Perfect Timing/Right Timing

I think a right of passage for anyone wanting to master their craft is learning the difference between perfect timing and right timing.

I tend to view all matters of timing into a two-part framework: knowing and preparing is the first part. Many of us have an idea in our head what perfect timing looks like in practice and sometimes we subconsciously guide our efforts towards that ideal moment.

The perfect time for high level thinking for me is just before midnight, it's just way easier to bring those kind of thoughts when much of the external world is silent.

So far, it has been hard to establish a routine to do the said thing at the perfect time, either I'm dozing off to sleep around that time of the night or I'm somewhere deep in the interwebs consuming information I may not remember when I wake up the next day.

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As opposed to knowing a perfect time and not taking advantage of it, the right time is more discernable in hindsight. It is only after the fact, when looking back at a completed task, that one realize the timing was "right."

One can spend so much energy chasing perfect timing that they miss the right timing entirely.

I've lost count of how many ideas never made it out of those late-night sessions partly because I was waiting for another perfect midnight moment to refine them further. Meanwhile, a good portion of my relatively best work has come from grabbing whatever time was available and somehow making it work despite the chaos.

This is an underrated skill of sorts that gets overshadowed by much of the advice on optimization and peak performance.

A wisdom, I'm learning, is knowing when and how to act on right timing. Some things genuinely benefit from that 11 PM clarity. Big decisions from doing deep reflections that need silence and space to emerge could be an example here.

But most things? Well, most things just need to get done, and the right time for those is usually now, or at least soon, regardless of whether the stars have aligned.

The perfect time is a projection of what we want the work to feel like and right time is simply the historic timestamp of when the work actually got done.

Of course, this whole framework is relative, it's not always that deep or fixed in a sense that context matters.
Right timing for a tweet is quite different from right timing for a career change, even though I've learned both come from the same place of just showing up.


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