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Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

If their job was, say, picking cotton, then the hours they spent at work would directly correlate to their work output.

So what is the difference?

Maybe scientists are still thinking about difficult problems when they are away from work. Like when they are sitting in their porch swing with nobody else around to distract.

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Being creative is like tending a garden. Ideas grow on their own, and all you can really do is prepare the environment to facilitate this growth. You do this by clearly defining the problem, fertilizing your mind with inspiration, and revisiting the problem periodically to keep it present. From there, you need to relax and let your brain do its thing. Actively thinking/concentrating actually inhibits brain activity in much of your brain to prevent interference, and the brain areas inhibited are usually the ones that make creative jumps. The rational networks of the brain should only be engaged to sanity check/refine creative ideas.

Not exactly:

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu

One way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them and then filter.

Even in highly creative endeavors like say music and painting, volume of work largely matters. You have to spend a lot of time(years) doing a lot of work before you get anywhere close to good.

You can work on a lot of different problems and still do the creative garden cultivation that the previous poster said. I do that. I've got about 10 prototypes for board and card games actively going at once at the moment, and I write down fresh ideas that pop into my head to come back to later.

Even if months pass, I'll get spontaneous ideas to certain projects that improve them a ton. But I have to feed my brain with fuel for inspiration constantly, and actively try to apply any interesting idea to my existing projects and see if they inspire anything new for them.

I can't find the quote now (It's written in a notebook I don't have on me at the moment), but this is apparently how Richard Feynman approached work, although by working on multiple problems at once, not projects (although all of my projects have problems :).

"creative garden cultivation" might be a poetic way of putting it. In reality its just hard work and sweat at the end of the day. It requires you to go through many iterations of success/failure loops testing outcomes of your work.

Of course you can do more than one of this at the same time. In fact that was precisely my point. The more of such you grab, the more come they come to you.

"sweat" is poetry/metaphor in this context, too, so your description and the previous one are equally valid "in reality."

Hard work is what you do once you have a creative direction. Before you have creative direction, you need "work hard" fertilizing your mind with inspirational material, then relax and let your brain create connections on its own. This process might need to be repeated frequently, but it is how big ideas are grown.

Think of your potential idea space like a box. When you relax the box moves around and reconfigures itself into different shapes. If you are actively thinking, this locks the box in the current location and shape. This can be useful when you want to explore the current box a bit more, but there is only so much exploring you can do within the current box before you are just retracing your steps. If you are always in explore mode without letting the box move and reconfigure you're just going to generate small variations on the same old ideas.

For factory work at least this is not true. Multiple people and real-world experiments, from Henry Ford to German factories, have found that 40 hour workweek maximizes output: http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons

The methods of testing employed by most manufactures of that time period are extremely flawed and considered blatantly unscientific today.

Robinson also points to studies in construction industry run in the 1980s.

If you pick cotton for 80/hr a week I promise you won't be picking cotton in the long run as long as the guy only doing it 20 hr/week (you will develop physical problems very quickly)

From a business perspective it is probably better to burn though many people at 80 hours a week, rather than fewer 20hr week employees (er, or slaves as history goes). Since it is a low skill job and anyone can do it the employee longevity likely doesn't matter. An employee that has picked cotton for 1 month isn't likely to be that much worse than an employee that has picked for 1 year. Of course this is my anecdote, and picking cotton is rather brutal by hand, hence we have machines that do it for us now.

If the amount of experience is irrelevant why not use more employees for shorter periods of time?

What is the administrative cost per employee?

In most business you will have a point where the cost per employee align with the output per employee and you try to peg production there. Also getting too many employees can lead to second and third order effects that have to be managed, like transportation of employees and parking.

Okay obviously there's some limit. It doesn't make sense to have 1000 employees that only work 5 min each. However I also fail to see the benefit of making anyone work 80 hours, rather than say 40.

Or when they are brushing the teeth

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170328-statistician-proves-...

I think the John Cleese speech is particularly relevant here - it's different modes of thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xPvvPTQaMI

Your hourly output will go down after a lot of manual work. Same as when you manually work without breakes.

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