In defense of sprinting

Something I’ve noticed I’m not very good at is thinking about where I want to be, long into the future. Short-term—a week, a quarter—I’m relatively okay—but anything longer is too much of a stretch to imagine.

Maybe that’s because I’m a little odd. But my guess is, you feel the same.

That's because cognitive load is real. Because you can only carry so many things in your head at once. Thinking about where you’re going to be, much less what you're going to do, for any more than a few days is psychologically taxing.

Which is why we so often underestimate what we can do in the long-term. (Because we literally can’t fathom what we’ll do in all that time.)

Short of long-term goal setting (which is ostensibly helpful for some), I think it may be more productive to think about time in shorter durations. Because, if you can’t reliably predict your future—what you need doing—past a few months, it doesn’t help to put it on your agenda.

Of course, our culture doesn't make this very easy. We typically think about time in blocks of months or quarters or years. And so everything from our calendars to our conversations are centered around where we’ll be a year from now, or five, or fifteen.

Alas, this might be the wrong approach for most people.

Because, if all you felt you had was a little more than a week or two to do everything you need doing (or, to at least, complete a sizeable chunk of a more time-consuming task) you’d probably get more done, not less.

If all you had was 7 days to start something, to end something, to create, to live, and to ship—what would you do? What would you accomplish?