other way, which takes half the time, gets it done. I wish I did it this way, but it turns out that I need to learn this or that. Instead, I’m going to chose the dirty or tedious approach. Because the value of getting it done now far outweighs the value of getting it done incrementally better, but later.
- Is this the most important thing right now? Probably the #1 lesson from the 4-hour workweek is that. Find the most important thing that you can get done today, then do it. For an INTJ it’s so deceptively easy to see a tangent and take it. (And many other things too) So on the path to becoming a doer, there’s many things that I leave undone, because they matter less.
- Is this work worth my hourly rate? Many knowledge workers tend to implicitly value their time at minimum-wage salary levels. They simply focus on things that somebody else could be doing much more cheaply. This question is an extension of #3. Because, many times, faced with the choice of shelling out actual money to get somebody to do something for us vs the hypothetical expenditure of our own personal time to get it done, we back away from the actual expenditure. Even though it’s not the rational choice.
5 Responses to “Becoming a doer: 4 practical questions to get stuff done”
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Great post. It is clear You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage.
The way you write shows you have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself.
It seems to me that while While you have some personal weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them.
I’m an INTJ also and this is so relevant. I also recently talked to an INTJ having troubles all revolving around this and was able to help by recommending some techniques. Not exactly Getting Things Done, but that type of thing.
Everything you said here is really central and a running theme with me and many clients I’ve had who are NT types. Check out my site and get in touch if you like. Always nice meeting other INTJ’s that focus on strategy and optimization (as if there are many INTJ’s that don’t haha).