Pressure produces results

Methodical creation of pressure sources can push you in the right direction and help you achieve your objective. You have to be careful though, too much pressure can be a bad thing and cause unnecessary stress and bad feelings.

But what is pressure?

I see 3 broad categories of constructive pressure:

• time
• concreteness
• skin-in-the-game

Time

If you just vaguely decide to do something, then it is very easy to instead end up doing nothing. Setting time constraints can force you into action and get the ball rolling.

Example

You decide that you want to start a blog and leave the thing at that. It is very likely that you will never actually do it or it will take you a long time to finally start doing it.

If, on the other hand, you set a time constraint. Then a sense of urgency is created and you are driven to pursue the thing you set out to do. "Every Monday and Thursday I will publish a blogpost". In the best case you have 3 days until the next deadline, there is no time to be tinkering with programming your own blog website from scratch, you've got a blog to write!

(definitely not something I went through when starting this blog)

The situation feels more urgent now so you start scrambling for things to write about. You are actively trying to make the thing happen.

Concreteness

Concreteness is also a great source of pressure. Having to spell out in great detail the requirements needed to achieve your goal makes you engage closely with the subject. It helps you focus on the essential and reject the non-essential.

A more intense version of this are stretch goals.

Setting ambitious goals is a great way to get the discussion going (within your head or with teammates) about the what, when and how of things. People could push back with valid arguments and help steer the undertaking into a better direction.

And by the way, just because you set a demanding goal does not mean it is absolute. If you want to do something 80% more ambitious than you initially planned but only deliver something 50% more ambitious that is still a win.

Skin-in-the-game

This one needs to be treated with caution since it can easily backfire and cause way too much pressure, which is also not good.

Let's say you want to become a better programmer. But messing around with toy projects in your private Github repositories can very quickly lose any sense of significance since the stakes are so low and no real outcome is expected.

You decide to turn up the heat by starting a blog, growing an audience (please sign up to my blog, it means a lot to me) and sharing your code and thoughts in public.

Knowing that others will read your stuff, maybe even hoping to learn from what you have to say, will make your coding experiments feel a lot more important. You will do more research, think more deeply and only settle on code once you think it is nice and tidy.

Too much pressure can backfire

Not all pressure is created equal and different people tolerate pressure differently.

At the beginning of the article I referred to types of constructive pressure, pressure that can help you reach your goals. When used correctly, it can help you to stay driven and productive, but if overdone, it can actually discourage and drain you; balance is key here.

There is also just bad pressure, everybody has stuff going on in their lives so it is important to be aware of your stressors, manage them and react to any negative effects they might be causing in your life. Apart from leading to a happier life, this creates some "unused stress capacity" which you can utilise in a positive way in your projects.