State thrashing · The Cold Coffee Club

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State thrashing

Picture this. You sit down to work and realize you have five different tasks that need to get done. So you open your project management tool and start sorting them by importance.

While you're in there, you realize you forgot some subtasks. So you add those.

Then you get an email about a summit you want to participate in, so you add the application deadline and everything you'll need to do for that.

You look up an hour later at your beautifully organized list and feel like you've been really productive.

Except... you haven't actually crossed a single thing off of it. 😬

There's a computer science concept for this called state thrashing. Basically, a system can get so overwhelmed deciding what to work on and switching between tasks that it spends more resources MANAGING the work than actually DOING the work.

Sound familiar? 😅

𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗺 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲:

When the system is overloaded, the solution is to STOP trying to perfectly organize everything, and START processing. Grab the first thing that you can cross off the list and DO IT.

Don't get me wrong - there absolutely is value in planning, organizing, and prioritizing.

But at some point, if you're dealing with state thrashing, you have to stop sorting the work...

and do the work.

Thoughts?

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State thrashing