Intermediate Packets

Thiago, tell me about intermediate packets.

Intermediate packets refer to the parts of your work. Most people don't think of their work in terms of parts. They might think of it in terms of tasks, they might think of it in terms of activities. They might think of it in terms of blocks of time, like 30 minute meeting, hour meeting, etc. But if you think about the concrete output of your work, again, whether that's a text document, whether it's a design, whether it's a plan, whether it's a memo, whether it's a conversation that happens in concrete parts. So this is related to the idea of defining your work in terms of projects. Very discreet, concrete, kind of small things. When you start noticing that every piece of work, no matter how large, is built out of parts, you start thinking, okay, whatever amount of time I have, If I have 15 minutes in between a meeting, if I have an hour, what is just one part that I can make? One little component? It's like creating a Lego brick. You don't want to just do a bunch of things. Oh, I spent that hour working. I spent that hour checking email. I spent that hour thinking. No, you want to say I created just the outline for the email that I'm going to be writing to my team. Right. That outline is a thing. It's a deliverable. It is a concrete piece of work, like a Lego piece that could find its way into any number of things.

This is, this comes to life once you consider that when we think of creativity, we think of these long, extended blocks. I'm going to have an entire afternoon, from 2 in the afternoon to 7 at night, to get something done. But that's not the way the modern work world is. You're in an office, you're getting slack notifications, you're getting pinged into urgent meetings. Talk about the modern work world. And then I want to hear a story about maybe with how you edit essays, with how intermediate packets impacts your work, and how you can still get done even if you don't have a huge extended block to work in.

Yeah, I'll use the example of the book that I'm writing. I'm writing the book version of Building a Second Brain. So getting everything I've learned from the course, from my writing, from this podcast, and turning it into a book. You know, writing a book is sort of the Mount Olympus of knowledge work. It's like, you know, anyone who likes to think, who likes ideas, who likes to learn, likes to read, whether they'll admit it or not, maybe even subconsciously, somewhere in the back of their brain, they think or they believe or they wonder if they could write a book, and they want to write a book often. But then you talk to people who are thinking of writing books or are writing a book, and it's like they're in paralysis more often than not. I found. Right. You tell them, so, what are you working on? I'm writing a book. Okay, well, what are you actually doing? Like, what are you doing today? Oh, you know, I'm just working on it. I'm just trying to make progress. And you keep questioning and they keep giving you these answers, and you realize they didn't do a single thing today. If they did anything today, it was worry and stress out and. And feel guilty about something else that they should have been doing. So as I embark on this journey, and I've been on it for the past year of writing a book, nothing about my life has changed. Nothing about my workload, my work schedule, how hard I work has changed, because I just see it as one little intermediate packet after another. Right? So the first intermediate packet was writing an email to an agent to get represented. And that might seem, oh, that just takes five minutes. But no, that is a project to write a good cold email to an agent. You got to look at examples, you got to talk to authors, you got to talk to people in the industry. I mean, that is a risky move that is not that likely to be successful. Writing one email can easily be one of these intermediate packets. Second intermediate packet, once I got a yes, was writing a similar email to an editor. Next one after that was the contract, settling on the contract. Next one after that was writing an outline for the book proposal. And just one after another after another. I think we just finished the proposal a month ago, and now we're talking to publishers. So we're just talking to publishers after a year. But I've already done probably a dozen projects.

See, what I think that you're trying to say here is that most people say, I'm building a huge LEGO set. I'm gonna think of the big spaceship. And what you're trying to say is first you have to think of all the individual legos. And what you do end up with is it's not intimidating at all. You have to take Lego 1, Lego 2, Lego 3, then you separate them into little distinct sections so that you know how they combine. Okay, Now I build the top of the ship, then I build the part where the captain of the ship sits in. Then I build the rudder at the end. And as I've watched you worked and spent years now working with you. What you do is you break down every single project into these small intermediate packets. And, and rather than being intimidated by the grandeur of a book, of a big Lego ship, you just look chapter by chapter, email by email, idea by idea, and you break things down to a level that they can't possibly be intimidating.

Exactly. They can't possibly be intimidating. They can't fail. It's really hard to fail writing an outline, right? I mean, you can make a better or worse outline, but the task itself is defined, it's finite, has a clear beginning, a clear end. It's very obvious when it's finished. Right. It's like another analogy you could use is, you know, you're building a cathedral, but for the first year or two, there's no evidence of that. Like there's no spire rising into the sky. So for the first year or two, you're just making one brick at a time, one brick or whatever. I don't know what cathedrals are made of. But you know, and by the way, the hardest thing for creative people to manage in a project is actually not the project, it's their own psychology. You're in. Psychology is obviously your greatest asset, but also your biggest obstacle. And so part of breaking things down, it's not just this analytical engineering thing, it's kind of hacking your own motivation. If you look at some of the studies on motivation, the principal thing that's required to maintain your motivation is that you have a regular series of wins. You need victories, you need clear cut completions. Otherwise if you go days or weeks or months just toiling away, never being able to celebrate, never being able to say, okay, I did this one little piece. I seriously don't know how people can sustain themselves. I need to win basically every day, every day I make one packet and I can go to bed happy and satisfied that I use the time that I had to create one little valuable piece of my work.

You talk a lot about transferring ideas through time. So a project, an idea from project A can be used in Project B, C, D. How does intermediate packets help with that? And walk me through the feeling of what it's like to have used an idea, to come across an idea from three years ago in a new project that you're working on through this intermediate packet method and then have this sweet song of serendipity that helps you propel yourself down this new project that you're working on.

Yeah, you know, I think so much about whether a certain idea is useful is timing. I mean, timing is really everything. Have you ever had a friend maybe recommend a book and they say, this is life changing, you absolutely must have this. And you read it, you're like, this is so lame. I think in most cases it's not that it's a bad book or a great book inherently, it's because they're in a certain place in their life that that book speaks to them, right? And it's the same with any kind of piece of content, any kind of piece of media. So timing is everything. I mean, if you think about the things that spoke to you a couple years ago, if you read them now, you'd probably be like, that's obvious. And the things that you'll be ready for in two years, if you read today, just you wouldn't be ready for. So when we talk about intermediate packets, it's sort of like you're bundling, like, let's say you have, I don't know, some food in your kitchen that is going to be perishable, it's going to go bad, it's going to disappear unless you sort of preserve it. Actually, that's a great analogy. Preservatives, right? So you have some peaches, and right now it's not the right time. You don't feel like peaches, you're not hungry, you just don't want the peaches. But if you take this little extra bit of time to say, put them in a jar, I don't know how this process works, but put the cap on, depressurize it, whatever that is, then suddenly this perishable thing that you would normally completely lose access to, you'd have no memory of it. Even if you did have memory of it, it would just wouldn't be usable. Suddenly becomes usable to your future self. And it does take a little bit of intentionality, right? If you write down a quote from a book, you might need to take a few extra seconds, write down the title of the book, maybe a link to the book, maybe the page number, right? It does take a tiny extra bit of time, but then suddenly the value of that idea, the potential value, is vastly extended through time.