The Four Archetypes of Work

From Pac‑Man to Portal: The Four Games of Work & How to Play Them

It’s impossible to say when it started, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been a collector. As a kid, I kept coins, and stamps, and Pokémon cards, and rusty nails I found on construction sites.¹ Anything rare or unusual, I wanted to pocket it, to keep it. I learned rather quickly, however, that collecting only works for things you can hold in your hands. Extraordinary experiences — trips, conversation, afternoons of play — resisted being bottled up. To keep those kinds of things, one first has to make them keepable. One has to make something from nothing. And that’s how I became a builder.

Whenever I’d gone deep enough into something, before moving on to the next thing, I felt compelled to make something from it — a keepsake, a small artifact to mark where I’d been and to bring with me. I loved music, so I learned to play the guitar and write my own songs. I loved movies, so I made amateur films; one trilogy we created was titled Cuddly Toys and had a total playtime of 2.5 hours. As a boy of the ‘90s, I also spent countless hours on my Game Boy. Unlike most ‘90s boys, however, I complemented that by designing my own paper RPGs for my cousins and brother.²

But—not everything went as planned. I loved reading, but all my attempts at writing a book were a disaster. I tried judo for a season, but found it just wasn’t for me right after my mom had paid a ton of money for a judo suit. I tried parkour for a while (no comments on this), and I played tennis for a couple of years, neither of which got me anywhere.³ However, I did not let these failings discourage me. After all, I wasn’t looking for permanent experience. I was following whatever spark felt alive and building artifacts to have something to show for it.⁴ And so my drive to experiment carried well into my twenties.

When I was around twenty-five years old, I became more elaborate in my ways. I went through a phase that felt like one long laboratory experiment: ninety days of cold showers, a pull-up challenge, running a marathon for fun, biohacking my energy, improving my sleep, and testing how many Pomodoros I could survive in a day (my record was 17). At the same time, I tried every learning method I could find to get through university — spaced repetition, speed reading, memory palaces. All of this blurred into a quantified‑self phase that awakened something more profound: a hunger to grow. I got the fittest I’ve ever been. I raised my self‑esteem in every measurable way. I meditated like a Tibetan monk. I traveled (or rather “vagabonded”) the shit out of the world.

And somewhere along the way—it’s hard to tell where exactly—I fell hard for the idea of “productivity”. Mostly, because it transformed my time at university from unmanageable stress into controlled calm. Getting Things Done (rest in peace!) rewired how I organized my work. Once I had mastered it, I sliced through tasks like a hot power saw through melted butter. And it led me into a never-ending rabbit hole of other self-help ideas. One of them was second-braining and treating everything I do as a “project”. Projects felt bigger, more meaningful than tasks and all the pseudo-scientific experiments I had done up to that point — and so quite soon I was obsessed with project-based work. After all, each project allows you to explore something new and concludes with a clear deliverable, an artifact, that proves your success; or so I thought. ⁵

Now, as life got more serious — a.k.a., I got older and started working — I found a new outlet for my drive. I’d become an Apple enthusiast when I got my first iPad in 2011, and over time, I had collected an iPhone, a MacBook, an iMac, and an Apple Watch. And when Apple brought out their new programming language (Swift) during my time at university, I thought Why not collect that as well? So I decided then and there to become an iOS developer. This wasn’t a light decision. Because, for the first time, I had to harness my builder energy and focus it on a single craft for years on end. That meant my life became, for a while, less about experiments and more about mastery. During that phase, I delved more deeply into goal-setting. Goals were challenging to get right, but once I understood them, they became a catalyst — a way to author my life with intention. I can hardly imagine living without them now.

Okay? Wait a second! Why am I telling you all this!?

Well… throughout all these phases, I—unknowingly—always carried a single, dominant model in my head for how work — or “effort” — should be structured and thought about. At different phases of my life, the main driver for all I was doing was either curiosity, or tasks, or projects, or experiments, or goals. And each frame worked for some of what I took on. Each gave me clarity, even breakthroughs. However, as illustrated, none of them worked for everything I did during that particular phase.

When I was deeply immersed in GTD, I would crush through tasks, but treating everything like a checklist made me lose sight of bigger arcs (GTD tends making you miss the forest for the trees). When I obsessed over projects and formal experiments, I often ended up over-engineering everything, building complex systems for things that didn’t need them. And when I followed raw curiosity, I was in a jack-of-all-trades kind of situation: I did a lot, but I drifted around a lotter, and, essentially, got nothing substantial done. Trust me, I’ve got many failed games, apps, and half-written novels to show for it. Even my goal-setting phase had a tough beginning and rough edges: sometimes I got stuck in tunnel vision and fixated on metrics, and at other times I ended up betraying myself and quietly massaging numbers to hide any failures. Read my series on magnitude tuning for a complete history of this.

It took me years to realize all this. To understand that there would likely never be a single effort model to rule them all. Projects are not the holy grail of getting stuff done. Experiments are no silver bullet either because they are exhausting. Goals can easily backfire. And no, habits and systems also have their weak points. All of these approaches and mental latticeworks that they bring with them have their place. But life is versatile, and the most successful approach is the one that integrates ALL of them. We need the whole bloody portfolio if we are to succeed at whatever we set our mind to. We need a way of seeing effort not as a single, all-encompassing approach, but as many different things that all require different approaches.

The alternative is to ignore all that and live a dull and utterly bland life, always doing things the same way, because we have always done them this way and because others do them the same way, and then be surprised, over and over again, why some efforts don’t seem to work out (wasn’t that, after all, the definition of insanity?).

So, how do we do this, I hear you say. How do we know what approach to take? Glad you asked! A first step is maybe to break free from the currently dominating model in your life by designing a scale and type-free map of efforts, a practical way to get a complete overview of your responsibilities and work by using effort notes. Realizing that neither tiny experiments nor GTD projects nor goals will save you. Because that jailbreak by itself is a pretty helpful way to avoid getting stuck in the wrong frame of mind. However, to get into the right frame of mind for what we are trying to do, we need more than that. We should not get rid of tasks, projects, programs, experiments, goals, habits, systems, routines—because ALL of them do indeed have merit. What we need to do instead is learning when to use which.

Enter effort archetypes…