Day 085

#100Days

The worker mindset, part II

Today I'd like to discuss where this thought and behavioural pattern that I'm calling Worker Mindset is useful.

I've used it for years and I feel quite familiar with it. It was just recently that I figured it that this pattern is not always helpful or efficient in every case. It has been actually useless to most things I expected it not to be.

Ok, but are there contexts where this mindset makes sense?

Yes, I think so. I think it makes sense, for example, cases where people want to establish a new habit in their lives.

Eating healthier, for instance.

Eating healthier is something that people usually want to start and never stop. You may want to improve, but you would not think about stopping it for good (unless for exceptional cases, of course.. there are always exceptions).

Improving means putting constant effort in the activity at hand. You can use that not only to eating habits, but to many different aspects of your life. Adding metrics can be very helpful.

Metrics will enable you to check progress, which is very useful in almost all circumstances. If you don't do it, you'd probably miss information that could help you act towards a more efficient approach.

I was not used to do it. I am still not. But I started to do that recently, and this has helped me to get a clearer idea of how things develop. To my specific case, it is important and quite useful to use some metrics from time to time, so I can get a grasp of what is going on regarding the activities I dedicate time to and how much they are working, or making a difference.

That's very imortant because I have recently found that by not using metrics while trying to implement new habits, I was pushing myself to my limits, and I was not able to recognize the outcomes of my efforts. That was something really bad, because I was just getting exhausted and losing track of my steps.

Look, I'm not even talking about the merits of being a worker yet. That's a topic that is still there to come.