About a week in and I can see two problems with this approach:
I sometimes read actionable things by accident. So the âactionable, to-tryâ pile keeps growing larger regardless of what I do.
Iâm itching to try and expand the bottleneck, even though I know itâs not likely to work. For most techniques, I find youâll have to focus on it quite a bit, and think about all the nuances before you get it to work.
The biggest win so far has been to have the âtwo experiments of the weekâ sit at the top of my todo list, as a reminder.
The way to expand the bottleneck has a couple options
increase your throughput in implementing actionable things
delegate the other actionable things to others and have them report back
While the second option isnât perfect, you can still glean some learnings from it.
Two experiments per week equates to 104 per year, provided no breaks. Realistically speaking lets say you commit to around 70 of those due to family, vacation, etc.
Allowing a group of people (aka CommonCog group) to perform and track their results allows larger amounts of experiments. 10 people x 2 experiments per week x 35 weeks = 700 experiments
Then there becomes a signal vs noise problem, but if there is a way to increase the quality of the âreportsâ it might not become an issue
There may be some positive benefit to letting these pile up. Once youâve amassed a list youâre no longer comfortable staring at, you can mine through them and try to:
Identify the âhot spotsâ in your current slate of interests and focus there
Extract the meta-skills that if experimented on and mastered, would check off multiple experiments (or even whole experimental areas) at once
Provide fodder to combine and recombine the experiments in novel ways that werenât obvious in isolation
If thereâs one thing Iâve learned itâs that you canât outrun your own curiosity, so instead learn to make it work for you more effectively
This is a good point. I donât see my list of âto-experimentâ ideas as a resource to mine for insight; perhaps I should. Iâll have to think about this.
In general, though, I have a handful of things I want to experiment with at any given time. So even though my âto-experimentâ list might be arbitrarily long, itâs usually pretty clear (given my work/life context) whatâs most important to prioritise in a given week.
Still, both of these comments are really good. Iâd not thought about them!