Assignments

School is simple. The subject matter itself may prove complex, but the concept of school itself is simple. An assignment is given by the teacher and the student has to do it in the time allotted. The task may be of no interest to the student, or it could be overtly challenging, requiring hours of extraneous effort, but at the end of the day, the hardest part of the whole endeavour is handed to us: what to do. The instructions may be complicated, vague or confusing, but that doesn’t matter. A desired outcome has been put forth, and it us up to us to get there. This is why school is simple. Life outside of school, on the other hand, does not provide such clear cut tasks. We may have some semblance of what to do with ourselves, but without clarity, we’re doomed to seek assignment from others. And if we’ve no tasks in the queue, well, what then?

For many, the school mentality carries over into the rest of our lives. This is not surprising given the standard western school system was designed in a way to breed obedient factory workers. But the working world has evolved beyond a place where mere obedience is rewarded. No, the name of the game now is problem solving, creativity, and innovation. But it doesn’t stop there. We want to be able to do all sorts of non-work related things in our lives. And the place to start is identifying a problem that needs to be solved. An assignment.

Assignments provide direction and purpose. They give us something to wake up for, to get ready for, to learn for. No matter what our school experience may have been, or what kind of bosses we’ve had, if we are given an assignment that we find interesting, something we believe we can do, then we’ll take to it with gusto. The trouble is, due to school programming, we often seek others to provide us with our assignments. But why not create our own? Why not see what we can do on our own terms?

We are perfectly capable of thinking up a task or project for ourselves. They come to us all the time, but seldom are they acted upon. Either because we’re too busy doing the things we need to do, often assigned to us by others, or because we’re seeking escape from all those tasks already on our plate, our owns ideas often fall by the way side. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We are perfectly capable of giving ourselves work and seeing it through. The reason we don’t, however, if often because we haven’t developed a practice to think in such a way. The first step then, is to come up with ideas.

Think about all the things you could do and write them down. Even coming up with one idea a day is better than nothing. Then, at the end of the week, or the end of the month, set aside some time to look over your ideas and decide on one you would like to pursue. That’s the general assignment.

Of course, if we are unaccustomed, or out of practice, in seeing our ideas through, then it helps to have some rules in place, some instructions. To steer us in the right direction we can ask ourselves the questions Seth Godin recommends at the beginning of each endeavour:

1. Who is this for?

2. What am I willing to give up to do this?

3. What does done look like?

At this point you will have clear idea of not only what the assignment looks like, but an agreement with yourself for what you’re willing to do to get it done. We may learn that our original plans may be too ambitious, or not ambitious enough, but as we practice the exercise process with each new undertaking, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re capable of.

Going through the exercise of setting up the task does require more effort up front than simply thinking something up and doing it. But if we’ve found ourselves never seeing anything through, then setting up parameters first can get us to actually do what we like. Teachers did this for us in school, bosses, do it for us in work, why not do it for ourselves for our life?