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Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

1. Momentum and Urgency seem to matter a lot in productivity and procrastination. 2. Focusing on outcomes rather than working just to work leads to focusing on useful work.

When you combine these things you can end up in a situation where.

Person A worked 5 hours and 80% of their work was useful = 4 units Person B worked 50 hours and 10% of their work was useful = 5 units

Which one is correct depends on the goal. Is the goal efficiency or useful output?

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Urgency/mission is probably the biggest one for me, especially when elements of desperation and impossibility are involved.

Working on easy or routine problems for 40 hours per week is torture to me. The ratio between my productivity extremes can be most conveniently described as "infinite".

If you want to know the root cause of the 10x, 100x, whateverx developer, this is almost certainly it. Someone was likely inspired to work on a super hard thing and just kept going. They don't have some weird genetic defect or unfair educational advantage.

Which one is correct depends on the goal.

Which is correct depends on who's paying. If you're a startup you want lots of Person A. If you're a consultancy you want lots of Person B.

Unproductive work can multiply, so your colleagues start wasting time, too. For example, if not carefully managed, initiatives that started for valid information, optimization or standardization efforts can turn into wasteful data collection busy work with little or no returns.

I guess the answer for that would be what did Person A spend the other 45 hours on, and is that extra unit Person 5 generated worth the additional 45 hours spent on it.

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