So, I found myself in a bit of a rut a while back, you know? Work felt like wading through treacle, and my own projects at home weren’t much better. I was browsing online, probably wasting time when I should have been doing something else, and I kept seeing this name pop up in weird corners of the internet – Heather Nasakaitis. It wasn’t like, famous or anything, just… there. And some folks were talking about her ‘approach’ to, I guess, cutting through the noise.
My Dive into the ‘Nasakaitis Way’
Now, there wasn’t a clear manual or anything. It was more like piecing together comments on old forums and half-forgotten blog posts. From what I could gather, this Heather Nasakaitis had some ideas about really, truly figuring out what you needed to focus on, versus all the stuff that just screams for attention. Sounded good to me, I was drowning in ‘urgent’ tasks that probably weren’t.
So, I decided to give it a shot. My own interpretation, of course, since it was all so vague.
- First up: The Big Dump. I got myself a massive whiteboard, one of those cheap ones. And I just started writing down every single thing that was on my mind. Work projects, home chores, ideas I’d had for years, emails I needed to answer, calls I needed to make. Everything. It took, like, two days, and the board was a mess. Looked like a crazy person’s manifesto.
- Then, the ‘Signal’ Hunt. This was the tricky part. The core of what I thought the Heather Nasakaitis thing was about. I had to go through each item and ask myself, “Is this a real signal, or just noise?” A ‘signal’ meant it truly aligned with what I actually wanted to achieve or what was fundamentally important. ‘Noise’ was everything else – obligations I’d accepted without thinking, tasks that were just busywork, other people’s priorities disguised as mine.
- Filtering and Facing Facts. Man, this was harder than it sounded. So much of what I did every day turned out to be, well, noise. It was a bit depressing, to be honest. I started trying to color-code things. Red for noise, green for signal. My board looked like a very sad Christmas tree at first, mostly red.
I spent a good week, maybe two, really trying to live by this. Every new request, every email, I’d mentally try to run it through the ‘Nasakaitis filter’. Did it work? Well, yes and no.
The good part: It forced me to be way more conscious about what I said “yes” to. I started pushing back a little on things that were clearly just time-sinks. And I did manage to carve out a bit more time for one or two things that I genuinely cared about, things that had been on the back burner for ages.
The not-so-good part: Life isn’t that simple, is it? Some ‘noise’ you just can’t ignore. Like, paying bills is noise, technically, it doesn’t get me closer to writing that novel, but try not doing it. And at work, well, your boss’s ‘noise’ is pretty much your ‘signal’ if you want to keep your job. The Heather Nasakaitis ‘method’, or my version of it, didn’t really have a chapter on that.
So, What’s the Big Deal?
In the end, it wasn’t some magic bullet. I didn’t suddenly become ultra-productive or find inner peace. Shocker, right? But it was a useful exercise. It made me think. And I guess that’s the value in a lot of these ‘systems’ or ‘gurus’ you stumble across.
It reminds me a bit of this one place I worked at, years ago. We had this manager, nice enough guy, but every few months he’d come back from some conference all fired up about a new ‘paradigm’ or ‘synergy framework’. He’d buy books for everyone, we’d have mandatory workshops, the whole nine yards. We learned about ‘blue ocean thinking’, ‘agile everything’, ‘disruptive innovation’… you name it. We had charts and acronyms coming out of our ears.
And for a week or two, everyone would try to use the new buzzwords. We’d have meetings about how to implement the new system. Then, slowly, everyone would just… go back to doing things the old way. Because the old way, messy as it was, actually worked for what we needed to do. The fancy new systems never quite fit the reality of our specific, chaotic little corner of the world. They were like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. This Heather Nasakaitis thing felt a bit like that. A good idea, in theory, but reality has a way of messing with theories.
I still have that whiteboard, though. It’s mostly covered in shopping lists and doodles now. But sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly swamped, I’ll stare at it and think, “Okay, what’s the real signal here?” And sometimes, just asking the question helps. So, thanks for that, I guess, Heather Nasakaitis, whoever you are.
