individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts in an undetermined currency
I feel your pain, but anyway those were things you wanted to do. In some sense, the information “this doesn’t work” is also a payout, just not the one you hoped for, but that is hindsight. If your best guess was that this was worth doing, then actually doing it is a legitimate work done, even if it ultimately didn’t achieve what you hoped for.
There is some kind of “doublethink” necessary. On one hand, we ultimately care about the results. Mere effort that doesn’t bring fruit is a waste (or signalling, that detracts from the intended goal). On the other hand, in everyday life we need to motivate ourselves by rewarding the effort, because results come too infrequently and sometimes are too random, and we want to reward following a good strategy rather than getting lucky. (Also: goals vs systems.)
There’s both “what’s the top priority?” and “what will reach this priority the fastest?” and they both feel pretty complicated.
Perhaps we should always add “according to my current knowledge” at the end of these question, just to remind ourselves that sometimes the right thing to do is stop prioritizing and collect more information instead.
I feel your pain, but anyway those were things you wanted to do. In some sense, the information “this doesn’t work” is also a payout, just not the one you hoped for, but that is hindsight. If your best guess was that this was worth doing, then actually doing it is a legitimate work done, even if it ultimately didn’t achieve what you hoped for.
There is some kind of “doublethink” necessary. On one hand, we ultimately care about the results. Mere effort that doesn’t bring fruit is a waste (or signalling, that detracts from the intended goal). On the other hand, in everyday life we need to motivate ourselves by rewarding the effort, because results come too infrequently and sometimes are too random, and we want to reward following a good strategy rather than getting lucky. (Also: goals vs systems.)
Perhaps we should always add “according to my current knowledge” at the end of these question, just to remind ourselves that sometimes the right thing to do is stop prioritizing and collect more information instead.