Mastering the Art of High-Level Planning: Seeking Strategies and Insights

[hyperrun]

I'm reaching out for some advice on improving my high-level planning and task prioritization. While my current system for handling day-to-day tasks is working well (thanks to a local task list app that syncs between my PC and phone, complete with time and place reminders), I'm facing challenges with broader planning.

My main issue is deciding what to work on at a higher level. I journal on my Remarkable, posing higher-level questions to myself, and I've tried setting goals over various time horizons (weekly, monthly, and quarterly). However, I struggle to stick to these timelines consistently.

I've experimented with different approaches:

• Making small progress on everything during the week: This often leads me to prioritize easy and immediately rewarding tasks, sometimes neglecting important long-term projects, like my PhD (putting it bluntly).
• Weekly reviews and scheduling tasks in my calendar: This method felt too rigid. If I missed a task, I'd reschedule it, leading to a backlog of tasks and a feeling of demotivation at the end of the week.

I'm starting to wonder if embracing a bit of chaos might be the answer. Currently, my priority is finishing my PhD, and perhaps that's sufficient for high-level planning. This approach could also reduce the time I spend on meta-tasks like scheduling, which don't feel productive in themselves.

However, I still yearn for a bit more structure. Relying on what I 'feel like' working on each day doesn't seem the most efficient way to handle things. Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences to share that might help me find a balance between structured planning and flexibility? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Miss Piggy]

One suggestion: Look into Stephen Covey's Four Quadrant system. It'll help you prioritize the more important stuff. (And it'll help you better understand what's important/not important and urgent/not urgent.)

Here are a couple of decent sites I found about it in a quick search:

https://www.bishophouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Effective-Personal-Management-with-Covey-The-4-Quads.pdf

https://exploringyourmind.com/stephen-coveys-4-quadrants-time-management/

[Metalcat]

First question: are you trying to organize your effort or trying to cram more into your days?

Doing a PhD is an enormous task and drains a ton of motivation resources. It's important to understand how much resources you actually have and what's realistic to do with them. I find a lot of people think that if they could just organize themselves better, they could magically have more resources to work harder, and this simply isn't true. That's how you burn out.

That said, there are ABSOLUTELY ways to be waaaay more efficient with the resources you do have, and organization is key to this. But this requires being highly realistic about your resources, and your priorities.

I find almost no one actually understands priorities. Your priorities aren't what you want to be doing, your priorities are what you ARE doing. So if you don't find yourself doing the things you really want to be doing, you have to look very critically at your priorities and why they are the way they are.

You can't just willpower yourself out of how you live your life, you have to understand what needs are being met with your current systems and how to possibly meet them more effectively/efficiently.

Contrary to how most people conceptualize priorities, I insist on starting with quality of life first. If you can't get your basic quality of life needs met effectively, your resources will perpetually be limited.

If you're not eating, sleeping, exercising, and socializing enough, your adaptive capacity for work will suffer and steadily decline over time, and you will depend more and more on will power to get shit done, which is a limited resource. And the more you depend on will power for work, the less you will have available for basic self care, and the more you will lose capacity, and so on and so forth.

Stephen Covey's old school 7 Habits paradigm is a great way to understand priorities.

He has 4 categories:

1: Urgent and important: it doesn't matter what you want from your life, you will do these things. If you have a medical emergency, you will seek medical care immediately, regardless of anything else going on. These are always top priorities as evidenced by the fact that they get done.

2: Not urgent and important: these are the priorities most likely to improve your quality of life, and also the most likely to be procrastinated. Things like exercise, taking time with loved ones, learning something new, really anything that would make your life better, usually stuff that takes consistent investment, and stuff that is very easy to push off to the next day/week/month/year.

3: Urgent but not important: Unfortunately this is where most people dump a lot of their energy. This shit gets done because it's urgent, even if it's fundamentally less important than items in category 2. Urgency often feels like importance, but it isn't. Often these priorities come from the outside, they are urgent because they are important to someone else or some external system that tells you they're important.

Unfortunately, our society will insist on telling you that virtually everything is more important than your own well-being. So it's pretty easy to legit feel like virtually any demand on your time and energy is more critical than preserving your own function. Which is truly fucked up.

4: Not urgent and not important: this one is tricky. A lot of people will interpret things like watching TV as not urgent and not important and will try to drown out these activities with more "productive" ones. This comes back to understanding why you do the things you do. If you're intellectual work is demanding and requires extreme focus, it may be that it's actually very important for you to be able to zone out for lengths of time.

If something is truly not important, then it has no real benefit. Look closely at the things you do that appear "useless" on the surface and try to understand what need they are meeting. If a behaviour is truly useless, it will be easy to ditch.

But just because a "useless" seeming behaviour is actually useful, doesn't mean it's a good idea. For example, it may be very useful for someone to drink a few glasses of wine every night to cope with the stress of their day, but that doesn't mean there aren't better ways to achieve the same outcome.

Look at your "useless" activities and assess what you get out of them, and if those benefits come at a cost, or if the "useless" habit is actually an important part of your resource management.

Once you hammer out what your priorities already are, what you want them to be, and what efforts you will need to get them there, that's when you start making a strategic plan.

That's when you start leveraging the power of habits so that the things you want to be doing become mindlessly automatic and minimally tap into will power. Engineering habits is how people become ultra productive without burning out.

But to do this, you have to be realistic about your resources, you have to maintain your self-care, and you cannot operate from a position where you default to overloading your systems.

[lhamo]

Do you have any systems/structures for external accountability set up for your PhD completion process?

I could NOT have finished my dissertation if not for three things:

1)  I had an awesome writing group that met every two weeks.  We committed to each other to share SOME new piece of writing, however small, at least that often.  Sometimes that meant writing a crappy paragraph or even just a chapter outline by the pre-meeting deadline (I think we set sunday night as the deadline for sharing, with our meetings mid-week)

2)  I joined an on-line support group -- old school forums at Phinished.org.  This was back in 1997-1999, so very much web 1.0 -- they are still around but looks like they are more chat based now.  Anyhoo, I used those forums to set daily/weekly goals and have some kind of accountability.  Some days that was just polishing up my references (again, a task that was EXTREMELY time consuming back in web 1.0 days, much easier now with citation management software.  But it needed to be done. 

3)  The thing that REALLY made me finish my dissertation?  Having a job I needed to move across the country for.  I almost didn't make it.  I had not written my conclusion when I walked into my defense.  Luckily the rest of my work was solid, and my committee was extremely supportive.  We basically drafted my conclusion during my defense.  I defended (successfully! pending writing the conclusion and making a few other minor edits) on a Monday, wrote the conclusion/edited/tweaked final formatting of 250+ pages on Tu-Wed, printed and submitted hard copies on Thurs, and packed the moving van on Friday.  On Saturday morning we started driving to NYC. 

It was the most stressful week of my life, but it was SOOOO worth it to be Phinished when I started my new job!  One of my colleagues there started work as an ABD and in spite of taking a year's sabbatical at one point to try to finish is STILL ABD.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I think he would have felt better about himself if he had finished his diss.

[joemandadman189]

PTF

[hyperrun]

@Miss Piggy: Thanks for the insight! This concept resonated with me more upon revisiting it. It seems particularly useful for discerning what to prioritize. The quadrant framework offers a straightforward method to evaluate the merit of different tasks. However, it doesn't entirely address my dilemma: balancing various life aspects, such as my PhD, friendships, hobbies, and family commitments. The challenge lies in determining the right time for each activity, especially when urgent matters are already well-managed, leaving a focus on important but not urgent tasks. For instance, if I have two non-urgent but important tasks in different areas like hobbies, how do I choose which to tackle? Work-related decisions seem more straightforward: engage in them during work hours and set them aside otherwise. But what about choosing between two hobby-related tasks? This might sound overly methodical, but I'm curious if there's an effective system to navigate these kinds of decisions.

@Metalcat: I'm not trying to cram more stuff into my days. Reflecting on @Miss Piggy's remark, I feel like the topic of this thread is in the important-and-not-urgent quadrant. I'm very okay with what I do. I don't think I'm doing too much. Whenever I start feeling like things might get too much, I always take a break, and so far this has worked very well. The thing that's bothering me is that I have no structure how to decide what I work on. I might journal some day that it would be nice to have a parser for our local law texts (which, by the way, are really badly structured...) and I enjoy doing that so much that I spend the whole weekend implementing that tool. Afterwards I don't necessarily feel bad about it (I'm quite proud of this specific project and I'm thinking about open-sourcing it and maybe present it at a local tech group), but I don't like that I didn't really decide that I want to spend 2 full days on this. I just got consumed in the project, started working on it and doing long nights. At no point I was saying I *want to* spend this weekend doing X. What I'm trying to get out of this post is maybe getting some tools/ideas how to be better at that. I feel like this could go in both directions: being okay with this current ad-hoc approach, or maybe using a strict framework of listing all things, evaluating them on certain criteria, maybe even chose a duration and then strictly following that. I tried to read quite a few books and blog posts about it, but none of them worked in the long term, so I'm very open for new ideas.

@Metalcat: Reflecting on @Miss Piggy's insights, I realize this discussion fits the 'important-but-not-urgent' category. I'm content with my current activities and workload (thus I guess it's not urgent). Whenever I sense things might become overwhelming, I take breaks, which has been an effective strategy. However, my main issue is the lack of a structured approach in choosing what to focus on. For example, I once thought about creating a parser for our poorly structured local law texts. That idea was so captivating that I spent an entire weekend developing it. Although I'm proud of this project and even considering open-sourcing it, I'm unsettled by the fact that I didn't consciously choose to allocate two full days to it. I got deeply involved without a deliberate decision to spend my weekend on it.

I'm seeking tools or ideas to improve my decision-making process. I'm open to either embracing this spontaneous approach or adopting a more systematic method, like listing all tasks, evaluating them based on specific criteria (e.g. Quadrants of Stephen Covey), and maybe even allocating set durations to each. I've explored various books and blogs for guidance, but haven't found a lasting solution, so I'm eager for fresh perspectives.

I find almost no one actually understands priorities. Your priorities aren't what you want to be doing, your priorities are what you ARE doing. So if you don't find yourself doing the things you really want to be doing, you have to look very critically at your priorities and why they are the way they are.
You can't just willpower yourself out of how you live your life, you have to understand what needs are being met with your current systems and how to possibly meet them more effectively/efficiently.

Perhaps maintaining a structured daily journal could be an effective strategy. By recording my daily activities and comparing them with what I intended to do, I can identify any discrepancies. This approach would enable me to understand why certain mismatches occur. Over time, I might be able to detect patterns or trends that explain these deviations, providing valuable insights for future planning and decision-making.

Contrary to how most people conceptualize priorities, I insist on starting with quality of life first. If you can't get your basic quality of life needs met effectively, your resources will perpetually be limited.

I feel quite satisfied with how things are going in my life. I spend most of my days surrounded by people I care about. I'm also quite active and prioritize my fitness. I consistently get around 8 hours of sleep each night, which is what I need to function at my best. In terms of diet, I'm mostly vegan with occasional vegetarian choices and I'm happy with the quality of my food. However, I sometimes find myself eating less than ideal, often due to not having certain ingredients or lacking the motivation to cook. Recognizing this as an issue, I've been actively working on solutions like cooking in bulk, freezing meals, and keeping a repertoire of quick and easy recipes. These strategies have been working well in recent months. While important, I realize this aspect shouldn't be the main focus of this thread.

Once you hammer out what your priorities already are, what you want them to be, and what efforts you will need to get them there, that's when you start making a strategic plan.

How do you hammer out priorities? Perhaps this is an ongoing mission, a process of continually defining and redefining one's priorities. It might involve considering the important-but-not-urgent tasks, periodically reassessing and adjusting them. Brainstorming could play a role in this. The process likely varies and evolves, adapting to changing goals and circumstances.

Maybe a habit could be to always go to bed at 10 (or 11) pm. This would e.g. solve the long programming hours during the night.

Do you have any systems/structures for external accountability set up for your PhD completion process?

I have a weekly meeting with my supervisor, which is immensly helpful. A few months ago I presented my progress in front of ~5 professors, which also gave me very constructive feedback. Similar to your third point: My firm deadline is set by my contract's expiration in autumn. While I'm aiming to complete my work by summer, it *have to* finish by the autumn deadline.

[Metalcat]

I'll come back and comment more, but to clarify, I said when you hammer out what your priorities *already are*, as in, what are you currently already doing.

You can't know what you want your priorities to be until you understand what they already are, and why.

What are you actually doing with your time and energy and why are those things getting done instead of what you think you would rather be doing instead??

[Tasse]

Some of your self-descriptions ("I got deeply involved without a deliberate decision") remind me of me. Cal Newport got me through the last year of my PhD; start with Deep Work and keep an eye out for his book Slow Productivity coming out in March--I have high hopes for it.

[GilesMM]

Set a firm deadline for 100% completion and work toward it with weekly milestones.  Set a weekly meeting with your supervisor to review your progress and set a goal for the following week.  Ask him/her/they to kick your ass.   I did this and was able to produce the first draft, 200+ pages, in six weeks.

[ChpBstrd]

• Making small progress on everything during the week: This often leads me to prioritize easy and immediately rewarding tasks, sometimes neglecting important long-term projects, like my PhD (putting it bluntly).
• Weekly reviews and scheduling tasks in my calendar: This method felt too rigid. If I missed a task, I'd reschedule it, leading to a backlog of tasks and a feeling of demotivation at the end of the week.

It sounds like you're putting PhD tasks / working times in your calendar, and then bumping those items as external events interrupt your plan. These external events could be things like the sudden announcement of social occasions, family stuff, outbreaks of good weather, spontaneous ideas, etc.

May I suggest this behavior is at the root of the chaos? It's not that the calendar is a bad system, it's that you keep bumping your PhD work time instead of following your calendar. You keep bumping PhD work because the other things are more immediately valuable and gratifying - friends, family, hobbies. This is the normal, optimal way to think and you'll have to break the habit for a while.

If you're going to accomplish this thing, you'll need to realize life has to suck for a couple of years, and thousands of hours of work must be allocated across time in a way that completes the objective quickly enough without leading to personal collapse. Family, spouse, and friends will need to be somewhat neglected for a couple of years, but maintained enough to preserve their connections. Hobbies are on hold. Beautiful days must be spent in libraries or at a desk in combat with writer's block or reading other people's bad writing.

I've been there, and my strategy was to envision the better life to come after completing this temporary phase in my life. I explained to friends and family that I was going to neglect them for a while, that I was going to have immovable, inflexible time commitments, that it was nothing personal, that I still wanted to be in the loop and hear about their plans, and that I envisioned having more time once I completed grad school. Their awareness and acceptance was important for me not to feel like I was letting people down or being unfriendly.

With such relationship issues managed, you can feel more free to block time and refuse to move those blocks. All the other events move around those blocks. It may help to take charge in a sense and initiate friend/family gatherings (e.g. a last-minute spontaneous dinner) after completing your self-assigned blocks of work. It may also help to ask an extroverted friend to make get-togethers happen when you realize you can budget a couple of hours and you message them. This way, more fun happens during the short periods of time you have available, instead of you postponing PhD work and feeling awful about it.

[reeshau]

At the height of my career, I was in charge of IT operations for a Fortune 100 company.  I had a management team of ~70 (in two levels).  Our case was similar to yours, only the urgent categories (both important and not important) came from others: service outages, projects requesting help on their own timelines, meetings and tasks to coordinate with the businesses we supported, etc.  We spent a year working through time management techniques, with mixed results.  What finally made the widespread breakthrough was when I said, "your open calendar is an invitation to interruption."  Calendars are broadly visible in the company, at least for free / busy, and they felt that they were at the mercy of these, as people invited them to meetings.

The simple act of blocking off necessary time to get their primary responsibilities done changed their working world.  And it did it, with no pushback from those outside groups--they weren't pressing for immediacy in many cases; they were simply taking advantage of availability.  Of course, truly important and urgent things came up.  But the frequency was low enough to manage the interruptions, particularly with the blocked off time my team gave themselves.  With permission to manage their schedules, they felt much more empowered about their day-to-day, and their annual goals.

You say that you do this scheduling, but then override it.  You need to respect the important and not urgent, and give it the due time.  I agree with the suggestions to find external accountability for this:  commit some milestone to someone else, and get the same source of external pressure that you feel for other things.

[lhamo]

There is a dangerous land that many FIRE-minded folks often wander into -- the land of sacrificing happiness and well-being to the altar of optimization and productivity.  You sound very much like you are wandering in those lands.

If you haven't already, read the Mad FIentists posts about his regrets about how he handled the build up to and early years of FIRE.  His issue was more about not spending money on things he valued/that gave his life purpose and meaning, but you could pretty easily substitute the concept of wasting your life counting and quantifying each second of time you have available and how you allocate  To me your obsession with optimizing your use of every minute of your life sounds a bit like a  miser sitting in a dark vault in his mansion counting and recounting every penny and trying to decide where to allocate it,  while never opening up his beautiful home and gardens to friends and family just to enjoy being and living in the space together.

I can't find a really targeted specific post right now, but this one is a good example of how his mindset (and life choices) have changed a LOT since he eased back on trying to optimize for money and started focusing on other things that truly bring joy in life:

https://www.madfientist.com/mad-fientist-jr/


Chris Gillibeau is currently publishing several times a week about his recovery from a similar  mindset that was overly focused on efficiency and productivity.

https://yearofmentalhealth.substack.com/

If you haven't already, read the book "Flow" by that guy whose name starts with Cz....  Your immersion in that weekend project sounds like a peak flow experience to me -- so sad that you are beating yourself up for sinking your time and energy into something that so clearly engaged you deeply, especially when it potentially can benefit others in the world!  Flow is a pretty high level mental/emotional state that many people never manage to find. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

And please don't take this the wrong way, but have you ever been screened for things like ADHD or OCD?  Maybe you don't meet the criteria for diagnosis, but the more I read about these neurological patterns the more I think that there are probably a LOT of very high functioning people who have them but have learned strategies to channel the "oh look, there's a squirrel" impulse so that it works for them rather than against them.  Many of us have quirky brain circuits, and that's ok!  There are now LOTS of resources out there trying to help people work with their ADHD or OCD wired brains rather than against them.  Maybe some of that literature would have useful tools or skills for you to experiment with.

FInally, I'm gonna plug the thread I started on the free Coursera/Yale online course on The Science of Well Being -- might be worth signing up for so that you don't sink a bunch of time/energy into forms of optimization that don't really benefit you in the ways you think they will:

https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/proposed-mmm-community-learning-opportunity-the-science-of-well-being/

[hyperrun]

@Tass: Appreciate your suggestion! That book is now at the top of my reading list. Plus, I've set a reminder for March to grab his upcoming release. :-)

@GilesMM: The weekly meeting is scheduled, primarily focusing on paper feedback so far. However, I'll make sure to include defining specific objectives for the upcoming week going forward. It indeed seems like a sensible and productive addition!

@ChpBstrd: Thank you for your thoughtful insights, especially about minimizing external interruptions to fully concentrate on my PhD. Your advice is genuinely helpful for maintaining focus. However, my query is a bit more overarching. It revolves around the broader decision of committing exclusively to my PhD. I'm contemplating the balance between my academic pursuits and maintaining my social connections. It's less about finding time for my PhD and more about the larger question: "What's the best way for me to allocate my life's time and energy?"

@reeshau: Very interesting story, I'm glad that things worked out for you and your company! I'll definitely be more on the looking for quadrant II tasks and prioritize them.

@lhamo:

There is a dangerous land that many FIRE-minded folks often wander into -- the land of sacrificing happiness and well-being to the altar of optimization and productivity.  You sound very much like you are wandering in those lands.

I'm not sure this is true for me. On the flipside, I feel like working on the right thing would boost my happiness and well-being. I don't want to work 10+ hours on my PhD (or anything else) and I'm certainly not looking for hacks how to be able to work more. Maybe this didn't come across clear in my previous posts, sorry for that.

Thank you for the book recommendation! I'm looking forward to reading it once I finish Cal Newport's book. About my weekend project, I want to clarify: I'm not regretting the time spent working on it. Rather, I wish I had made the decision to work on it more consciously and intentionally.

I haven't been tested for ADHD or OCD. Are there specific aspects in my messages that led you to think I might have these conditions? I'm intrigued to know!

I've just enrolled in the Science of Well-Being course. Thank you for suggesting this one too!



So far, here are my key takeaways (I hope I'm capturing them accurately and don't simply too much):

1. Engaging with the recommended reading material.
2. Maintaining an evening journal to reflect on my daily activities and emotions. Assessing whether these align with my values and, if not, considering modifications or discontinuing certain activities. Identifying tasks that are important but not urgent.
3. Setting weekly tasks through collaborative planning with my supervisor.





I have another topic on my mind that I considered introducing in a new thread for clarity. However, upon reflection, I realized its close relevance to our current discussion, and so I've decided it's best to address it here.

For many years, I've been actively involved in another club (specifically, a scouting group), where I engaged weekly in teaching children aged 10 to 13 various practical life skills, predominantly technical ones like knot-tying, camping, and similar activities. Recently, I've been contemplating leaving the club. A contributing factor is the distance — it's now an hour's bike ride away since I moved to be closer to University. However, the primary reason is the change in club leadership. The new leaders and I haven't quite meshed well. The result is that I don't enjoy spending my time there. This feeling has persisted for several months now, to the extent that I've been missing about 75% of the weekly meetings. I'm starting to think that continuing in this half-hearted manner isn't worthwhile anymore.

Having been a part of this club for a substantial period, I'm hesitant to make a hasty decision about quitting. I'm concerned about potential regret in the future, keeping in mind that rejoining is an option. The main drawback, however, is that the joy and satisfaction I used to find in my time there have significantly diminished.

There are a few options for how I could approach leaving the club. One is a complete exit, formally disassociating myself from all aspects of the club – this would involve steps like leaving all chat groups and ceasing payment of membership dues. Alternatively, I could adopt a less active role, stepping back from weekly meetings but remaining available as a backup leader in case others are unable to attend. However, I'm leaning towards a full departure. Afterall, I can always rejoin in the future if I find that my decision was premature. Reflecting on this in writing has helped clarify my thoughts. It's remarkable how putting thoughts into words can aid in decision-making.

[ChpBstrd]

@ChpBstrd: Thank you for your thoughtful insights, especially about minimizing external interruptions to fully concentrate on my PhD. Your advice is genuinely helpful for maintaining focus. However, my query is a bit more overarching. It revolves around the broader decision of committing exclusively to my PhD. I'm contemplating the balance between my academic pursuits and maintaining my social connections. It's less about finding time for my PhD and more about the larger question: "What's the best way for me to allocate my life's time and energy?"

Here's some additional color: I dropped out of a science PhD program once I understood the price in terms of living a diversified lifestyle of doing lots of things, having strong relationships, having personal autonomy, and having the option to reject workaholism if I wanted to. I was entering a world of six or seven day a week focus, ending up who-knows-where, and after all that work not even being in a necessarily meritocratic field.

If you want to be a PhD, this will be the price, and so my advice applies if you want to make it through. If this invoice makes you less inclined to continue on this path, there's no shame in fixing an error and finding new things to do. That's what I did and I don't regret it 20 years later.

Yes, there are people on the eight-year path in some disciplines, raising kids and occasionally watching a movie, but to become a Dr. in 4y or less generally requires dropping everything and being a workaholic. Then - guess what? - you get to compete for jobs against peers who are all workaholics. I wanted to be an academic, but then I realized only a small fraction of PhDs in my field get to do that - and never on their terms. Publish or perish meant getting the job you think you want is like an auction, where you are paying in terms of everything else in life, and expected to keep paying forever. Once I understood that and got over my denial and fears that I was having a psychological reaction to stress, I realized there was nothing to lose by quitting and my whole life to gain back. I went and became a millionaire instead, working 40 hour weeks.

[Tasse]

As someone who finished my science PhD and then fled the academic track as fast as possible, I do not disagree with @ChpBstrd 's analysis. However, I don't think OP said what their PhD was in. Is it a labor of love?

[hyperrun]

For many years, I've been actively involved in another club (specifically, a scouting group), where I engaged weekly in teaching children aged 10 to 13 various practical life skills, predominantly technical ones like knot-tying, camping, and similar activities. Recently, I've been contemplating leaving the club. A contributing factor is the distance — it's now an hour's bike ride away since I moved to be closer to University. However, the primary reason is the change in club leadership. The new leaders and I haven't quite meshed well. The result is that I don't enjoy spending my time there. This feeling has persisted for several months now, to the extent that I've been missing about 75% of the weekly meetings. I'm starting to think that continuing in this half-hearted manner isn't worthwhile anymore.

Having been a part of this club for a substantial period, I'm hesitant to make a hasty decision about quitting. I'm concerned about potential regret in the future, keeping in mind that rejoining is an option. The main drawback, however, is that the joy and satisfaction I used to find in my time there have significantly diminished.

There are a few options for how I could approach leaving the club. One is a complete exit, formally disassociating myself from all aspects of the club – this would involve steps like leaving all chat groups and ceasing payment of membership dues. Alternatively, I could adopt a less active role, stepping back from weekly meetings but remaining available as a backup leader in case others are unable to attend. However, I'm leaning towards a full departure. Afterall, I can always rejoin in the future if I find that my decision was premature. Reflecting on this in writing has helped clarify my thoughts. It's remarkable how putting thoughts into words can aid in decision-making.

I quit yesterday. It feels strangely good that I finally made it :-)

@Tass: I'm doing my PhD in computer science.