I Did the Same Task Well in March and Badly in June. The Difference Was Not Me.

I have a recurring piece of work — a quarterly analysis — that I have now done eleven times. Some of those were good and done early; some were rushed and mediocre. Same task, same person, and the variation is enormous. I went back through all eleven looking for what distinguished them, expecting the answer to be about how motivated I was.

Two things predicted it and neither was internal.

The first was whether anything else with a deadline sat within the same fortnight. In the seven good instances, the answer was no in six. In the four bad ones it was yes in all four. This sounds obvious stated plainly, and it is, and I had never once considered it as a factor when assessing my own performance. I had been attributing the difference to focus, and the actual variable was whether there was a competing claim on the same two weeks.

The second was whether I had done the first ten minutes on the day it arrived. Not a serious start — opening the file, writing three lines of a plan. In the good instances I had, in the bad ones I had not, and the gap between arrival and first contact in the bad ones averaged nine days. What happens in those nine days is that the task acquires weight; it becomes the thing I have been not doing, and starting it now means confronting that as well as the work.

Neither of these is about wanting to do it. In every one of the eleven I wanted to do it about the same amount, which is moderately.

What I changed is small and mechanical. Anything recurring gets ten minutes on the day it arrives, blocked in advance, no exceptions and no expectation of progress. And when something lands in a fortnight that already has a deadline in it, I now say so and move one of them, which I had previously experienced as an admission of weakness and now experience as scheduling.

The three instances since have all been in the good group. Three is not evidence and I am aware of that.

The broader thing I would say is that I spent a long time asking motivational questions about variation that was environmental, and the reason is that the motivational framing puts the cause somewhere I have direct access to. It feels more actionable to resolve to try harder than to notice that two deadlines are in the same fortnight, because the second requires looking at a calendar and possibly having a conversation.

When someone tells me they were unmotivated for a stretch, the question I now ask is what else was in that period, and the answer is usually immediate and specific, and it is usually enough.