If you're busy, you're doing something wrong (2011)
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
This reminds me of some other advice I remember reading: No level of hard work or organization will substitute for talent and opportunity, and nearly all success stories to the contrary are missing key facts. ie Myth: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Reality: Michael Jordan was put onto the junior team with players his own age/size so he could get more play time, instead of being prematurely promoted to the highest level of play. Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.
The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.
> No level of hard work or organization will substitute for talent and opportunity
I find that very doubtful. A certain level of talent is needed, there is no doubt about that. Beyond that level, though, it seems to me that focus and continuous dedication (aka, hard work) in combination with being at the right place with right people at the right time are the most decisive success factors in any endeavour. Bill Gates is the perfect example. He has been working like crazy in his early years, was basically on the job all the time.
He still would have been successful without all of those things together, but not at the same level.
You can't do much about your inherited or birth situation, but the extremely successful people I know usually have a very fortunate background and also worked hard to expand their future luck surface so that when outrageous opportunity lightning was looking to strike somewhere, they had an outsized chance to be the spot.
Listening lately news about Bill and he's circles of friends.. I can honestly say I am not surprised why these certain billionaires are never prosecuted of anything..
Microsoft paid hefty fines for its monopolistic behavior...
GP shouldn't insinuate vaguely, IMO.
> A lot of his science breakthroughs went on unknown
I suppose if one's goal is solipsistic research, that would be fine. (We know that wasn't Da Vinci's goal, though.)
To put it a different way, suppose I have solved AGI and never told anyone.
... What good have I done?
Some might say the ability to focus to that extent is a talent too.
I personally think it's all a mix of nature and nurture, and you can't put anything 100% in one category or the other.
I agree with the talent + opportunity + hard work combination, and I would say that enjoyment is also necessary for the hard work not to become (self-)destructive in the long term.
This is very deceptive, and probably gets people into trouble more often than not, changing their long term orbits based on fantasies built on selective factology about what is enough for success.
Why invoke conspiracy when mere venality will suffice? Optimism sells. Hollywood has warmed its benches with a never-ending stream of would-be stars and filmmakers despite the fact that the image of the struggling Hollywood hopeful is as cliche as that of the morally intermittent lawyer.
Perhaps one of the strangest things about our psychology-and-PR-dominated world is that psychology is so subtle and powerful that it affects us even when it is not affecting us, making us see ghosts in the shadows of folklore. What would be so nice is a list of criteria for determining when a meme may have been designed for cultural impact. Surely cui bono is not enough -- it implicates nearly everything!
Let's say I grow up in a poor working-class environment. Years later I find myself CEO of a multi-national corporation and the people working for me are poor working-class people. - And most companies are set up like this. There's very few people at the top and they have all the power while the subordniate masses have none. You give orders. They take orders. - One way to justify my own place in this system is to convince myself that my sucesses have some special property rather than just coincidence: "You can make it if you work hard like me."
And if you're a media company one might suspect that because of this you would tend to tell stories of individual endeavor. And one might suspect the same would be true for a marketing company.
It is quite impossible to just work hard unless you are forced to. I mean there has to be some spark, some excitement about the work you are doing. Which typically means you have some inkling to do take on this task, which you may not be good at but with hard work you will make progress and eventually good at the task, and this self fulfilling cycle continues.
I am not however certain that this process will equip you to spot good opportunities. You can be really good at what you do and not even realize how many opportunities in that same space have gone by. You may be very content with your status quo. There could be multiple reasons for not spotting opportunities.
So I wouldn't say that just working hard is a sure recipe for failure.
I personally believe that there is no clear-cut rule or path for success and it differs from person to person. So, this way - I wonder how people could come up with such an outrageous article saying that x will lead you to success if you do it this way?!
But crucially, at the peak of the game, both talent and hard work are just the cost of entry. The rest is luck and opportunity.
For example: Phelps won the Olympics by a knuckle. That’s a difference so subtle it’s down to chaotic systems and butterfly wings for that particular race. Overall everyone at that level is hugely talented and incredibly hardworking
To be fair, Phelps has 23 Olympic gold medals. Some victories were closer than others but he really did have an era of true dominance.
And even that's got a certain element of opportunity in terms of the era you were born in. Tons of good athletes could have revolutionised their fields had they been born a few decades/centuries earlier. See British tennis pros, with the likes of Henman and Murray having had the potential to win a lot more grand slams in an era with worse rivals.
Still, other fields are a lot more opportunity and luck based. A lot of successful businesspeople got there by being well connected or simply having the right idea at the right time. Someone who had the foresight/luck to get into the vaping industry or bitcoin or whatever at the right time could become a millionaire/billionaire without any real talent. There are many YouTubers who can barely edit a video that got hundreds of thousands or milllions of subscribers via luck and timing. There are programmers who don't know what a switch statement here is how classes/OOP works who make thousands a month from game development on Patreon.
In many cases, talent and hard work sadly matters less than finding the right audience to appeal to, being good at marketing/sales and being able to network well/have good connections.
Seizing opportunities is a talent I’d say.
You’re falling for the fallacy that technical brilliance/execution is what matters. It doesn’t. It just needs to be good enough.
But at the same time, there are definitely success stories who just kinda stumbled into it too. Hell, I'd count myself in that camp too, at least at a certain level based on past experiences. I look at some of my past sites, and genuinely wonder how some of them took off. I was terrible at design, mediocre at best at coding, had little idea about marketing and had no network to speak of... and was beating out people who by all means should have done much better.
Even now, I've had people I admire complain that their years of effort on YouTube haven't paid off, while I somehow got three times the subscribers without knowing how to properly edit a video.
I know tons of people who stumbled to undeserving success, and tons of others who should have done well but didn't.
I don't know much about swimming but in bicycle races and skiing close results seem to be very common. Now if it really is "down to chaotic systems and butterfly wings" I wonder why we don't see much more variance amongst the winners?
You are right, but too often what people take from this is that the hard work doesn't matter and the people who succeed only did so because of random talent and/or opportunity. No, if you have talent and opportunity but don't work hard, you still won't succeed.
There's also a cohort of people who are insanely talented in a field but don't really enjoy it that much, and find it hard work. One of my best friends is an incredibly talented artist, but burnt out doing commercial work in his 20's and rarely puts pencil to paper these days. I consider it a criminal waste of talent, but it's his life ;)
Then there's the cohort of people who are a bit talented in the field, but have decided for whatever reason (usually parents) that this is what they'll do with their life, and hard work is how they're going to do it. Watching them beat their heads against the brick wall is horrifying.
In the end, we need to avoid survivor bias. For every person who says "I did this, and you can too!" look for other people who did the same and yet didn't succeed. Learn from them, too.
In what sense is that a myth? He is a college dropout. Lots of people had access to computers at that time. True, not everyone, but extraordinarily few of the people that had access to computers at that time went on to found multibillion dollar companies. The idea that the fact that he had access to computers somehow debunks the story of his merit is absurd to me.
More or less unfettered access during middle school in the late 60s?: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/bill-gates-got-what-he-neede...
"Lots" isn't a scientific term but I still don't think it fits here. He was probably one of a few people at the time to have a few years of in-depth experience before leaving high school.
I'd call it a "myth of omission". It's technically true but the missing details are very, very important to the whole picture. That doesn't mean he didn't work hard or have a knack for it though.
I've heard so many way below average dropouts from nameless universities or high-schools justify their "performance" by mentioning how Bill Gates was also a dropout without realizing that Gates dropped out of Harvard (!) after already having an excellent education and most likely being above average at all relevant topics for his future career.
The myth isn't that Gates is a dropout but that he's the average dropout, or that being a dropout is somehow a signal of greater things to come.
This comic makes for an eye opening read for many [0]. (Edit: updated link, thanks, it must have been a case of copy/pasta).
[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...
That Harvard provided a better education than his High School and that leaving Hardvard is someting only loosers do.
At the undergrad level I think the main benefit of a high end school is simply being grouped with other high end students and so getting a curriculum tailored for you. As if the Honors and AP classes in high school were only available in a few schools that were selective and more expensive.
I don't think this is completely true but I think there is a lot of truth to it... you go to fancy schools for the other fancy students as much as anything else.
Point being, at the undergrad level Harvard isn't better because it's Haaaard-vard, it's better because their curriculum is more advanced, which they can do because they have sufficient concentration of high-talent students who can handle it.
1) The professor might be someone you've heard of,
2) Guest speakers/lecturers are both A Thing and are usually very important people (highly placed in government, NGOs, or corporations),
3) The students are way more engaged, which I think is a result both of actual higher levels of student interest in the material and more of the students having come through a K-12 education that was participation and discussion heavy (see: how most major prep high schools run their classes) so being used to behaving that way, because that's just what one does.
The actual material wasn't really different.
If you want an exceptional education, with access to the hardest courses available, you go to MIT.
Because, look, the reason we're talking about him is because he is an exceptional story of a man completely trashing his competition, standing head and shoulders and bottom-hem-of-dad-sweater above anyone stepping toe-to-toe with him. But then, how impressive does that become when you realize that his "competition" was essentially a small subsection of the in-the-know low-tier-wealthy-and-up? In launching an industry-leading, cutting-edge tech company, his strengths were revealed to be in how quickly and differently he thought and how tenaciously he acted, compared to the relatively comfortable people in his extended network (the caveat of a network being that its members must be sufficiently similar enough to engage with one another). Outside that bubble, it probably becomes much easier to find someone who thinks differently and somewhat easier to find someone who is very tenacious. So... do the bell curves of intelligence for affluent West Coasters and everyone else not overlap at all, or what?
They might have made it anyway, but there's a good chance all the stress and worry from providing for themselves in the modern economy would have taken all their focus and energy for starting a creative career. I've seen too many independent ambitions crushed under unpredictable automated schedules, wage theft, repair and medical bills, and cascading overdraft fees.
It took me way too long to realize that I should focus most of my effort on things that are so easy for me that I'm taken aback when others find them difficult.
If you look at top athletes, where being the best in your craft is priority, talent, quality of training and rest are the most important factors. I agree that the same is true for mental work. Look at the daily schedules of famous writers and scientists. 6 hours is a full day of work, with a lot of resting and walking.
But if you move into the realm of successful people, all those things that you mention come into play. They can also handle more work hours because management is not as intensive as serious mental work on 1 topic.
That's a facile rhetorical question. You could similarly ask, "How do we know that good food and exercise lead to healthy human beings, rather than that already-healthy human beings have access to good food and exercise?" The answer, of course, would be research. All the students were working the same amount. Their work habits were different.
Furthermore, although I can understand why success might lead to more relaxation (for instance, by making students feel less stressed about their future prospects), I don't see how it would lead to more discipline or a focus on deliberate practice. Successful people tend to do the same things they've always done, for the obvious reason that they are successful doing it. If they were undisciplined and successful, what motivation would they have for becoming disciplined?
In addition to the data and the research (and Newport has illuminated many more results than this one), two anecdotes come to mind. The first is from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, where he brings forward some examples:
> [Consider] Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, “Lord Heart of the Matter” and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington.
The second is from my personal life. Having children forced me to concentrate my efforts and create a much more disciplined work life. I'm more successful and focused than ever. Although this is just an anecdote, this phenomenon is commonly reported by other people in demanding technical or executive roles.
The proper research here would have been to make the student change their habit and see if they became better musicians as a result. This article isn't research, it's writing down a fact and then trying to extract conclusions when none can be made.
Working smart, hard is how you get value from hard work. Good luck and timing manner, but fortune favors the bold.
In the article, they looked at university students, prior to success. Of course this meant they had to predict the future, and they did this by asking the professors and by self-selection: The assumption was that music students who study to become teachers are average performers whereas music students who study to become performers and whose professors think they are great are also in fact going to be great.
You need look no further than a literal lottery to learn that obvious truth. Could anyone with enough hard work and organization make $100M?
That said, it's not a very useful statement; you can't control what you can't control.
I do the opposite. As soon as I wake up in the morning I read the book for one hour, then I stop. I do this every day, weekends included. I also read the chapter before the lecture so it’s still interesting, and any questions I have, I can ask the professor during the lecture. Once I finish the chapter assigned for the week, I split this session into 30 minutes of creating Anki flashcards, and 30 minutes studying those Anki flashcards. I score significantly higher than the rest of the class.
I just learned how to do this at the start of the semester thanks to commenters on HN, and it has changed my life. This also deals with my attention lowering after about the 1 hour mark of reading, but the concept is still the same. Before, I would procrastinate on reading, and spend most of my days playing video games. Now, I spend most of my day playing video games, but it’s always a very relaxed, guilt free gaming session because I already know I read for an hour. I hope I’m not rambling here.
After a calculus class ended for the semester, I had the professor tell me that I was the only student that understood a certain basic concept of the class. I don't attribute that to me having a masterful intelligence, just that I happened to be diligent in the class and figured out a system based on seeking to really understand the material instead of just pass the tests.
The classes where I heavily procrastinated, I had more trouble with, or at least much more stress. There was one class where I procrastinated and then speed-read 300-400 pages in the textbook the days before the midterm, and aced the midterm...but that was really a freak exception to the rule. It probably did me a disservice, thinking I could do the same for other classes and still succeed.
In retrospect I probably should’ve eaten $2k and dropped for a better prof. Then again $160 on leetcode has given me more algo knowledge than my $160k degree lol.
I will however recommend one thing.
Find out what internal representation of information works for you. I am an extremely visual thinker to whom things click the second they are put into context or situated in a flow chart / graph of concepts.
Since I have started started fitting every new thing into that mental model, I have started found memorizing significantly easier.
IMO, good studying and work structuring habits are among the most valuable long term skills a person can learn.
It's funny how a simple infographic on a video can really make things click for me.
You identify the root variables/ideas on which the whole premise hinges. These ideas are absolute, assumed true without rationale and independent.
Then you establish dependent ideas and variables which are connected to these base variables along with a few minor isolated assumptions needed to support the structure. ( I mean it is not perfect, so the minor assumptions keep the whole thing form falling apart)
Once you have all the nodes, you connect new ideas as they come and as they fit into this view.
It is almost like a clustering task or think word2ve tsne visualization (https://miro.medium.com/max/3200/0*quUwP6EqEhFmNAqX)
Now you have a visualization, from something that never had any images to begin with. The distance between nodes can indicate how strong the relation is and colors can indicate positivity/negativity.
Once you have that, it becomes incredibly easy to hold very complex ideas in your head and it makes it a breeze to explain something. Just start from the root node and work your way up to the leaf, and the thing explains itself.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankiapp-flashcards/id689185915
I just read for an hour every morning, and once the chapter is complete, I go back through the chapter and create Anki flashcards for 30 mins, then study the cards I just created for 30 mins.
So right now my professor will be lecturing us on Chapters 7 and 10 next week on November 18. I did an hour of reading for chapter 10 today. I'll finish Chapter 10 and Chapter 7 by next week on the 17th.
So far, I've covered the material once: I read the chapter.
When my professor lectures us next week, I'll take detailed notes over the material. I write all my notes by hand.
So far, I've covered the material TWICE: I just took notes during lecture
Next week, since I finished Chapter 7 and 10 already, I'll continue my one hour routine every morning, but I'll do 30 minutes of creating Anki flashcards, and 30 minutes of studying those flashcards. Each time I perform an Anki session, it would be my THIRD time going over the material. Each additional time I study an Anki deck, the number increases.
I also realized that I become so much more productive when I started studying/reading first thing in the morning - I have the most energy, and it gives me that "Let's get this done and over with" mentality. I can wake up at 8, read until 9, then head out for class. Once I get home, I can do what I want.. I already studied. Homework is done in the afternoon. My day ends at 5. I treat school like a full time job essentially.
Yes, they push themselves hard and strive constantly to improve. But when the nature of your work matches the contours of your mind perfectly, it's not really work – it's purpose. In this zone you can feel yourself excelling and striving with a sort of effortless ease. You needn't force yourself to study - on some level you want to sit down and practice. The feeling of being truly excellent is addicting and propels a virtuous cycle of growth and achievement. So yeah, of course you're relaxed. Winning feels great.
Rather, it's saying that they studied exactly as much as the lesser players, and that they did so with more discipline, both by spending more time on deliberate/hard practice, and by strictly scheduling their practice sessions.
1. Music is inherently a technical, movement exercise, especially violin with the bowing. If you are not relaxed, if you are not muscularly efficient, if you're tense from overwork, you're going to play less well. So, those who are busy may simply be less good due to that residual tension and stress....and this is much less relevant to coding or purely intellectual work, which simply requires typing and not muscular fluidity.
2. Deliberate practice is extremely hard to measure by looking at someone's time journal...it's a modality of practice, a time journal is not going to gather that information. Just because the talented ones practiced in huge chunks of time, versus spaced out shorter chunks, how do we know they were drilling the hardest skills and analyzing their weaknesses?
3. Looking at students who have promise (according to their professors) is vastly different than looking at actual professionals. Many pupils were not esteemed or had mixed reviews from their professors, and then went on to great things. I'm thinking Debussy and Valentina Lisistsa, both of who did not succeed initially but whose great talent was revealed later on.
Some people seem to think that "busyness is next to godliness", so they make sure never to let anyone see them idle. They don't so much focus on what they are doing, just that they are doing something.
I've always taken the opposite approach. I go out of my way to make it look like I'm never busy. "Make it look easy." It's just a different sort of personality quirk.
It's fun to come across people from the other camp. We find each other very peculiar... :)
--Michael Caine
--
[0] - asking me to help with something which would take them a small fraction of the time and effort it takes me. Wasting an hour of someone else's time to save yourself a few minutes is something I consider an extremely disrespectful thing to do.
I think these sorts of polar opposites can be deeply entertaining / enjoyable.
They said they do it in such a way as to make it seem easy.
I'm in that camp as well. I never get flustered. I never get overwhelmed. I never get bothered to run around like an idiot or panic over everything, like so many other administrators in my field do.
And it's all on purpose. I never get flustered, because I want everyone around me to understand and believe that I'm doing what comes naturally to me, and that I'm the best at what I do because of it.
You see these people going around in a flap, all heat, little light. Meanwhile there's other people in the office quietly getting on with things. The noisy one is compensating for inability with visibility.
For what it's worth now, I agree with you 100%. The loudest person to talk about how useful they are, generally are the least useful.
Empty vessels make the most noise, or so the saying goes ...
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop." ...
There are entire ideologies based on this kind of thinking.
Interestingly, both Protestant work ethic (which some argue gave rise to capitalism) and communism (because in communism the value of a product arises from the work put into it rather than its market value) are centred around this idea.
I think we should all try a bit harder to disprove our conclusions as advocated by Karl Popper.
If you can't write down Freygish scale, including the dominant fifth, you needn't even dare thinking about playing there.
(2) The musicians will start to charge fractions of a cent per note, with some sections playing certain notes while other sections play the rest of them. Incentivizing short bursts of music, and "interoperability"
She has spent years and years perfecting the way she practices, sleeps a ton, and hustles hard for gigs. She’s highly systematic as to how she memorizes her music, learns how to pronounce words in different languages, practices technique.
Less successful singers in our network can’t be this efficient. They struggle at sight reading despite years of practice. They take hours to learn new music as opposed to minutes. My fiancé takes minutes to learn music and hours to perfect. They work their ass off practicing their Italian accents but are never quite perfect.
My fiancé works hard but all her work has compounded over the years because she has an incredible talent for memorization, languages, and likely perfect pitch.
I’m a good programmer, not great like John Carmack. I get stuff done but I have to work to the point of exhaustion at times. Personally I don’t think this sort of elite relaxation is available to everyone and may be just specific to musicians.
It's like... Let's theorize that the underlying mechanism of excellence is "strength of focus", in the same way that weight lifting is "strength of muscles". The elite player's practice schedule then resembles HIT vs the average player's aerobics.
It's similar to how work/life balance isn't just about leaving the office, but about having something to _do_ that is for your life (instead of your work).
If you want something done, give it to the busiest person
As a man of science, I am sure Cal appreciates the weakness of a study with self reported journals, collected at a single site, in a single problem domain (Violin players).
My point is that it's ok to propose this and clarify it is your opinion or your proposed approach to work. But I often see with a lot of life/work advice, that we somehow try to prop up opinions under this "evidence-based" umbrella when we know full well that the scientific strength of this evidence does not fully support our initial claim.
- one morning and one night period of very deliberate practice
- an extra hour of sleep
- leisure time was rated as more relaxing
:(
Moral of the story is succeed while you have the time.
The two groups are not comparable, because the talent is a non-negligible difference, so the experiment is flawed (few samples, different groups....)
So assuming you take one day off per week, you still need to pack 8 hours and 20 minutes of practice per day. So, we stack these hours in 2 sessions of 4 hours and 10 minutes per day. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. So what does it look like? They work from 8am to 12.10am, then take a break until 2pm, then work from 2pm to 6.10pm and then be done with the day?
Sounds like a typical workday for a lot of people...
Each morning I set 3 tasks (sometimes 4 or 5 if I absolutely have to and they're small) that would make me feel good about the day if I finish. I write them in an otherwise empty text document, order them by importance, and start working on the first one.
These tasks can be large or small, sometimes even just "send this email" that will take 15 minutes to write, but is really important to send off. This also works great when working from home, because even if the environment is different, I can still feel productive if I at least finish those 3 things.
If I finish the 3 things early, I assess my energy level and either finish the day with organizing emails or reading up on stuff or other low-effort tasks, or I tackle one last MIT if I feel up for it. The point is to prioritize short-term focus of the 3 MITs instead of looking at the potentially endless list of todos I could keep picking from all through the day.
MIT: https://zenhabits.net/purpose-your-day-most-important-task/
Zen to Done: https://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-pr...
By most measures I have had a very successful career developing software and doing research.
My deliberate practice has been learning new languages, solving very difficult problems both on my own, and for work, and for most of my career averaged about 30 hour part time work weeks (even when working for large companies like SAIC).
I work very hard for a few periods during the day. The exception to this was my last job before retiring this year where I really had three jobs in one, so I had very few breaks in my work day except for a couple of long walks.
Deliberate practice is the way to get good at things and achieve success.
Learning is often done best in small chunks e.g. when learning to rock climb it is usually best to climb no more than 6 hours a day, every other day. But when the skills are learned the climber may spend 15 hours a day, 3 days straight to climb their dream route and they may well sleep hanging from the side of their wall too.
I'd be interested to see how much time the elite players devoted to their work when on tour as professional musicians in later life.
The relax of the talented amounts for the gap in talent, not the other way arround. That's the definition of talent, they can achieve more with less effort.
There is a very big bias in the study, the reference team are average violin players. Obviously, the try to compensate with training the gap, to achieve the same result. On top of that, as other comments say, the sample is too small and narrow in time.
> Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions)
Let's not pretend like 3.5 hours a day of practice is not a lot. I completely agree that this is what it takes to be good, but try doing anything for 3.5 hours a day and then say that you "didn't have to do too much of it".
I went back to school at age 48 and it amazed me how younger people could do so much and so well. I'm amazed at how people can be so efficient. Those same people some just 10 years younger than me worked full-time jobs and went to a full schedule of classes.
I'm terrible at time management. At school I tried to start every assignment the minute it was assigned. Yet I was still working on it five minutes before it was due.
Eventually I figured I needed time to relax so I created a block of time only for school. I do better when it's evening or night so I blocked off 7pm to 9pm. That also allowed me to eat first I found eating later didn't work since my mind didn't work without food younger me could have plowed through the hunger (I'd often go days without eating as a 20-something).
From the article the two practice-time peaks make sense. Maybe I may do just as well in the early morning as I do in the evening. That would free up a large part of my day. At school I found things like laundry, grocery shopping, any small task was sacrificed to make up study time.
I can imagine myself well organized and focused when I largely work according to my schedules and according to my aims. Some else putting more goals into my system might effectively reduce my drive to get stuff done.
In this special case the aim and reaarding system of an artost is likely to be quite different to Hacker Average.
e.g I work out every day from 7 to 8 pm. I may be sounding less busy. But if the routine is the same, but I decide to go to the gym at random schedule, I will be more unorganized, will look busier, might be less productive, and yes I'm doing something wrong.
Btw if you have not read his boom “deep work” then I would really recommend it.
Looks like there is a huge benefit to leaving some waste time in the schedule.
For example, working stupidly hard in a startup where you're stake/potential upside is either very limited or unlikely is working hard for other people.
Or you have an infant.
What are these "average players" doing in their 50 working hours, then?
28.8 chunks. Nice.
Either of these approaches can result in burnout.