Magnitude tuning™️

Tweaking the size of things...

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

I recently uncovered a productivity tactic.

I've never heard anyone talk about it.

It arose quite naturally for me over time. But I never had a term for it.

So, let me introduce you to magnitude tuning.

Magnitude tuning is all about tweaking the size of things.

It's answering questions like:

• How do you determine the appropriate length of a time box?

• How can you appropriately scope a task/project/program?

• How many actions should you put on a weekly review? 

But that’s only half of the story.

Magnitude tuning is also about assigning things to different orders of magnitude.

So it also provides answers to the following:

• Which action steps should you put in a monthly vs. quarterly review?

• Which tasks are standalone? Which goes in a project? Or program?

• Which cadence should you choose for personal goal setting (weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly)?

Magnitude tuning is necessary because of how we think.

Maybe you have noticed it in your life.

Our thinking capacity ranges from very detailed to very abstract, from very nuanced to very high-level, and from focused to diffuse. When it comes to a single thinking session, however, we are often “locked into” just one level along this spectrum. We rarely, if ever, traverse different levels of thinking.

I guess that’s because jumping between levels is mentally taxing.

Every time we do, we have to flip our understanding of things. We have to shift our perspective. We have to "reset the slate" - the priorities - in our minds; we need to figure out what to focus on and what to ignore.

So it is our mental capacities that force us to select a given thinking level first. Because then we are able to abstract away unnecessary detail and blind out distracting generalizations. Through a process of active inhibition, we can narrow down on key elements most relevant to the task at hand.

And most of the time, this works quite well.

But every once in a while, we tackle a problem on the wrong level.

And when we do, we colloquially either

• miss the forest for the trees (miss a bigger picture by thinking on a level too low for the problem at hand) or

• disregard the devil in the details (miss important details by thinking on a level too high for the problem at hand)

It is such a failure that magnitude tuning tries to address it.