Meanwhile, there’s something on-hand I could do that’d have 300 times the impact. For sure, almost certainly 300 times the impact, because I see some proven success in the 300x area, and the frittering-away-time area is almost certainly not going to be valuable.
Your post includes a “silly” and a business-scale example, but not a personal one. In order to answer the questions about causes that you ask, it seems necessary to look at specific situations. Is there a real-life situation that you can talk about where you have two options, one almost certainly hundreds of times as good as the other, and you choose the option that is worse?
Commenting on nothing particularly important on Hacker News when I could be writing my second book. Commenting on HN = very small gain, minor contribution to a few people over a very short period of time. Working on a book = much more enjoyable, and much larger contribution over a longer period of time.
Have you seen the same phenomenon in your life at all Andreas? Maybe “300x” is an exaggeration—or maybe not, even, if the value of the distracting task is low enough, and the value of the good task is high enough.
Comments on HN and LW result in immediate reward through upvoting and replies whereas writing a book is a more solitary experience. If you identify this difference as a likely cause for your behavior and if you believe that the difference in value to you is as large as you say, then you should test this hypothesis by turning book-writing into a more interactive, immediately rewarding process. Blogging and sending pieces to friends once they are written come to mind.
More generally, consider structuring your social environment such that social expectations and rewards line up with activities you consider valuable. I have found this to be a powerful way to change my behavior.
Indeed, this is a good insight. I’ve done both, actually. I have an active blog, and actually making a public commitment helped me finish my first book. I wrote about it under “The Joys of Public Accountability”; it does work.
More generally, consider structuring your social environment such that social expectations and rewards line up with activities you consider valuable. I have found this to be a powerful way to change my behavior.
That’s a really powerful observation. Why do you think people don’t do that more often? Ignorance? Also, do you have any observations from your own life of structuring your environment? I’d be fascinated to hear, you seem very knowledgeable and astute on the subject.
Is there a real-life situation that you can talk about where you have two options, one almost certainly hundreds of times as good as the other, and you choose the option that is worse?
I used to be pretty cavalier about messing with Windows, and would lose my files on an annual or bi-annual basis. I spent a heck of a lot of time tracking down files and restoring from my sporadic backups, not to mention the virus scan time or defragging.
Then the 4th or 5th time I realized that this was crazy, switched to Linux, and learned how to use DVCSes. I’m not sure that this has yet amounted to a 300x improvement in wasted time, but I’m pretty confident that by the time I die it will have.
I agree, I don’t think these kind of ‘easy’ wins are all that common in real life, certainly not those offering 300x improvements. I would like to see some better examples.
Entrepreneurship / business seems likely to be relatively fertile ground for finding good examples since short term financial gain can often be used as a relatively good proxy for ‘success’ and is relatively easy to measure. Too much focus on short term financial gain isn’t always an optimal strategy even in business however since it may result in getting stuck in local maxima or directly compromising longer term success.
Squatting heavy once a week will make you stronger than almost everyone at almost everything, younger, healthier, leaner, smarter*, richer, prettier; takes about fifteen minutes. How does that compare to your current exercise regimen?
I was already persuaded by the evidence that strength / weight training is a more time efficient and effective route to overall fitness and health than extensive cardio but I’m not familiar with the specific arguments in favour of squats. The first link doesn’t seem to highlight squats specifically and I didn’t read the second yet (behind a required registration). Are you saying that heavy squats specifically are dramatically more effective than other approaches?
I haven’t had a regular exercise regimen for a while but I’m just starting to try and get back into strength training, mainly focused on body weight exercises as I don’t like gyms and I can do them easily at home.
Time shouldn’t be that much of an issue if you’re interested in functional improvements in your strength. I mean, if it’s functional, you should be doing it anyway—so just do it more or provide more resistance. For instance, you can put your car sit horizontal, then do situps when you get to traffic lights.
a mere 20 minutes a week of any physical activity, whether sports, walking, gardening or even housecleaning, the last not usually associated with bringing out the sunshine. The researchers found that more activity conferred more mental-health benefits and that “participation in vigorous sports activities” tended to be the “most beneficial for mental health.” But their overall conclusion was that being active for as little as 20 minutes a week is sufficient, if your specific goal is mental health.
In other words, six minutes or so a week of hard exercise (plus the time spent warming up, cooling down, and resting between the bouts of intense work) had proven to be as good as multiple hours of working out for achieving fitness. The short, intense workouts aided in weight loss, too, although Gibala hadn’t been studying that effect.
I don’t think these kind of ‘easy’ wins are all that common in real life, certainly not those offering 300x improvements
That depends on the universe out of which you’re selecting/counting them. In business, most attempts to improve things have zero (or very nearly zero) positive effect on the bottom line, and thus finding things that are 300x or more better than the worst case or even typical case isn’t really that hard. ;-)
Understanding constraints and the Pareto Principle are critical to making effective improvements in business, i.e., ones that have non-zero chances of affecting the bottom line.
I think these types of wins are common, but not easy.
That is, working a little more on your primary project (the one that offers greatest ROI), or figuring out how to become more productive on your primary project, will usually be > 10x ROI of commenting on blog and web forums. But the latter is fun, immediately rewarding, doesn’t require willpower, etc. We sometimes do it b/c we haven’t explicitly recognized this difference (an easy win), but more often it is due to a limited ability to direct our attention to our most valuable project, not a limited ability to identify our most valuable project.
So the solution requires the hard work of greater willpower, increasing self-discipline and the ability to direct your attention. You know, what I’m failing at right now :). More generally, what almost anyone commenting on a web forum (instead of writing a great top-level post or book or starting a local LW chapter) is doing. At least, if you agree w/ me that commenting on web forums is a very low-valued activity.
Your post includes a “silly” and a business-scale example, but not a personal one. In order to answer the questions about causes that you ask, it seems necessary to look at specific situations. Is there a real-life situation that you can talk about where you have two options, one almost certainly hundreds of times as good as the other, and you choose the option that is worse?
Sure. An easy one:
Commenting on nothing particularly important on Hacker News when I could be writing my second book. Commenting on HN = very small gain, minor contribution to a few people over a very short period of time. Working on a book = much more enjoyable, and much larger contribution over a longer period of time.
Have you seen the same phenomenon in your life at all Andreas? Maybe “300x” is an exaggeration—or maybe not, even, if the value of the distracting task is low enough, and the value of the good task is high enough.
Comments on HN and LW result in immediate reward through upvoting and replies whereas writing a book is a more solitary experience. If you identify this difference as a likely cause for your behavior and if you believe that the difference in value to you is as large as you say, then you should test this hypothesis by turning book-writing into a more interactive, immediately rewarding process. Blogging and sending pieces to friends once they are written come to mind.
More generally, consider structuring your social environment such that social expectations and rewards line up with activities you consider valuable. I have found this to be a powerful way to change my behavior.
Indeed, this is a good insight. I’ve done both, actually. I have an active blog, and actually making a public commitment helped me finish my first book. I wrote about it under “The Joys of Public Accountability”; it does work.
That’s a really powerful observation. Why do you think people don’t do that more often? Ignorance? Also, do you have any observations from your own life of structuring your environment? I’d be fascinated to hear, you seem very knowledgeable and astute on the subject.
I used to be pretty cavalier about messing with Windows, and would lose my files on an annual or bi-annual basis. I spent a heck of a lot of time tracking down files and restoring from my sporadic backups, not to mention the virus scan time or defragging.
Then the 4th or 5th time I realized that this was crazy, switched to Linux, and learned how to use DVCSes. I’m not sure that this has yet amounted to a 300x improvement in wasted time, but I’m pretty confident that by the time I die it will have.
I agree, I don’t think these kind of ‘easy’ wins are all that common in real life, certainly not those offering 300x improvements. I would like to see some better examples.
Entrepreneurship / business seems likely to be relatively fertile ground for finding good examples since short term financial gain can often be used as a relatively good proxy for ‘success’ and is relatively easy to measure. Too much focus on short term financial gain isn’t always an optimal strategy even in business however since it may result in getting stuck in local maxima or directly compromising longer term success.
Squatting heavy once a week will make you stronger than almost everyone at almost everything, younger, healthier, leaner, smarter*, richer, prettier; takes about fifteen minutes. How does that compare to your current exercise regimen?
*http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000465
**http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0197-4580/PIIS0197458005002745.pdf
I was already persuaded by the evidence that strength / weight training is a more time efficient and effective route to overall fitness and health than extensive cardio but I’m not familiar with the specific arguments in favour of squats. The first link doesn’t seem to highlight squats specifically and I didn’t read the second yet (behind a required registration). Are you saying that heavy squats specifically are dramatically more effective than other approaches?
I haven’t had a regular exercise regimen for a while but I’m just starting to try and get back into strength training, mainly focused on body weight exercises as I don’t like gyms and I can do them easily at home.
Time shouldn’t be that much of an issue if you’re interested in functional improvements in your strength. I mean, if it’s functional, you should be doing it anyway—so just do it more or provide more resistance. For instance, you can put your car sit horizontal, then do situps when you get to traffic lights.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/phys-ed-how-much-exercise-to-avoid-feeling-gloomy/
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/can-you-get-fit-in-six-minutes-a-week/
this is very weird to read on this forum, but yes, it’s a good idea.
Your second link is broken, even for people access; worse, it doesn’t give the citation. I think that this (ungated, alt) is the study.
That depends on the universe out of which you’re selecting/counting them. In business, most attempts to improve things have zero (or very nearly zero) positive effect on the bottom line, and thus finding things that are 300x or more better than the worst case or even typical case isn’t really that hard. ;-)
Understanding constraints and the Pareto Principle are critical to making effective improvements in business, i.e., ones that have non-zero chances of affecting the bottom line.
I think these types of wins are common, but not easy.
That is, working a little more on your primary project (the one that offers greatest ROI), or figuring out how to become more productive on your primary project, will usually be > 10x ROI of commenting on blog and web forums. But the latter is fun, immediately rewarding, doesn’t require willpower, etc. We sometimes do it b/c we haven’t explicitly recognized this difference (an easy win), but more often it is due to a limited ability to direct our attention to our most valuable project, not a limited ability to identify our most valuable project.
So the solution requires the hard work of greater willpower, increasing self-discipline and the ability to direct your attention. You know, what I’m failing at right now :). More generally, what almost anyone commenting on a web forum (instead of writing a great top-level post or book or starting a local LW chapter) is doing. At least, if you agree w/ me that commenting on web forums is a very low-valued activity.