Comment by Mattasher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mattasher | Hacker News Reader

Good post I'm quite certain this is correct:

> Meaning that if you go from 4 priorities to 3, you can get, say, 10 percent more done; but if you go from 4 to 1, you get 400 percent more done.

But unless you can afford a butler or work at a company that gives you a very high level of institutional support, mono-focus seems impossible in our current world. I'd love to completely deprioritize the following roles, but they don't seem to want to detach themselves from me: tech support geek for wifi and computer issues, bookkeeper and tax preparer working hand-in-hand with my accountant, occasionally car expert for buying and maintaining vehicles, real estate expert for evaluating house purchases based on market conditions and my families needs, health care plan decider, and on and on and on. Each one of these areas if filled with multi-armed bandit problems (How much research should you put into evaluating a new home purchase where you live, or looking for a better city to live in?). It's a lot.

For a 'mono-focus' lifestyle or even a very pared down focus, you don't need to eschew everything else, in my opinion, where all you know is breathing and fine dining. You can still do those things and the author says as much as well.

You can, in my opinion, pick the reasonably best option because the payoff of squeezing another 2 - 5% out of the decision isn't worth the multiple weeks or worse you will spend. Could you get the absolutely best house for the best price? Yeah. Is it worth the trade-off of your other focus? Probably not.

There's no need for you to be a master mechanic, you just need to be good enough. So rather than trying to be "pretty good" at 10 things, you should strive to be world class / "extraordinarily good" at 1 or maybe 2 things and leave the rest between "not a clue" and "passable".

The author's call isn't to cloister yourself away but to choose not to pursue things at length that aren't what you want to focus on. You can learn to fix a specific problem, you just shouldn't spend your time going down the rabbit hole learning how to fix every problem of every car unless that is your chosen focus.

I use to do all my own car repairs and oil changes when I was younger and had more time.

Now I am more partial to Naval’s saying about how you value your time and picking an absurdly high hourly number.

I have felt very much like this in the past, but no so much any more. .. my thinking is:

Some things are just part of the responsibility of being a grown up. Home maintenance, driver for children, doing taxes, etc. These are your baseline priorities that you don't get to choose.

Some of these sound like they occupy a rotating priority slot. House and car purchases do take a big commitment and require prioritization (especially if you build) but they are temporarily a priority. It is usually your choice to make these a priority, and they are rare.

Keeping a smaller priority list means saying 'no' to more things too, like being 'tech support geek for wifi and computer issues' or vehicle maintenance. These priorities are fully under your control.

Not to mention that some of these things get easier once you have the skills for them. E.g. I've been buying my own health insurance on the open market since I was 22 - now in my early 40s, it takes me maybe an hour or two to fully compare a handful of policies and choose the best one for me and my family (even doing calculations, etc). This is vs having to immerse myself in it for a whole evening (4-5 hrs) and then agonize about it for the next week or so like I used to do back in the day (and only for myself)

There's also the risk management aspect if the projects are likely to fail. Aka "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Or, at least, consider the risks carefully.

This is most certainly true when it comes to investments. Yes, you could put 100% of your savings in an index fund and forget about it, but that seems extreme, and also you have to live somewhere, so instead of paying rent and living in a non-ideal place you can't customize, you might as well buy a home that's a better fit for your family and has upside potential (and yes, no matter what people say, buying a house is most certainly an investment, a large one and potentially a bad one, but an investment nonetheless).

So now you have at least two big investment baskets that you really should watch carefully, on top of your job, and all those other life things that, as mentioned by another commenter, do get easier once you've done them a few times (like picking a health plan or knowing the basics about car maintenance), but each one has a learning curve and change with technology or policy. And it's a very long list.

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