Oliver Burkeman on the flaw with productivity geek thinking | Hacker News Reader

Oliver Burkeman on the flaw with productivity geek thinking

thebrowser.com

85 pointsubac40 comments

>And actually, more than that, lots of what goes wrong is not just that productivity geekery doesn't work, it’s that it makes things worse, right

A lot of good points here. I figured this out myself ages ago and have done well to actively halt the 'only do things that are maximally productive' behaviors that actually cripple any productivity at all.

As one example amongst many: I wasn't taking the garbage out until the mail arrived. Because that was optimal! Maximize efficiency! Except it doesn't really help. Taking out the garbage takes 20seconds. Going to the mailbox and bringing in mail? 20 seconds. Doing them together and juggling bins, mail and doors? Over a minute. Not to mention the many minutes of distraction from the mental weight of a chore needing to be done. It's only theoretically optimal and the theorizing part itself is crippling.

Likewise I'd let myself get crippled by 'there's a meeting in 20minutes'. I'm sure it's a huge problem for others in the wfh era. I wouldn't start washing the dishes because i might be in the middle of it when i need meet with others and then with the stop and start that'd be less than optimal. But doing the dishes, even if slow turns out to be a 10 minute chore. I should have just done it. But i procrastinated because theory crafting told me that it'd be slightly less than optimal to do it now. Meanwhile i just waste those 20minutes on Hackernews. Even being less optimal i'm always better of doing it now.

It's definitely helpful to be aware of these behaviors. I think the focus on maximizing productivity affects the geek types more but it's absolutely crippling to let yourself go down these paths. Don't do it and you'll be better off and more productive.

> Meanwhile i just waste those 20minutes on Hackernews.

Practically every "productivity hack" is less effective than simply dropping all lowish-value Web browsing and doing almost anything else instead.

One thing that amazes me is how many of even the most-effective people I know seem to spend multiple hours a day doing low-value web browsing. Is it actually impossible to avoid that temptation? Or are there people who manage it but they're just living in a different world than I am?

The Web has a strange way of feeling both important and interesting while, on reflection, not really being either. There's some kind of time-eating black magic at work—and that's before something like TikTok or Facebook get involved, where there's no mystery about why they have the effect they do.

can't remember where it is but there's an amazing pg quote somewhere wondering whether the net effect of hn has been positive or negative on account of the time-eating aspect. (I think his conclusion was "almost certainly very positive, but I have moments of doubt....")

There's a bit in 'What I worked on' where he says

"Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN."

Is it the social aspect? Far more people are able to hang out and talk with friends for hours on end than are able to read a book for hours on end, say.

Throw in the ease of changing direction (jumping from one article from another in a wiki rabbit hole, say), too.

I've heard that if one sets the display screen (whatever it is) to be black-and-white, the web gets much less compelling. I'm sure there are more factors than that, but it's funny how much bright colours in feedback play a role.

One of the most important ideas I‘ve come across in the last few days while doing low-value browsing on HN was an insight shared by Rich Hickey: „A computer is the absolute worst place to do thinking“. I think it was in his talk „Hammock driven development“. I actually installed a hammock in my office yesterday because of it. It takes self-control to actually go over and use it. And to leave my phone at the desk, too. But once I do, I profit tremdenously. I get ideas. I see the big picture. I get energized again.

I develop many ideas on my motorcycle, or on my bicycle, or while having breakfast. Once I have a computer, my brain is rarely idle enough for that.

I walk to a family dollar that’s 30 min round trip from my house. Many problems have been solved by a slim Jim and diet Dr Pepper.

Just go for a 45 min walk without bringing your phone (or if you have the discipline simply don’t use it). I solve most problems that way.

I've totally cut out Reddit and other sites that have gotten increasingly low quality over the years. That said I do still regularly 'waste' time on HN, although I think it offers enough utility that it's not a bad place to relax for a while now and then.

One thing I've realized over the past few years is that it's almost impossible to get away from 'wasting' a fair few hours each day. It's a good idea to let yourself disengage and move into a more diffuse mode of thought instead of trying to hold your nose to the grindstone unnecessarily. It may be that the effective people you know are that way because of their willingness to take a extended breaks rather than in spite of.

Any tips for high utility websites apart from this one?

Would really appreciate this thanks

One thing I've noticed is that, there is some value in stepping away from your work, and then coming back. Something like a "palate cleanser" for your mind. I agree that mindless web browsing is mostly a waste of time, but there might be some value in loading a little static into your mind, then coming back at your problem in a new frame of mind. So I try to not beat myself up too much. I have blockers and other things which I do use sometimes. I like https://selfcontrolapp.com/ the best for the Mac.

The funny thing is that, as soon as we geeks realize that this is a problem, we immediately want to optimize away the problem by building another app. Hehe.

If all you have is a computer, everything looks like a computation.

I think it's a case of most people have a finite amount of really productive time in them per day and once it's exhausted trying to squeeze more out is counter productive.

What do you fill the rest of the time with?

If you accept you have a finite limit of really good productive time per day in you, it becomes easy, focus on supporting that and making sure you achieve what you can during that productive time then slack off for the rest of the day.

Most creative people have about 2 hours of effective time per day. The rest is thinking/noodling/playing/recovering/… time.

> Most creative people have about 2 hours of effective time per day. The rest is thinking/noodling/playing/recovering/… time.

Thinking time is effective time. Intellectual labor isn't typing, though that's sometimes a necessary mechanism for reifying the output.

Personally, I find it incredibly addictive. Despite trying many things to keep it under control, I still struggle with it.

The thing with mindless browsing is that it gives you an instant trickle of dopamine. Any other activity requires some ramp up time before it feels rewarding. It's a bit like snacking vs. cooking a meal.

HN still has a better signal to noise than 90% of the web.

Agree. HN is the only website I visit every day.

You don’t know any particular web browsing session is low value until after you do it. in fact the web is almost anything.

> Doing them together and juggling bins, mail and doors? Over a minute.

I love this example because it's so crunchy and honest. My "wasteful efficiency" is when I get home and have, like, a couple bags and some other random items that I need to bring from the car into the house. I often forget that I need a free hand to fetch my keys from my pocket and unlock the door, and will attempt to carry everything into the house all at once. And I inevitably end up shoving things into my armpits or awkwardly setting/dropping them on the floor in order to actually open the door. But I park in an attached garage, and the house door is literally 10 feet from the driver's seat of my car. I can just grab one small thing, unlock the door, then come back and get everything else.

The Theory of Constraints works well for me: at any point in time there will be exactly one thing you can do that will have the most positive impact on what you want to achieve. So do that one thing as much as you can. And only do the rest when you are too tired to do #1 or are blocked. The rest you can do in any order without stress. For example optimising when you are taking garbage out is so far from being #1 that you shouldn’t even think about it. It has zero importance. And when #1 is achieved or you have the habit/system in place, something else will now be #1.

Re: having multiple projects in the air

> the reality of it is that you don't make much progress on any of them because as soon as one of them gets difficult, you just bounce over to another one that feels easier.

This really rang true to me. I have so many projects, and once I hit a significant technical wall, I usually start looking at other projects where I can get things done more easily and get gratification quicker. It really sucks, and Burkeman's recommendation of focusing on only one project at a time until you're done makes a lot of sense.

That said, it also requires a lot of determination to see something through. I think for me that is one of the most difficult things: having sufficient motivation to accomplish a task despite the difficulties. There has to be a great reward on the other side in order to push through the tough stuff. Only a few times in my life have I felt that sort of motivation for projects, and I'm not really sure what the throughline was between them, but I hope to capture that energy again someday.

Really agree with this. The whole "trying to do 8 projects at once is actually a coping mechanism because it lets you lie to yourself more easily about how little you can really finish" was a light bulb moment for me

This is especially true with books for me. I’ve discovered that I need to be exceedingly single threaded for books. Reading multiple books just leads to finishing none of them or dropping all of them except for one

I once read a book halfway through only to realize that I had already read it years before. And when I happen to stumble upon my notes from some book that I‘ve read, I‘m sometimes surprised and have zero recollection of ever having read it. I‘m probably somewhere around the thousand to two thousand book mark. Sometimes I think that, even if I don‘t remember the contents consciously, the books might still be influencing my thinking and my judgement in some positive way. But sometimes I think that, perhaps, it‘s really just a chasing after wind. That „next book“ is always as shiny as those new headphones from Amazon, or that new productivity tool. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

There's gonna be a technical solution for this, that you could print a QR code (or something) and tuck it away in the book, and it would take you to your notes.

Or you could organise your digital book notes by title, and just search for it.

>This really rang true to me. I have so many projects, and once I hit a significant technical wall, I usually start looking at other projects where I can get things done more easily and get gratification quicker. It really sucks, and Burkeman's recommendation of focusing on only one project at a time until you're done makes a lot of sense.

My experience has been the opposite. I like to have multiple projects on the go, and when I hit a wall with one I'll just put it down for a few days and do something else. When I come back, the problem that was stumping me less than a week ago seems magically solved!

Having one project and forcing yourself to do it, on the other hand, is gruelling and makes you miserable for no gain.

It might just be the way I'm wired, but I think for some things it's necessary to walk away occasionally and come back later with a fresh perspective and days of "background" thinking.

Agreed. It's operationally equivalent to "sleep on it". Let your subconscious work with it in the background, and when you come back the obstacle has dissolved.

I think this is a closely related and equally important quote (emphasis added):

> “okay, there are, four home improvement projects that all feel essential to making my living space acceptable. I'm going to deliberately give up all hope of making progress on three of them until I have seen one of them through to completion, or consciously abandoned it because it turned out to be a bad idea, that's okay too.”

My biggest sources of anxiety have always been those projects that I should have pulled the plug on looooooong before I actually pulled the plug. Having a bunch of projects going all at once not only allows you to switch focus as a coping mechanism, but also allows you to avoid facing the (possibly somewhat traumatic) reality that the project needs to be killed.

Then you can "ghost" on a dodgy project - in a good way - rather than forcing yourself to make a binary choice.

Think about it this way: if you are making a lot of progress then you are not learning anything new. It’s when you are stuck, when you have hit a wall, that’s when you are doing something new. Something where you have to push hard and think hard to make progress. But that is also where you learn and make personal progress. So seek out problems that are hard not easy.

I think one of the major reasons tech geeks are mislead by this "productivity" culture is because we make the flawed assumption that our brains work similarly to (silicon) computers in the sense that our performance and output is consistent and independent of tasks performed previously.

If we can perform Action X in 2 days, then we should be able to perform 100x Action X in 200 days.

The reality, which I learned the hard way, is that you just can't extrapolate like that. Performing Action X could create a massive spike in cortisol that quite literally drives you (partially) insane in a matter of weeks and renders you nearly completely unproductive until you stop (and then you remain unproductive for a couple of months after that). Maybe Action X is dull, and performing it long term makes you genuinely depressed (and again, unproductive). Maybe it's engaging, but makes you question your morals and leads you to a moral crisis.

This doesn't even scratch the surface of the time-and-motion level optimisations found in the article.

Truthfully, I think the best way to be a productive being, if that's your goal, is to listen to your emotional warning signs (sense of meaningless, long-term unhealthy stress, perpetual exhaustion, long stretches of boredom etc.) and change your routines in response.

Keep your brain running on "clean fuel" and in good condition!

I think this article (and presumably the book) is mostly aimed at people who, in the words of the interviewer, have "this kind of overwhelming ambition that therefore makes the finitude of life seem particularly traumatising." The author claims otherwise, but... I'm skeptical of that claim.

When you are active and engaged in pretty much all areas of your life, and you really enjoy learning new things and especially learning how to do things yourself, you will reach a point when "productivity" is much less about minimizing wasteful behaviors, or optimizing routine tasks, and much more about effectively filtering through all of your ideas to identify the ones that truly deserve your finite time and attention.

The money quotes are near the end of the article, where he gives the pithy advice of "one thing at a time" (which has a book-length treatment in The One Thing by Gary Keller). In reference to the tendency to keep lots of projects or tasks going at the same time:

> the reality of it is that you don't make much progress on any of them because as soon as one of them gets difficult, you just bounce over to another one that feels easier.

> “okay, there are, four home improvement projects that all feel essential to making my living space acceptable. I'm going to deliberately give up all hope of making progress on three of them until I have seen one of them through to completion, or consciously abandoned it because it turned out to be a bad idea, that's okay too.”

> choosing to do something that matters when you've got more things than that matter than you can handle is always going to come with that feeling of anxiety about what's going unaddressed.

It sounds to me like the advice here is that one must learn to say "no", or at least "not right now". And that for most people, this boils down to anxiety management--assuaging those fears of missed opportunities or preventable errors long enough to sit down and focus on something truly worth doing.

Yep agree. Focus on the one thing that will have the most positive impact in your life. Ignore the rest (doing minimum to keep things going). What is #1 will change as life changes. But there will always be a #1 that you should focus your energy on while keeping the rest at minimum power.

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