(meta: I’m not sure if I should make a Discussion post for this, so I’m posting here. Feedback most welcome)
I’m exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.
Most productivity methods suggest the obvious, to keep wasteful activities in check. It could be gaming, chatting, checking news websites. They all share a common trait: you don’t gain any significant utility (nor money, nor fun, nor rest) for spending more time on it. You achieve the same result by spending a little time on it, rather than a full day.
With productive activites, time spent and value created aren’t proportional. Sometimes you’re lacking energy, inspiration, and it’s okay: you don’t have to work yourself ragged.
If you have multiple tasks to be achieved in parallel, you should treat them as sequential anyway. Focusing on one task at a time yields better results than task switching all the time.
Problems arise when you find inspiration, or a sudden peak of interest for a certain task which is, useful in isolation, but which doesn’t fit in your schedule. Maybe a discussion with a friend sparked the idea of a story to write. Maybe you’re considering moving some furniture because you’re well-rested and full of energy.
Even if you could be maximally productive for a given useful task, you should treat it as a wasteful activity if you have something else you planned to do. If the idea sounds good, write it down. If it’s really good, hype will come back another time. If you’re energetic, do the most physical thing you had planned to do. Energy will come back another time.
The goal is not to add another task on your current schedule and mess with the plan you’ve set for the day, like you’d do with “classical” wasteful activities. You can convince yourself easily that news websites can wait another day. The unintuitive part is this also holds with most productive activities, even though you’re training yourself to not defer work!
Let’s start with a bang: don’t keep a schedule. He’s crazy, you say!
I’m totally serious. If you pull it off—and in many structured jobs, you simply can’t—this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity.
By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day.
As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.
There is a risk of doing “urgent, but not important” tasks, and never getting to the “important, but not urgent” tasks.
An example of an “important, but not urgent” task would be putting your money into an index fund to save for retirement. There is never a pressing reason to do it today instead of tomorrow. On the other hand, debates on social networks always give you something to do right now, and replying a few days later when everybody has already moved on is not the same thing.
This risk is also present when putting items into one’s calendar, if you only plan a short time ahead. It could be reduced by a hierarchical approach where you would first list the things you want to achieve this year, and then continue planning this month, and the individual days. So you would notice that you e.g. wanted to learn Spanish in 2016, it is April now, and you still haven’t started the first lesson.
I’m exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.
I would try to make the hypothesis a bit more concrete. Something like: flow, immersion and engagement are all important factors in productivity. An implication of this is: (your hypothesis here). You should of course look at the literature and explain what flow, engagement etc. is and how it relates to productivity.
If you want this to be interesting, then you should probably also try to find some implications that people normally don’t think about because they’re not strategic. Maybe, things like that you should: remove clutter, have the right perspective, exercise, practice, gamify things, learn how to beat akrasia, learn when its a good idea to relax etc.
The cfar class called turbo charging training which I described here seems to be related to your hypothesis . The underlying idea of it is the rule of intensity which states that the experience of intensity or effort that you are expending to learn something corresponds with the rate at which you are learning it.
(meta: I’m not sure if I should make a Discussion post for this, so I’m posting here. Feedback most welcome)
I’m exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.
Most productivity methods suggest the obvious, to keep wasteful activities in check. It could be gaming, chatting, checking news websites. They all share a common trait: you don’t gain any significant utility (nor money, nor fun, nor rest) for spending more time on it. You achieve the same result by spending a little time on it, rather than a full day.
With productive activites, time spent and value created aren’t proportional. Sometimes you’re lacking energy, inspiration, and it’s okay: you don’t have to work yourself ragged.
If you have multiple tasks to be achieved in parallel, you should treat them as sequential anyway. Focusing on one task at a time yields better results than task switching all the time.
Problems arise when you find inspiration, or a sudden peak of interest for a certain task which is, useful in isolation, but which doesn’t fit in your schedule. Maybe a discussion with a friend sparked the idea of a story to write. Maybe you’re considering moving some furniture because you’re well-rested and full of energy.
Even if you could be maximally productive for a given useful task, you should treat it as a wasteful activity if you have something else you planned to do. If the idea sounds good, write it down. If it’s really good, hype will come back another time. If you’re energetic, do the most physical thing you had planned to do. Energy will come back another time.
The goal is not to add another task on your current schedule and mess with the plan you’ve set for the day, like you’d do with “classical” wasteful activities. You can convince yourself easily that news websites can wait another day. The unintuitive part is this also holds with most productive activities, even though you’re training yourself to not defer work!
You might be interested in Marc Andreessen’s approach which includes things like
There is a risk of doing “urgent, but not important” tasks, and never getting to the “important, but not urgent” tasks.
An example of an “important, but not urgent” task would be putting your money into an index fund to save for retirement. There is never a pressing reason to do it today instead of tomorrow. On the other hand, debates on social networks always give you something to do right now, and replying a few days later when everybody has already moved on is not the same thing.
This risk is also present when putting items into one’s calendar, if you only plan a short time ahead. It could be reduced by a hierarchical approach where you would first list the things you want to achieve this year, and then continue planning this month, and the individual days. So you would notice that you e.g. wanted to learn Spanish in 2016, it is April now, and you still haven’t started the first lesson.
I would try to make the hypothesis a bit more concrete. Something like: flow, immersion and engagement are all important factors in productivity. An implication of this is: (your hypothesis here). You should of course look at the literature and explain what flow, engagement etc. is and how it relates to productivity.
If you want this to be interesting, then you should probably also try to find some implications that people normally don’t think about because they’re not strategic. Maybe, things like that you should: remove clutter, have the right perspective, exercise, practice, gamify things, learn how to beat akrasia, learn when its a good idea to relax etc.
The cfar class called turbo charging training which I described here seems to be related to your hypothesis . The underlying idea of it is the rule of intensity which states that the experience of intensity or effort that you are expending to learn something corresponds with the rate at which you are learning it.
This seems obvious.