What are the barriers to having really high “knowledge work output”?
I’m not capable of “being productive on arbitrary tasks”. One winter break I made a plan to apply for all the small $100 essay scholarships people were always telling me no one applied for. After two days of sheer misery, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t able be productive on a task that involved making up bullshit opinions about topics I didn’t care about.
Conviction is important. From experiments with TAPs and a recent bout of meditation, it seems like when I bail on an intention, on some level I am no longer convinced the intention is a good idea/what I actually want to do. Strong conviction feels like confidence all the way up in the fact that this task/project is the right thing to spend your time on.
There’s probably a lot in the vein of have good chemistry: sleep well, eat well, get exercise.
One of the more mysterious quantities seems to be “cognitive effort”. Sometimes thinking hard feel like it hurts my brain. This post has a lot of advice in that regard.
I’ve previously hypothesized that the a huge chunk of painful brain fog is the experience of thinking at a problem, but not actually engaging with it. (similar to how Mark Forster has posited that the resistance one feels to a given task is proportional to how many times it has been rejected)
Having the rest of your life together and time boxing your work is insanely important for reducing the frequency with which your brains promotes “unrelated” thoughts to your consciousness (if there’s important stuff that isn’t getting done, and you haven’t convinced yourself that it will be handled adequately, your mind’s tendency is to keep it in a loop).
I’ve got a feeling that there’s a large amount of gains in the 5-second level. I would be super interested in seeing anyone’s thoughts or writings on the 5-second level of doing better work and avoiding cognitive fatigue.
I often think a sentence like, “I want to have a really big brain!”. What would that actually look like?
Not experiencing fear or worry when encountering new math.
Really quick to determine what I’m most curious about.
Not having my head hurt when I’m thinking hard, and generally not feeling much “cognitive strain”.
Be able to fill in the vague and general impressions with the concrete examples that originally created them.
Doing a hammers and nails scan when I encounter new ideas.
Having a clear, quickly accessible understanding of the “proof chains” of ideas, as well as the “motivation chains”.
I don’t need to know all the proofs or motivations, but I do have a clear sense of what I understand myself, and what I’ve outsourced.
Instead of feeling “generally confused” by things of just “not getting them”, I always have concrete, “This doesn’t make sense because BLANK” expressions that allow me to move forward.
What are the barriers to having really high “knowledge work output”?
I’m not capable of “being productive on arbitrary tasks”. One winter break I made a plan to apply for all the small $100 essay scholarships people were always telling me no one applied for. After two days of sheer misery, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t able be productive on a task that involved making up bullshit opinions about topics I didn’t care about.
Conviction is important. From experiments with TAPs and a recent bout of meditation, it seems like when I bail on an intention, on some level I am no longer convinced the intention is a good idea/what I actually want to do. Strong conviction feels like confidence all the way up in the fact that this task/project is the right thing to spend your time on.
There’s probably a lot in the vein of have good chemistry: sleep well, eat well, get exercise.
One of the more mysterious quantities seems to be “cognitive effort”. Sometimes thinking hard feel like it hurts my brain. This post has a lot of advice in that regard.
I’ve previously hypothesized that the a huge chunk of painful brain fog is the experience of thinking at a problem, but not actually engaging with it. (similar to how Mark Forster has posited that the resistance one feels to a given task is proportional to how many times it has been rejected)
Having the rest of your life together and time boxing your work is insanely important for reducing the frequency with which your brains promotes “unrelated” thoughts to your consciousness (if there’s important stuff that isn’t getting done, and you haven’t convinced yourself that it will be handled adequately, your mind’s tendency is to keep it in a loop).
I’ve got a feeling that there’s a large amount of gains in the 5-second level. I would be super interested in seeing anyone’s thoughts or writings on the 5-second level of doing better work and avoiding cognitive fatigue.
(Less a reply and more just related)
I often think a sentence like, “I want to have a really big brain!”. What would that actually look like?
Not experiencing fear or worry when encountering new math.
Really quick to determine what I’m most curious about.
Not having my head hurt when I’m thinking hard, and generally not feeling much “cognitive strain”.
Be able to fill in the vague and general impressions with the concrete examples that originally created them.
Doing a hammers and nails scan when I encounter new ideas.
Having a clear, quickly accessible understanding of the “proof chains” of ideas, as well as the “motivation chains”.
I don’t need to know all the proofs or motivations, but I do have a clear sense of what I understand myself, and what I’ve outsourced.
Instead of feeling “generally confused” by things of just “not getting them”, I always have concrete, “This doesn’t make sense because BLANK” expressions that allow me to move forward.