Too few people ever bother thinking about what they are doing, why, and what alternative options they have. You have to think about your work before you do it. But if you want to get the most out of life with the least wasted effort and emotion, you need to learn how to separate the thinking and the working.
There is a difference between designing a machine and operating one. Planning is where you build the machine, and execution is where you run it. Relentlessly consider the expected outcomes of your actions when prioritizing and planning. But during execution, the only thing that matters is effort. Work like a maniac with laser focus on your stated plan.
Once you’ve completed your day’s to do list, you can and must shut planning out of your mind. In execution mode, you free up your mental and emotional resources for actually doing what you have already decided to do. You draw a box around the task at hand, and ignore the rest of the world. You exit the infinite and uncertain world of what might be, and shift into the well-defined realm of the discrete. This frees you from any anxiety and grossly curtails otherwise unbounded uncertainty. Everything that matters is on that little square of paper containing your day’s to do list.
It’s odd to talk about the need to robotically execute while discussing the need to live life with your whole soul, but these aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. During planning, you engage the exploratory capacity of your mental and emotional channels as if they were an ambient light. When you get into the execution state, you bridle your heart and mind toward the task at hand with the focus of a laser, avoiding the many distractions that would otherwise occur. During execution, there is no surplus energy available in execution mode for daydreaming, yearning, or second-guessing. What is a vital part of planning becomes a bottleneck in execution, and vice-versa. In short, when moving from planning to execution, you replace “if ”and “should” with “must.”