I think there are some serious low hanging fruits for making people productive that I haven’t seen anyone write about (not that I’ve looked very hard). Let me just introduce a proof of concept:
Final exams in university are typically about 3 hours long. And many people are able to do multiple finals in a single day, performing well on all of them. During a final exam, I notice that I am substantially more productive than usual. I make sure that every minute counts: I double check everything and think deeply about each problem, making sure not to cut corners unless absolutely required because of time constraints. Also, if I start daydreaming, then I am able to immediately notice that I’m doing so and cut it out. I also believe that this is the experience of most other students in university who care even a little bit about their grade.
Therefore, it seems like we have an example of an activity that can just automatically produce deep work. I can think of a few reasons why final exams would bring out the best of our productivity:
1. We care about our grade in the course, and the few hours in that room are the most impactful to our grade.
2. We are in an environment where distractions are explicitly prohibited, so we can’t make excuses to ourselves about why we need to check Facebook or whatever.
3. There is a clock at the front of the room which makes us feel like time is limited. We can’t just sit there doing nothing because then time will just slip away.
4. Every problem you do well on benefits you by a little bit, meaning that there’s a gradient of success rather than a binary pass or fail (though sometimes it’s binary). This means that we care a lot about optimizing every second because we can always do slightly better.
If we wanted to do deep work for some other desired task, all four of these reasons seem like they could be replicable. Here is one idea (related to my own studying), although I’m sure I can come up with a better one if I thought deeply about this for longer:
Set up a room where you are given a limited amount of resources (say, a few academic papers, a computer without an internet connection, and a textbook). Set aside a four hour window where you’re not allowed to leave the room except to go to the bathroom (and some person explicitly checks in on you like twice to see whether you are doing what you say you are doing). Make it your goal to write a blog post explaining some technical concept. Afterwards, the blog post gets posted to Lesswrong (conditional on it being at least minimal quality). You set some goal, like it must acheive 30 upvote reputation after 3 days. Commit to paying $1 to a friend for each upvote you score below the target reputation. So, if your blog post is at +15, you must pay $15 to your friend.
I can see a few problems with this design:
1. You are optimizing for upvotes, not clarity or understanding. The two might be correlated but at the very least there’s a Goodhart effect.
2. Your “friend” could downvote the post. It can easily be hacked by other people who are interested, and it encourages vote manipulation etc.
Still, I think that I might be on the right track towards something that boosts productivity by a lot.
These seem like reasonable things to try, but I think this is making an assumption that you could take a final exam all the time and have it work out fine. I have some sense that people go through phases of “woah I could just force myself to work hard all the time” and then it totally doesn’t work that way.
I agree that it is probably too hard to “take a final exam all the time.” On the other hand, I feel like I could make a much weaker claim that this is an improvement over a lot of productivity techniques, which often seem to more-or-less be dependent on just having enough willpower to actually learn.
At least in this case, each action you do can be informed directly by whether you actually succeed or fail at the goal (like getting upvotes on a post). Whether or not learning is a good instrumental proxy for getting upvotes in this setting is an open question.
From my own experience going through a similar realization and trying to apply it to my own productivity, I found that certain things I tried actually helped me sustainably work more productively but others did not.
What has worked for me based on my experience with exam-like situations is having clear goals and time boxes for work sessions, e.g. the blog post example you described. What hasn’t worked for me is trying to impose aggressively short deadlines on myself all the time to incentivize myself to focus more intensely. Personally, the level of focus I have during exams is driven by an unsustainable level of stress, which, if applied continuously, would probably lead to burnout and/or procrastination binging. That said, occasionally artificially imposing deadlines has helped me engage exam-style focus when I need to do something that might otherwise be boring because it mostly involves executing known strategies rather than doing more open, exploratory thinking. For hard thinking though, I’ve actually found that giving myself conservatively long time boxes helps me focus better by allowing me to relax and take my time. I saw you mentioned struggling with reading textbooks above, and while I still struggle trying to read them too, I have found that not expecting miraculous progress helps me get less frustrated when I read them.
Related to all this, you used the term “deep work” a few times so you may already be familiar with Cal Newport’s work. But, if you’re not I recommend a few of his relevant posts (1, 2) describing how he produces work artifacts that act as a forcing function for learning the right stuff and staying focused.
This seems similar to “pomodoro”, except instead of using your willpower to keep working during the time period, you set up the environment in a way that doesn’t allow you to do anything else.
The only part that feels wrong is the commitment part. You should commit to work, not to achieve success, because the latter adds of problems (not completely under your control, may discourage experimenting, a punishment creates aversion against the entire method, etc.).
Yes, the difference is that you are creating an external environment which rewards you for success and punishes you for failure. This is similar to taking a final exam, which is my inspiration.
The problem with committing to work rather than success is that you can always just rationalize something as “Oh I worked hard” or “I put in my best effort.” However, just as with a final exam, the only thing that will matter in the end is if you actually do what it takes to get the high score. This incentivizes good consequentialist thinking and disincentivizes rationalization.
I agree there are things out of your control, but the same is true with final exams. For instance, the test-maker could have put something on the test that you didn’t study much for. This encourages people to put extra effort into their assigned task to ensure robustness to outside forces.
I personally try to balance keeping myself honest by having some goal outside but also trusting myself enough to know when I should deprioritize the original goal in favor of something else.
For example, let’s say I set a goal to write a blog post about a topic I’m learning in 4 hours, and half-way through I realize I don’t understand one of the key underlying concepts related to the thing I intended to write about. During an actual test, the right thing to do would be to do my best given what I know already and finish as many questions as possible. But I’d argue that in the blog post case, I very well may be better off saying, “OK I’m going to go learn about this other thing until I understand it, even if I don’t end up finishing the post I wanted to write.”
The pithy way to say this is that tests are basically pure Goodhardt, and it’s dangerous to turn every real life task into a game of maximizing legible metrics.
For example, let’s say I set a goal to write a blog post about a topic I’m learning in 4 hours, and half-way through I realize I don’t understand one of the key underlying concepts related to the thing I intended to write about.
Interesting, this exact same thing just happened to me a few hours ago. I was testing my technique by writing a post on variational autoencoders. Halfway through I was very confused because I was trying to contrast them to GANs but didn’t have enough material or knowledge to know the advantages of either.
During an actual test, the right thing to do would be to do my best given what I know already and finish as many questions as possible. But I’d argue that in the blog post case, I very well may be better off saying, “OK I’m going to go learn about this other thing until I understand it, even if I don’t end up finishing the post I wanted to write.”
I agree that’s probably true. However, this creates a bad incentive where, at least in my case, I will slowly start making myself lazier during the testing phase because I know I can always just “give up” and learn the required concept afterwards.
At least in the case I described above I just moved onto a different topic, because I was kind of getting sick of variational autoencoders. However, I was able to do this because I didn’t have any external constraints, unlike the method I described in the parent comment.
The pithy way to say this is that tests are basically pure Goodhardt, and it’s dangerous to turn every real life task into a game of maximizing legible metrics.
That’s true, although perhaps one could devise a sufficiently complex test such that it matches perfectly with what we really want… well, I’m not saying that’s a solved problem in any sense.
Weirdly enough, I was doing something today that made me think about this comment. The thought I had is that you caught onto something good here which is separate from the pressure aspect. There seems to be a benefit to trying to separate different aspects of a task more than may feel natural. To use the final exam example, as someone mentioned before, part of the reason final exams feel productive is because you were forced to do so much prep beforehand to ensure you’d be able to finish the exam in a fixed amount of time.
Similarly, I’ve seen benefit when I (haphazardly since I only realized this recently) clearly segment different aspects of an activity and apply artificial constraints to ensure that they remain separate. To use your VAE blog post example, this would be like saying, “I’m only going to use a single page of notes to write the blog post” to force yourself to ensure you understand everything before trying to write.
YMMV warning: I’m especially bad about trying to produce outputs before fully understanding and therefore may get more bandwidth out of this than others.
I think you might be goodhearting a bit (mistaking the measure for the goal) when you claim that final exam performance is productive. The actual product is the studying and prep for the exam, not the exam itself. The time limits and isolated environment is helpful in proctoring (it ensures the output is limited enough to be able to grade, and ensures that no outside sources are being used), not for productivity.
That’s not to say that these elements (isolation, concentration, time awareness, expectation of a grading/scoring rubric) aren’t important, just that they’re not necessarily sufficient nor directly convertible from an exam setting.
I think there are some serious low hanging fruits for making people productive that I haven’t seen anyone write about (not that I’ve looked very hard). Let me just introduce a proof of concept:
Final exams in university are typically about 3 hours long. And many people are able to do multiple finals in a single day, performing well on all of them. During a final exam, I notice that I am substantially more productive than usual. I make sure that every minute counts: I double check everything and think deeply about each problem, making sure not to cut corners unless absolutely required because of time constraints. Also, if I start daydreaming, then I am able to immediately notice that I’m doing so and cut it out. I also believe that this is the experience of most other students in university who care even a little bit about their grade.
Therefore, it seems like we have an example of an activity that can just automatically produce deep work. I can think of a few reasons why final exams would bring out the best of our productivity:
1. We care about our grade in the course, and the few hours in that room are the most impactful to our grade.
2. We are in an environment where distractions are explicitly prohibited, so we can’t make excuses to ourselves about why we need to check Facebook or whatever.
3. There is a clock at the front of the room which makes us feel like time is limited. We can’t just sit there doing nothing because then time will just slip away.
4. Every problem you do well on benefits you by a little bit, meaning that there’s a gradient of success rather than a binary pass or fail (though sometimes it’s binary). This means that we care a lot about optimizing every second because we can always do slightly better.
If we wanted to do deep work for some other desired task, all four of these reasons seem like they could be replicable. Here is one idea (related to my own studying), although I’m sure I can come up with a better one if I thought deeply about this for longer:
Set up a room where you are given a limited amount of resources (say, a few academic papers, a computer without an internet connection, and a textbook). Set aside a four hour window where you’re not allowed to leave the room except to go to the bathroom (and some person explicitly checks in on you like twice to see whether you are doing what you say you are doing). Make it your goal to write a blog post explaining some technical concept. Afterwards, the blog post gets posted to Lesswrong (conditional on it being at least minimal quality). You set some goal, like it must acheive 30 upvote reputation after 3 days. Commit to paying $1 to a friend for each upvote you score below the target reputation. So, if your blog post is at +15, you must pay $15 to your friend.
I can see a few problems with this design:
1. You are optimizing for upvotes, not clarity or understanding. The two might be correlated but at the very least there’s a Goodhart effect.
2. Your “friend” could downvote the post. It can easily be hacked by other people who are interested, and it encourages vote manipulation etc.
Still, I think that I might be on the right track towards something that boosts productivity by a lot.
These seem like reasonable things to try, but I think this is making an assumption that you could take a final exam all the time and have it work out fine. I have some sense that people go through phases of “woah I could just force myself to work hard all the time” and then it totally doesn’t work that way.
I agree that it is probably too hard to “take a final exam all the time.” On the other hand, I feel like I could make a much weaker claim that this is an improvement over a lot of productivity techniques, which often seem to more-or-less be dependent on just having enough willpower to actually learn.
At least in this case, each action you do can be informed directly by whether you actually succeed or fail at the goal (like getting upvotes on a post). Whether or not learning is a good instrumental proxy for getting upvotes in this setting is an open question.
From my own experience going through a similar realization and trying to apply it to my own productivity, I found that certain things I tried actually helped me sustainably work more productively but others did not.
What has worked for me based on my experience with exam-like situations is having clear goals and time boxes for work sessions, e.g. the blog post example you described. What hasn’t worked for me is trying to impose aggressively short deadlines on myself all the time to incentivize myself to focus more intensely. Personally, the level of focus I have during exams is driven by an unsustainable level of stress, which, if applied continuously, would probably lead to burnout and/or procrastination binging. That said, occasionally artificially imposing deadlines has helped me engage exam-style focus when I need to do something that might otherwise be boring because it mostly involves executing known strategies rather than doing more open, exploratory thinking. For hard thinking though, I’ve actually found that giving myself conservatively long time boxes helps me focus better by allowing me to relax and take my time. I saw you mentioned struggling with reading textbooks above, and while I still struggle trying to read them too, I have found that not expecting miraculous progress helps me get less frustrated when I read them.
Related to all this, you used the term “deep work” a few times so you may already be familiar with Cal Newport’s work. But, if you’re not I recommend a few of his relevant posts (1, 2) describing how he produces work artifacts that act as a forcing function for learning the right stuff and staying focused.
This seems similar to “pomodoro”, except instead of using your willpower to keep working during the time period, you set up the environment in a way that doesn’t allow you to do anything else.
The only part that feels wrong is the commitment part. You should commit to work, not to achieve success, because the latter adds of problems (not completely under your control, may discourage experimenting, a punishment creates aversion against the entire method, etc.).
Yes, the difference is that you are creating an external environment which rewards you for success and punishes you for failure. This is similar to taking a final exam, which is my inspiration.
The problem with committing to work rather than success is that you can always just rationalize something as “Oh I worked hard” or “I put in my best effort.” However, just as with a final exam, the only thing that will matter in the end is if you actually do what it takes to get the high score. This incentivizes good consequentialist thinking and disincentivizes rationalization.
I agree there are things out of your control, but the same is true with final exams. For instance, the test-maker could have put something on the test that you didn’t study much for. This encourages people to put extra effort into their assigned task to ensure robustness to outside forces.
I personally try to balance keeping myself honest by having some goal outside but also trusting myself enough to know when I should deprioritize the original goal in favor of something else.
For example, let’s say I set a goal to write a blog post about a topic I’m learning in 4 hours, and half-way through I realize I don’t understand one of the key underlying concepts related to the thing I intended to write about. During an actual test, the right thing to do would be to do my best given what I know already and finish as many questions as possible. But I’d argue that in the blog post case, I very well may be better off saying, “OK I’m going to go learn about this other thing until I understand it, even if I don’t end up finishing the post I wanted to write.”
The pithy way to say this is that tests are basically pure Goodhardt, and it’s dangerous to turn every real life task into a game of maximizing legible metrics.
Interesting, this exact same thing just happened to me a few hours ago. I was testing my technique by writing a post on variational autoencoders. Halfway through I was very confused because I was trying to contrast them to GANs but didn’t have enough material or knowledge to know the advantages of either.
I agree that’s probably true. However, this creates a bad incentive where, at least in my case, I will slowly start making myself lazier during the testing phase because I know I can always just “give up” and learn the required concept afterwards.
At least in the case I described above I just moved onto a different topic, because I was kind of getting sick of variational autoencoders. However, I was able to do this because I didn’t have any external constraints, unlike the method I described in the parent comment.
That’s true, although perhaps one could devise a sufficiently complex test such that it matches perfectly with what we really want… well, I’m not saying that’s a solved problem in any sense.
Weirdly enough, I was doing something today that made me think about this comment. The thought I had is that you caught onto something good here which is separate from the pressure aspect. There seems to be a benefit to trying to separate different aspects of a task more than may feel natural. To use the final exam example, as someone mentioned before, part of the reason final exams feel productive is because you were forced to do so much prep beforehand to ensure you’d be able to finish the exam in a fixed amount of time.
Similarly, I’ve seen benefit when I (haphazardly since I only realized this recently) clearly segment different aspects of an activity and apply artificial constraints to ensure that they remain separate. To use your VAE blog post example, this would be like saying, “I’m only going to use a single page of notes to write the blog post” to force yourself to ensure you understand everything before trying to write.
YMMV warning: I’m especially bad about trying to produce outputs before fully understanding and therefore may get more bandwidth out of this than others.
I think you might be goodhearting a bit (mistaking the measure for the goal) when you claim that final exam performance is productive. The actual product is the studying and prep for the exam, not the exam itself. The time limits and isolated environment is helpful in proctoring (it ensures the output is limited enough to be able to grade, and ensures that no outside sources are being used), not for productivity.
That’s not to say that these elements (isolation, concentration, time awareness, expectation of a grading/scoring rubric) aren’t important, just that they’re not necessarily sufficient nor directly convertible from an exam setting.