Notes on Industriousness

This post examines the virtue of industry (a.k.a. “assiduity,” “enterprise,” “industriousness,” or “productivity”). It is meant mostly as an exploration of what others have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope this post (and your comments on it) will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

“Lose no time: be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” ―Benjamin Franklin^[1]

What is industry?

Industry is the virtue of habitually devoting one’s sustained effort earnestly toward worthwhile goals. It is contrasted with such things as idleness/laziness/sloth, but also with things like aimlessness, dabbling, dithering, flitting, being ironic (un-earnest), triviality, and wasting time. The self-motivating impulse behind industry is sometimes distinguished from industry itself and called by names like “drive,” “eagerness,” “enthusiasm,” or “ambition.”

“There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair.” —Thomas Carlyle^[2]

Cate Hall (“How to be More Agentic”) prefers the term “agency”, which she defines as “manifest determination to make things happen.”^[3]

Related virtues

Some virtues that are in the same ballpark as industry include:

Duty (responsibility, diligence): understanding what you ought to be doing, and then devoting yourself to that in particular.
Engagement: participating earnestly in life, rather than being a mere spectator.
Focus: resisting distraction and maintaining a goal over time (though for some types of goal, being able to multi-task and rapidly shift focus is important).
Purposefulness: a belief that your endeavors matter, a sense of mission or calling.
Service: exerting oneself for the sake of something beyond oneself.

The virtue of determination / follow-through is also associated with industry, but it can sometimes be counterproductive if taken to extremes. If you are determined to push something through to the finish line no matter what, you may be exhibiting a stubbornness or bullheadedness that interferes with industry: you continue to devote yourself to an unproductive enterprise because you’re unwilling to give up or to change your mind or because the sunk cost fallacy has captured you.

“Never shirk the proper dispatch of your duty, no matter if you are freezing or hot, groggy or well-rested, vilified or praised, not even if dying or pressed by other demands. Even dying is one of the important assignments of life and, in this as in all else, make the most of your resources to do well the duty at hand.” —Marcus Aurelius^[4]

What is industry good for?

Most obviously, industry helps you achieve goals and accomplish things that you value.

It is also sometimes supposed to have some inherent value, aside from the value of whatever it is that it helps you to do or produce.

Purposeful, earnest action can contribute to a sense that your life has meaning. If you are idle and aimless, the questions of “what am I doing here? what is the point of my being alive?” are more likely to gnaw at you.

“The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much…” (Ecclesiastes 5:12)

People seem commonly driven to do something goal-oriented. If you do not choose something meaningful to do, you may spin your wheels doing something just to pass the time.

“[W]ork… is a necessary condition of life… If a man does not work at necessary and good things, then he will work at unnecessary and stupid things.” —Tolstoy^[5]

If you are idle and lazy, work is hard and daunting. You may find that just doing the basic tasks you need to do to get through the day is irritating or difficult. By contrast, if you habitually put your shoulder to the wheel and apply yourself to an enterprise you find valuable, the more mundane chores of life are less likely to bother you.

“Whether you like to or not, acquire the habit of working hard, then you won’t have to work hard. Idleness does not make work easy, it ensures that work will be hard.” ―Crates^[6]

Purposeful effort can itself be pleasurable. It is enjoyable and invigorating to be “in the zone” — applying yourself thoroughly to the task at hand.

“[T]hose pleasures are most valuable, not which is most excellent in the fruition, but which are most productive of engagement and activity in the pursuit.” ―William Paley^[7]

How can you develop industry?

“[L]et him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: ‘Do the duty which lies nearest thee,’ which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.” ―Thomas Carlyle^[8]

It is hard to be industrious when you are mentally or physically fatigued. If fatigue makes it difficult for you to apply yourself, you may need to attend to physical fitness, general health, nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Stress, depression, and other psychological ills can also make it difficult to concentrate or to exert productive effort. Some drugs can mimic or exacerbate the effects of fatigue (others, such as caffeine, modafinil, and amphetamines can at least temporarily alleviate them; and some people swear by more exotic nootropics for this purpose).

You may find it easier to accomplish things if your life is more orderly. Some attention to tidiness might increase your effectiveness.^[9] Some time management tips might also help.^[10]

Cate Hall cautions against trying to develop industry by just doing more harder:

The reality is that grinding, even if it temporarily increases output, kills creativity and big picture thinking.
Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening. A switch flips and I start looking for ways to rule out ideas and actions, to conclude they won’t work or aren’t necessary, rather than chasing better versions.
These days I set boundaries that would have made me ashamed at earlier points in my life: I’m offline at 6 p.m. almost every night, and rigorously observe a Sunday Sabbath where nothing with the flavor of effort is tolerated.^[3]

A common complaint these days is of short attention span, and a feeling that thousands of things are tugging at us all the time to try to get our attention.^[11] It is hard to roll up your sleeves and get down to business when a vibrating phone, blinking icon, and clanging inbox are all lining up to take swings at you. So many global crises really are very important and really do demand attention, but it is hardly possible to even stay up-to-date on all of them, much less address them with any competence, unless you narrow your focus and allow some of them to remain ignored.

You may want to reconsider the utility of some of the distractions you have invited into your life.^[12] How much is all of that doom-scrolling doing for you? Could you maybe leave that next flame war unfought? Do you really need to make it to the boss room of Ultimate Myth Hammer ⅩⅦ? Is all of that trivia-collecting about your favorite band / celeb / sports team / whatever really the best use of your time? Perhaps a few moments installing ad-blockers and tightening up app notification settings and abandoning dead-end screen-habits and played-out hobbies today would save you lots of future scattered thinking and allow you to set your sights higher.

Sometimes we unwisely use distractions as more-or-less deliberate techniques of procrastination (and then blame the distractions for it).^[13]

Cate Hall recommended that you improve your agency by “finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.”^[3] You may be able to get a better payoff from your effort if you apply that effort where others are neglecting to do so.

Warren Buffet had this bit of advice:^[14] Make a list of your top 25 goals. Then pick out the most important five of those. Then avoid putting in any work at all on the other twenty things until you’ve taken care of those five.

Ivy Lee had a different technique but one that seems to have a similar aim:^[15] Each day, start by listing the top six things you have to do, ranking them by their importance. Begin working only on the most important one (not for example the easiest, most time-sensitive, most well-understood, or some other such tempting heuristic), and keep at it until you’re done, and only then move on to the next one.

There are an asston of such simple-secrets-of-titans-of-industry tricks (and similar “Getting It Done” advice) out there, though, and it’s hard to tell if they’re genuinely useful or just a genre of stories. On the one hand, advice is so bountiful that if you wade into it you’re eventually bound to stumble upon something you’ll find useful. On the other hand, there’s just so much to wade through.

One piece of advice that seemed sensible to me is that you periodically remind yourself of your big, important goals when you’ve been spending a lot of time buried in the nitty-gritty of some difficult subtask. “Keep your eyes on the prize,” as the song goes.

A while back @Chi Nguyen asked LessWrongers for “stories of people who have successfully become more hard-working, especially if they started out as not particularly hard-working.”^[16] Here (paraphrased and summarized) are some of the suggestions for promoting hard work that Nguyen got in return:

A physically comfortable working environment with few distactions. Or, more generally: learn which sorts of working environments improve your productivity and adjust your working environments to be like those.
Avoid mentally framing tasks you want to accomplish as “chores” or “drudgery” or “things I gotta do [sigh].” Keep in mind that they’re things you want to accomplish. Try not to contrast industrious effort with fun and enjoyment, but instead try to take enjoyment from being industrious and productive (or to apply your productiveness and industry toward things that are also enjoyable).
Prescription amphetamines.
Software tools that temporarily block attention-sapping websites and apps, such as Freedom. (Also, consider turning your back on social media entirely.)
Avoid bullshit jobs in favor of work that feels meaningful and/or useful.
If the purpose of the work does not itself seem meaningful and/or useful, concentrate on something secondary (e.g. expanding or improving one’s skills, inventing better or less-onerous techniques) that can also be accomplished via the work.
Don’t multi-task as an excuse to swap out a difficult or unpleasant necessary task in favor of an easy, pleasant, but less-critical one. Monitor yourself by critically inspecting your task-swapping decisions using this test. (This may be easier to do when you use a formal task-tracking system like a kanban board.)
You are likely to work harder if there are social costs to be paid for not doing so (e.g. you let other people down who depend on the results of your work). Real responsibilities and accountability can be motivating.
Similarly, you may be more motivated to be industrious if the stakes are high (e.g. if you’ll lose the farm if you fail).
Hang out with productive, accomplished people who may both inspire you and indirectly suggest to you better working habits, and who celebrate and value industriousness.
Replace hobbies that involve a lot of time, learning, and effort but that accomplish nothing real (e.g. complex video games) with hobbies that engage you in a similar way but that also include real-world accomplishments.
Continually strive for incremental improvements in your habits.
Aerobic exercise.
Keep a journal or some sort of log of your productivity so you have better insight. (This may also motivate you, as you will want to be able to report gold-star days of high productivity in your journal or log.) This may also help to make incremental progress towards long-term goals more salient
Meditation, therapy and any other methods that are likely help you become more aware of psychological processes by which you might be sabotaging your industriousness.
Books like Getting Things Done and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Check in with peers regularly about your accomplishments and struggles. This both can be motivating (you want to have something to crow about) and can be a source of good ideas on how to be more motivated, industrious, and/or productive.
Ask for help when you hit roadblocks rather than getting frustrated or trying to reinvent the wheel.
Use the pomodoro technique.

I’ve also heard some people say that at the end of the day they like to leave an easy-to-complete subtask uncompleted (e.g. an author may leave the last sentence in a paragraph half-written) so that the next day can start with an obvious what-to-do-first task that is easily done and that can be used as the basis for working momentum.

^
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography Ⅸ (1791)
^
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), chapter Ⅺ: “Labour”
^
Cate Hall “How to be More Agentic: On a supposedly difficult thing” Useful Fictions 10 January 2024
^
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Ⅵ.2
^
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (1910), March 7
^
Crates of Thebes, letter to Hermaiscus
^
William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), chapter Ⅵ: “Human Happiness”
^
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus Ⅱ.9 (1836): “The Everlasting Yea”
^
@Zvi “Tidying One’s Room” Don’t Worry About the Vase 16 August 2018
^
Mark Maric “Master Productivity with These Simple Time Management Tips” Skills You Need
^
Nick Rojas “8 Productivity Tips to Avoid Distractions While Working” Skills You Need
^
@So8res “Deregulating Distraction, Moving Towards the Goal, and Level Hopping” LessWrong 12 Jan. 2014
^
@lukeprog “How to Beat Procrastination” LessWrong 5 Feb. 2011
^
James Clear “Warren Buffett’s ‘2 List’ Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities”
^
James Clear “The Ivy Lee Method: The Daily Routine Experts Recommend for Peak Productivity”
^
Chi Nguyen “How have you become more hard-working?” LessWrong 25 September 2023