three questions

(fellow student) Smitha has these post-its on her desk:

• what are you doing?
• why is it important?
• are you making progress?

I think these are important questions to ask anytime you're trying to get work done. I would amend the middle one to be: "why is it important TO YOU" since that makes it clear that you should as a person be trying to come alive rather than working on something that seems objectively consequential (i.e., for which you can tell a motivating story, or elon-musk-style 'future of the human race' stuff) but which you don't yourself feel personally invested or interested in. So it could be that what is important to me is building new friendships and relationships, and then my work would want to reflect that, instead of being just purely driven by the application of the work itself.