A common feeling of tension that I experience is the competition between a desire to plan and a desire to crack on with work. Planning can include: planning tasks for work and prioritising them, updating my to do list and my goals, reflecting on mistakes and new knowledge, planning career steps and the future. These can be described as meta-actions; they are themselves real and concrete actions, but their efficacy ultimately relies on further action, and their purpose is to guide our choice of actions. These are the work of the farmer. The fruit-picker on the other hand only wants to crack on with the bread and butter actions that form as fruits on the end of the branches of the tree; the tree that the farmer is trying so hard to nurture.
Unfortunately we only have one brain each, and we divide our time between farming and fruit-picking.
One might wonder if we can be the farmer and the fruit-picker at the same time. While this might work locally for some types of work, I think the nature of highly focused and high quality fruit-picking (at least in research or creative work) makes it hard to simultaneously take a step back, think about the bigger picture, and pick holes in your own methodology. There are associated switching costs of doing so, since the type of thought process can differ significantly. My own experience at least, and probably yours, tells you that we often make questionable decisions in the heat of the moment. One aspect of this is that we can easily enter an autopilot state of mind if we switch tasks too often without a break. But let’s leave this argument for now, and take it as an assumption.
Personally, I know that I have a tendency to swing too far both ways. At times, particularly in my teenage years, I spent the majority of my time fixated on planning, figuring out the best way to learn X or achieve Y, and, in hindsight, not as much time as I’d have liked actually carrying out the actions that would lead to me knowing X (practicing the sport, reading the relevant textbook, following a good course, solving hard problems) or achieving Y. Meanwhile, I’ve also gone too far in the opposite direction, blindly assigning more and more effort to some task, without taking a step back to reflect — where, upon doing so, I would realise that I can double my efficiency using some silly hack.
Neither of these outcomes are ideal. I do believe that the majority of time should be spent fruit-picking. Those actions are typically the ones that require a greater input of time. The reading of a textbook will require more time than the planning how to best read that book and planning how to experiment with your learning method. I think the tendency to prioritise fruit-picking is a very important trait of a proactive person (be it learned or innate). Once somebody has successfully committed to prioritising fruit-picking, the danger is then the total abandonment of structured farming.
I say structured farming, by which I mean regular and purposeful work on meta-actions (planning, prioritising tasks, reflection and review), to highlight the difference between this and just giving some thought to plans and the bigger picture “every now and then” in some vague way. Even if it uses less time, as I hope, I believe farming should be taken as seriously as fruit-picking and it should be given equal respect. To really thrive as a fruit-picker, it might help to do some high quality consistent farming. I believe that neglected farming has been one of my biggest weaknesses.
Examples of farming
To be concrete, I want to give some examples of how I schedule farming time, what the different actions look like, and explain why they are valuable (if done regularly and sincerely).
Regular work reflections and research log updates — approx 10m 2x per day
By taking a step back every few hours, reviewing progress, and updating a research log (1 per project) with new information or results, I’m reminded to zoom out and check in with myself. I can ask myself questions that I might forget to ask myself and then address them: am I feeling ok? am I fatigued? am I hungry?
By writing down my recent thoughts it also forces me to make things more concrete which is always helpful. If my thoughts are actually not concrete, or I’m in an auto pilot state of mind, then this is when I can notice that and do something about it. Very often, just noticing a certain undesirable state of mind can really help (not always, but then we can plan reactions to noticing such states of mind e.g. drink water), or at least give us the kick we need to take a break or finish for the day.
For me, the purpose of this farming action is to minimise the number of days where I just go into auto pilot mode, slog away for hours on non-concrete tasks, achieve very little, and feel burnt out.
Daily task planning — approx 15m per day
At the beginning of my day I like to spend 15 minutes figuring out what I would like to do today (selecting tasks off of my to do list), and what time I expect to have for these tasks.
By realistically assessing my time resources that day, I can match it to the tasks, and not plan above my capacity, which generally leaves me feeling happier I think.
I can also make sure that I work on something concrete each day this way. If I can identify one concrete thing I want to get done each day for a research project, this is a fantastic way of ensuring that we have consistent incremental progress —something which I and most everyone I think would trumpet as very important for long term success in a project.
Weekly review — approx 30m-1h per week
A weekly review is for me a time to reflect on the past week. I find it invaluable for identifying improvements that I can make to the way I work, either as a fruit-picker or as a farmer. By prompting myself with the same questions each week, I am encouraged to reflect on how I felt that week, how I’ve worked towards my goals, brainstorm improvements that I can make to my workflow, see the joy in learning new things, identify the main concrete thread in each research project, and much more. By using the same set of questions, adding as they arise, I can also track how my answers change over time.
Since I’ve started weekly reviews I have become addicted. I always finish with a clearer mind and feeling happier. I’m sure that part of this is that it acts as an active memory de-clogger, offloading any concerns I have. By putting them down in writing, and being given the time explicitly to brainstorm solutions to lingering problems that I’ve procrastinated addressing, I find myself living a more exciting and dynamic life. By keeping track of the new things I’ve tried, I can identify if I’m becoming malcontent in an aspect of life, and am reminded to try something new.
The weekly review gives me time to review how different experiments in my life are progressing. If I’ve started slacking in one, say I wanted to avoid eating for 2 hours before I sleep, the weekly review is where I can notice this and plan how to react.
I think I could go on for hours ranting about the benefits I’ve felt. The main point though is that it gives you a bit of time every week to breathe and take a step back and, importantly, plan to change those things that you don’t like and be grateful for those you do. It's like a big stop sign, a reminder to actually think about the meta questions free of guilt.
However, this would not work nearly so well if we did it constantly, or even every day. Doing this once a week really hits a kind of sweet spot. We’ve cracked on with our fruit-picking for a whole week, and now, as a reward, we get to reflect and let our farmer steer the course for next week. I will come back to this point later.
Monthly research review — approx 30m-1h per month
Playing much the same role as the weekly review, but dedicated to reflection on my research performance over a longer interval , checking in with my feelings of excitement/enjoyment, planning future directions, and thinking about how to develop as a researcher.
One motivating reason for having this monthly review is to give myself some perspective. In the day-to-day bustle of work, it can be hard to accurately measure how much progress we’re making in a project or as a researcher. There is no default check-in for this, where we can review our work on a longer timescale. Meetings with a supervisor could partially function like this, but I find they tend to naturally focus on present work over reflecting on previous work. It functions in some sense like a progress review with your manager, except it’s with yourself and without external pressure.
These examples of how to schedule farming time are simply the ones that I’ve tried, and they’ve all been successful so far. I think people should feel free to develop their own routines for farming, experimenting with regularity and focus, to find a system that they feel benefits them. The one which I really recommend trying is a general purpose weekly review. A week is a really nice time period over which to reflect. Any longer, and I tend to start forgetting bits and pieces, and any shorter feels too forced. Now, what to reflect on in that review, how to prompt yourself and which questions to ask? That is up to the individual.
Conclusion
I would like to finally reflect on the importance of the regularity of the farming actions. Importantly, by regularity I really wish to encode both a sense of consistency and the reminder not to overdo it by farming too frequently (e.g. if the weekly review were a daily review, eww). We gave reasons why overdoing farming can be bad at the start, but I want to highlight again that one of the key benefits of having a regular set of farming actions is that, in the remaining time, you can fruit-pick to your hearts content, without worrying about the concerns of the farmer. You can safely bury your nose in your work, knowing that the time for farming will anyway soon come again.
Tons of fruit-picking, regular farming.