Why do your routine tasks get priority over your creative ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Why do your routine tasks get priority over your creative ideas?

devashish.bearblog.dev

55 pointsmemorable29 comments

The author seems to be suggesting that people are spending time on routine tasks that are somehow not mandatory. All routine tasks are mandatory. That's why they become routine, become a part of a person's routine, and have the highest possible priority. Most of them relate to survival and hygiene because we have not yet escaped biology. Others are things like filing taxes which are made mandatory by our society.

What is the author suggesting people do? Be wealthy enough to pay someone else to take care of those tasks when possible? Suffer by leaving those tasks un-done, or done to a less than satisfactory level? What tasks exactly is the author de-prioritizing?

My own reaction to the headline is "because otherwise the routine/mandatory tasks build up, and then you have no control over your time as continually context switch to put out fires and even previously fun-creative tasks become a death march". But I've also settled a few estates, which is basically a whole batch of mandatory tasks and other unfinished business being dumped into your own run queue.

I think a charitable reading of the article is that it's coming from the perspective of someone who finds themselves gravitating towards routine tasks, but isn't swamped by them. So perhaps they find themselves doing one or two routine tasks per day, then being too tired to do anything creative, rather than batching the routine tasks so they could have more creative days. And the answer there is that routine tasks (especially say full time employment), suck out your creative energy in a way that takes down time ("relaxation") to make up for.

I think the article should have gone into a lot more depth exploring various concrete strategies to manage this, instead of being mostly aspirational. If it at least listed some details about the author's situation and what they found helpful, I think the non-universality of the sentiment would have been a lot clearer.

No blog post can teach you concrete strategies because they are dependent on your own life and its precise parameters. But even the simple idea of examining the building blocks of your life that you don't usually think about is a good start.

It's not a very well thought out article.

There are probably things in our "routine" that don't need to be there or could be automated. ...or maybe we've taken on certain support tasks that require too much maintenance. ...or maybe they really are necessary.

This is the complexity of thinking and planning you need to do it you run out of free time.

I'll say that with three young kids - I've entirely run out of enough free time to even handle all the routines. Stuff breaks as a result and it's a bit of chaotic juggling in this house these days.

...but it's also true that we underestimate the benefits of creative ideas because they don't come to fruition for a long time - so we can overload ourselves with routine tasks that might have a net lower value.

I think many of us, in retrospect, too much time. especially on those mandatory-ish, unfixed tasks, or those that we e.g. "should be better about doing earlier." and then end up not?

> The answer is because it's easier to attend to something that has a deadline, than to do something limitless and unstructured. It can also be more daunting to attend to the things we feel confident doing, than to the things we are unsure about.

This is very similar to John Cleese’s lecture on creativity -

“Because, as we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.

And it's also easier to do little things we know we can do, than to start on big things that we're not so sure about.”

It’s a good talk if you’ve never seen it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

Unless you’re Diogenes, it’s also hard to enjoy your creative pursuits when you haven’t eaten in a while and you don’t have any clean underwear.

Cleese’s context is within the scope of doing your job. If you need to do something creative, you need to make time for that creativity to come out.

For me, its the anxiety of having "must-do" tasks build up. Although I love spending time exploring and playing with new things, I also like the feeling of having an empty work queue. Or, conversely, I hate the feeling of having a lot of backlogged tasks.

I've always been a proponent of removing people from ops when they work on a project, so they can truly focus on creation, design and exploration.

They're easier.

I tried to get rid of scrolling through social media, and it led me to do more chores and training.

My flat is clean and I get fitter, but I didn't read more books of finish more projects.

These routines don't require much thinking, so they're as easy as scrolling and end up to be the go-to tasks I do when I want to avoid wasting time on my smartphone.

But it would be fantastic if I could frame more productive work in a way that makes them easier. I just don't know how...

Deadlines pay the bills while creative work often doesn’t. Most of us haven’t reached the point where we can forget about the bills.

This is my conundrum: what gives me happiness to motivate me to make money is having the liberty and luxury of time for my creative interests. Part of the reason having a day job with health insurance likely got me more guitars than playing the bar scenes for the same 15 years.

If I was independently wealthy - basically same monthly income or debt free then part time fun gigs - I’d be amazingly productive, not waste away on the couch with Netflips.

Interesting. I would say I am an unusually creative person, and the one consistency is that I ignore routine tasks. I let the dishes pile up, I just throw my socks on the floor, etc. I am generally a bit messy and I literally procrastinate every possible routine thing and it gives me lots of time to actually create. Then when I'm in a slump I just do all that routine stuff.

Another theory on why routine tasks get prioritized over creative is simply the mental load associated with the routine tasks “spills over” into creative idea times.

What I mean is that, routine task can be mentally laborious - with little motivation to do them other than they fact they are mandatory or needed. Once the motivation to do this task is used, the motivation to do the creative task is no longer there because it was spent on the routine.

It’s seems related to what we’re trying to build (https://doubleapp.xyz ), where we want to provide a way to channel motivation from accountability so it’s not all on you to muster the motivation do everything.

This is a fun idea.

I wonder how helpful other people are in practice, or is it just the notion of having someone there that helps people focus?

Do you filter people so that they are paired with people doing similar tasks? similar skillsets?

It’s extremely helpful, at least speaking for myself. There’s a technique called “body doubling” which entails doing tasks in the presence of another, it’s what we’re basing the whole idea around.

We think it works because the other person there acts as a sort of proxy for motivation (I chat a bit more about it here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/body-doubling-proxy )

We do provide the option for people to filter to others that are doing something similar (e.g., creative vs exercise/active, etc.). We plan to make it a more fine grained in the future for sure!

It reminds me of the whole "two in a box" management practice, where putting two workers in a cube (who got along) allowed them to be more efficient together.

It was a corporate fad in... I want to say maybe 2005?

> It can also be more daunting to attend to the things we feel confident doing, than to the things we are unsure about.

Something got swapped here, I think.

Because otherwise I couldn't get anything done. Duty first.

Ask a parent.

This was my reaction, too.

Would be very curious to learn whether or not the author of this article has children.

I can only do a few hours/day max on creative ideas, hence more time for routine ones

Hello my friend, final reminder that the FB price is now 141 and trending steadily down.

Good luck in your future predictions !

Because when they don't, I end up owing the IRS $150k with a lien on my house.

I used to have a hygiene of 30min (or more) of creative hack (fruitless or not). It's hard to maintain though.

The consequences of falling behind on routine tasks are more severe. It affects everything else.

Current context determine brain actions. That's a emotion machine theory by minsky

Routine tasks are, as others have commented, essential to pay the bills. And they come with a deadline, because someone out there is expecting the task to be done--whether it's the bills you need to pay, or a report you need to prepare for your boss. So logically, if the key difference between a routine task and a creative task is the lack of deadline and structure, wouldn't it make sense to have people involved for your creative projects too? So collaborative creative projects are likely to get done, while solo creative projects will probably run slower.

Activation energy.

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