How to Reverse Engineer with Compassion
hacks for common productivity tools
Quick Announcement
I have three spots open for Success & Accountability Coaching clients to start packages in June! S&A Coaching is a 6-month/12-session coaching package with detailed coaching notes, weekly accountability check-ins, and email support between our sessions to help you progress on your important academic and/or writing projects.
If you’re interested, you can learn more here and schedule in for a Discovery Call here to chat with me about your project and discuss how Success & Accountability Coaching could support you this year.
When I was doing my Tending Year project, I researched and tried out a different tool each week for two years. At the end of my weekly experiments, I shared a blog post where I reflected on what was or wasn’t working for me and decided which parts of the tool I wanted to take with me into my daily practices. This is how I discovered tools I use often, such as the pulse and pause approach, the must-do method, and gamifying my aversive tasks.
I eventually started developing my own hacks for common approaches to productivity, such as the Proactive Plans and Acute Actions framework and the Goldilocks Approach to Productivity. Something these tools have in common is their use of reverse engineering—but in a way that prioritizes self-compassion.
What’s Reverse Engineering?
If you’re like me (meaning you didn’t go to school to be an engineer), you might have assumed that reverse engineering simply means breaking down a process to reach an ideal end goal. In other words, if you need to write 10,000 words in a month, you want to write 2,500 words each week.
To get technical with it, reverse engineering occurs when we take something apart to investigate how it works. Perhaps someone wants to discover how a product was created so they can develop a blueprint to recreate it (this makes me think of a sommelier or trained chef being able to smell and taste different ingredients in wine or meals). They will likely use reverse engineering because it can help them better understand how to build or improve a product.
This process can be helpful as a learning or inspiration tool—but it can also be used unethically, like when a big company steals designs from a small artist and mass markets it as their own creation. Or when a company tries to trademark a traditional and/or freely circulated recipe to prevent others from accessing it, like happened with fire cider (which the courts ruled is generic and cannot be trademarked, thankfully!).
How Does Reverse Engineering Help with Personal Productivity?
Unlike a gadget that is meant to function the same on each use, our personal productivity practices shift from day to day and project to project. Still, we can develop processes that help us navigate these ebbs and flows to make forward progress.
For both the Goldilocks Approach to Productivity and the Proactive Plans and Acute Actions framework, our approach to completing a long-term, complex project is grounded in self-compassion. In order to accommodate our unique personal needs, we have to go deeper than just dividing the end result by the number of days between now and the deadline.
The Goldilocks Approach to Productivity is an awesome tool to plan out your productivity session in a way that aligns with your personal resources on the day you’re working. Personal resources include not only your time, energy, and ability to focus, but also your mental, emotional, and physical state (i.e., are you working in a place with furniture that hurts your back). This involves checking in with how much time you have to work and how you’re feeling at the start of your work session, so you can identify an appropriate task to work on that day.
The Proactive Plans and Acute Actions framework is a great way to mitigate potential challenges and navigate obstacles that could come up when you’re working on a complex, longer-term project. There are three steps: reflect on your past experiences with similar projects, create a strategy for avoiding the unhelpful patterns you tend to fall into, and generate a list of actions you can reach for when you encounter a roadblock down the line.
It’s important to note that neither The Goldilocks Approach nor Proactive Plans and Acute Actions are rooted in being hyper-efficient. Rather, they ask you to pause and truly consider how you can make your approach more doable for you as an individual. In an ideal world, we would be able to move slowly throughout projects, but I know that many readers have no choice but to multitask and dial up their output to hit overlapping deadlines. My hope is that tools like these can help us not aim for optimization or perfection, but rather make things easier for ourselves by taking a compassionate route that accounts for how we feel and what we need.
Resources for Reverse Engineering Your Productivity
Wendy Belcher’s guidebook Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is a good example of reverse engineering a complex writing project into specific actions taken in a particular order. I appreciate Belcher’s book because it extends beyond developmental writing tips or time management tools and offers academic writers a scaffolded approach to writing that accounts for invisible labor that takes up more time than we might suspect.
If you’d like to learn more about the tools I discussed today (including worksheets and video lessons) I invite you to download my free Purposeful Productivity Sessions workbook here.
Curiosities
Kris and I recently watched the animated show Arcane, and I enjoyed it! It had a huge budget—like largest budget for an animated series ever—and the visuals and use of music were impressive.
The newsletter “WTF Just Happened Today” has been helpful for keeping me up to date on what’s going on in U.S. politics through a daily summary with hyperlinks to news stories from multiple sources. It’s helped me remain informed without falling into doom scrolling pits when I check the news.
It’s Spring and the sun has returned and it’s warm enough to make sun tea! I fill up a quart mason jar with water, plop in two teabags of black tea, close it up, and let it sit on a little table on the back porch for a few hours. Once it has steeped for a while, I remove the teabags, add honey and shake it up, and keep the jar in the fridge to enjoy over the next couple days.
I hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter! I’ll be back next week with a short and sweet newsletter and new podcast episode for Honing In.
Take care and talk soon,
Dr. Kate
Thanks for reading! If you found today’s newsletter helpful, I invite you to share it with your friends and colleagues.
If you’re not a paid subscriber, you can support me and access bonus newsletters and monthly co-working by upgrading your subscription below.