This week I have been struggling with burnout. Every small task feels like a heavy lift. I find myself looking at my phone and procrastinating far more than usual, and the social algorithms keep sending me land sourcing and property development course adverts which further add to the guilt of procrastinating! One positive from sitting outside in my contemplative mood this week is noticing that the swifts who nest in our roof space have returned after their migration! It’s like having our very own aerobatics team giving private displays. I’ve added swift bricks to my self-build specification. For the past month I have been heavily working on a project to extract metadata from 173 self-build case studies. The breakdown of each build is an insight into the variety of ways we can build our own home and all the decisions it takes to get there. Collating this information has been extremely tedious at times and keeping it meaningful and useful outside of the overall context of the build has been challenging. But the biggest challenge that I personally face is knowing when it is good enough. My role in aerospace and just by nature is all about the details. I’m a sucker for Analysis Paralysis. Getting the aircraft design to a level that satisfies many different disciplines takes time and a level of obsession that can be very taxing at times. And I am finding that I am applying that same exhausting level to projects for MTBO that I am not even hitting publish on! Beginning with one idea often quickly grows to a multilevel complex task that never quite gets finished. But things are moving forwards, nonetheless. Information overwhelm is one of the big barriers of entry faced by self-builders. It is difficult to know where to begin and where to spend your time effectively. This is especially a problem because we usually only have a few hours each week to actually spend on research. Cutting out the noise to find the signal is one of the best ways to make progress and utilise the little time that we have to focus on self-build each week. The way to locate that signal is to have a firm understanding as to the reasons why you are planning to build in the first place. It’s the North Star that guides the way when everything seems impossible. When you have a firm reason for pursuing the goal, everything else becomes quieter. Information in books and articles becomes highly relevant. Course information can be repurposed effectively, and motivation finds its way back to you. If you are interested in reading about my why, click this link and it’ll get sent to your inbox along with some frameworks for finding Your Why. Warning: It’s deeply personal, which is why I don’t want to send it to everyone, and I can’t promise that you’ll learn anything from it. But seeing my approach may spark some ideas for your own. As always, I’d love to hear back from you to understand what is motivating (or motivated) you for your self-build. P.S. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, click here to subscribe. – Brendan |
