You're Going to Need a Bigger Boat
Why everything takes 3x longer than you planned
Welcome to All the Tasks Fit to Print, my weekly newsletter on all issues productivity-related for authors (and other solopreneurs)!
"In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill… The four stages suggest that individuals are initially unaware of how little they know, or unconscious of their incompetence. As they recognize their incompetence, they consciously acquire a skill, then consciously use it. Eventually, the skill can be utilized without it being consciously thought through: the individual is said to have then acquired unconscious competence." – Wikipedia
I bet you're wondering what the tenuous connection might be between the four stages of competence (4SoC) and personal productivity. Sure, you are more productive and efficient at doing things when you are competent at doing them, that is just common sense!
However, understanding how the 4SoC affect your perceptions of time and energy are an important part of productivity planning, especially for creatives and artists. I joke with my friends how everything I plan to do takes three times as long as I thought it would, even with tasks that (by now) are very familiar to me. The 4SoC offers insight into why.
Before I get to that, though, let's look at exactly what the four stages of 4SoC consist of, in order (the order is important):
Unconscious incompetence (you don't know what you don't know);
Conscious incompetence (you know what you don't know);
Conscious competence (you know what you know);
Unconscious competence (you don't know what you know).
That is pretty simplistic, of course. In fact, "unconscious competence" is less "you don't know what you know" and more like when you are so good at doing something you don't have to think about how to do it. That is the point of true mastery, where your body and mind are so aligned in completing the task that you barely realize time is passing. Most people who drive cars get to this stage after a few years of driving consistently, and often end up ending up at a destination without thinking about it. Writers, artists, dancers, and craftspeople often get into this mental zone where they are simply doing the thing without self-reflection.
The drawback is that you know the thing so well that it is hard for you to teach someone else how to do what you do if they don't already have a basic understanding of what they want to learn (that is, they need to be at stage 2, "conscious incompetence"). Consider that most drivers who have reached stage four of competence are terrible at teaching driving, even to a student who understands the basic principles involved, simply because at that point they can do the thing but not explain how they do it in any detail.
For me, that's computers. If I tried to teach someone how to use a computer who has never used one before and barely understands how the technology works or what it can do, I will go absolutely bonkers and they will probably end up wanting to punch me for great justice. What good is the advice "click the 'save' icon using the left mouse button" if someone does not know what an icon is, has no idea what "saving" means, and has never used a mouse before? Chaos!!!!!
Back to productivity and everything taking three times as long as you expect it to: the most common reason things drag out so long is because we are caught in a state between stage three (conscious competence) and stage one (unconscious incompetence) which is, ironically, not stage two (conscious incompetence).
In other words, we are doing something we know that we know, but aspects of it include elements that we don't know we don't know.
Again using myself as an example (because damn, do I have a lot of experience with this onerous situation!), back in the day when I first started self-publishing my books, I knew each book needed social media image to go with posts on facebook, twitter (back in the day), Instagram, etcetera. I also knew it needed to be a specific size, which I could easily look up. I knew enough photoshop/GIMP to put something together that vaguely resembled a social media image suitable for posting.
Easy-peasy, amirite?!?!?
You see where this is going. Here is why it took three times as long to do, despite knowing all of that: do different platforms need different sizes/ratios? (they do) What file format is acceptable? (.jpeg, if you were wondering) What kind of layouts are good for readability at different sizes? (BIG TEXT, always use BIG TEXT) Are all of my socmed platforms up to date with buy links and profile info? (no. no they were not)
Then I realized that my branding was inconsistent across platforms, and I needed to go into each profile page/screen and update them.
Remember this was about ten years ago, during the wild-west era of social media. Every platform had different standards and requirements for posts and for banners.
I thought it would take about an hour to whip up an image about my book and post it. It easily took more than three, as I found out about all the things I had not known were necessary to know, combined with things I knew (update socmed profiles, KimBoo!!!!) but had forgotten were important to do.
Another example, and a more recent one, was setting up my direct sales store on shopify on a tight deadline for pre-orders. I did this in a rush last August as I got ready to launch Become an Unstoppable Storyteller: How to Craft Compelling Serials. After years of building websites and working in I.T., I was supremely confident in my abilities to launch an online store in about an hour or so.
Oh, poor baby, I was SO VERY WRONG. It took nearly 36 hours, during which I got very little sleep. I had no idea about using apps with shopify, or how they worked, or how to dial in the webhook for bookfunnel (the ebook delivery app). I had no idea what I didn't know that I really, really needed to know.
There is a lot to be said about "jumping in with both feet" but none of it is "it's efficient."
Common advice is simply to plan for something to take three times as long as you think it will. No one does that, though. We all want to believe that we are super efficient productivity machines who don't need no gantt chart! It feels self-defeating from the start to make a plan that relies on you being the unreliable variable. In regards to positive mindset, it's definitely not that.
Instead, look at your project or task and consider: where are the parts of it that might contain things I don't know I don't know? Where are my blind spots?
For me, if I had stopped for a damn second to think about that shopify store, I would have realized that I did not know how shopify handles preorders (they don't; you need an app/plugin for that!) and I would have also realized that the connection to bookfunnel was a complete mystery to me (for a valid reason as it takes about a bazillion steps to set up properly). Then I would have done a little research first, which would have almost certainly required less time in the long run than all the headaches, false starts, and backtracking I had to do during those 36 hours of frustration.
While you can't know what you don't know in every situation, if you consciously engage with the 4SoC during the planning stage of a project or task you can start seeing patterns to the things where your knowledge runs out. Practice it enough, and it will become second nature to look for the things that contain trip wires or traps which end up sucking up all your time.
You will still have to learn what you need to learn, but coming into the situation with enough self-awareness of your limitations can help make up the time you might otherwise lose.