What state are you in?

You cannot manage a state you have not noticed.

The question nobody asks first

A to-do list assumes a person capable of working through it. Most of the time that assumption is wrong in some specific way, and the list does not know. So the morning goes: read the list, feel a vague resistance, do the third item because it is easiest, and finish the day having been busy without having moved.

The missing step is one question, asked before the list rather than after the failure. What state is the person reading this actually in? Not how are you, which has a social answer. What condition is the instrument in.

Six states, and what each one is bad at

These are not moods and they are not diagnoses. They are working conditions, and each has a characteristic failure. Naming them matters because the right response to one is the wrong response to another.

• Sharp. Thinking is quick, decisions feel easy, you can hold a problem in your head. Bad at: patience, other people, anything that needs care rather than speed.
• Flat. Nothing is wrong and nothing is interesting. Bad at: starting. Surprisingly good at finishing something already begun, which is the thing to exploit.
• Wired. Fast, scattered, plenty of energy with no rudder. Bad at: choosing. Everything seems equally urgent because the sorting mechanism is the part that is off.
• Heavy. Thinking is slow and physical effort feels expensive. Bad at: anything new. Fine for the known and repetitive, which is most of what any week contains.
• Brittle. Functioning, and one interruption from not. Bad at: absorbing anything unplanned. The state where people say something they regret.
• Clear. Rare, and the one everybody assumes they are in. Good at almost everything, which is why it should be spent on the hardest thing available rather than on email.

Why naming it does most of the work

There is a gap between being inside a state and observing one. Inside it, the state is the lens and everything you look at is coloured by it: being brittle does not feel like a state, it feels like other people being unreasonable.

Putting a word on it moves you from the first position to the second. That is not a trick or a reframe, it is a change in what you are doing: you were experiencing, and now you are describing. The state does not necessarily improve. What improves is that the state stops making the decisions.

This is why the instruction is to name it in one word and not to explain it. The explanation is where you go back inside. "Brittle" is useful. "Brittle because of the thing in the meeting and honestly also because nobody ever" is the state wearing a reason.

Matching the work to the weather

Once you can name it, the useful move is usually not to fix the state. It is to pick work the state can do.

Flat is good for tidying, filing, the backlog of small known things. Heavy is good for the second draft. Wired is good for physical work or for anything with an obvious order. Sharp should be spent on the one genuinely difficult problem and protected from meetings. Brittle means cancel what you can and do not send anything.

People resist this because it feels like giving in. The alternative, though, is attempting sharp work in a heavy state, failing, and adding the failure to the reasons the next day is worse. There is no prize for doing the hardest thing badly.

A note on the states that repeat

A state that turns up most days at the same time is not a state, it is a pattern, and patterns have causes that are usually boring. Heavy every afternoon is frequently lunch or sleep. Brittle every Monday is usually the weekend, or the week ahead being unclear.

The log is what turns one into the other. Three words a day for two weeks is enough to see that Thursday is always flat, which is a far more useful thing to know than any individual Thursday.