Why do more things? Tl;dr It feels good and is highly correlated with other metrics of success.
According to Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualization is the ultimate need. And this comes through the feeling of accomplishment—achieving difficult things and seeing tangible results. I.e doing more things
I claim that success in life can be measured by the quality and quantity of things we accomplish. This is invariant to your specific goals / values. C.f. “the world belongs to high-energy people”.
The tips
Keep track of things you want to do. Good ideas are rare and easily forgotten.
Have some way to capture ideas as they come. Sticky notes. Notebooks. Voice memos. Docs. Emails. Google calendar events. Anything goes.
Make sure you will see these things later. Personally I have defaulted to starting all my notes in Todoist now; it’s then very easy to set a date where I’ll review them later.
80⁄20 things aggressively to make them easier to do.
Perfection is difficult and takes a long time. Simple versions can deliver most of the value. This advice has been rehashed many times elsewhere so I won’t elaborate.
Almost all things worth doing have a shitty equivalent you can do in a day. or in a few hours.
Focus on one thing at a time. Avoid ‘spreading attention’ too thin.
Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things.
“What is the most important thing you could be doing?” … “Why aren’t you doing that?”
I personally find that my motivation for things comes in waves. When motivation strikes I try to ‘ride the wave’ for as long as possible until I reach a natural stopping point.
When you do have to stop, make sure you can delete the context from your mind and pick it up later. Write very detailed notes for yourself. Have a “mind like water”.
I’ve found voice recordings or AI voice-to-text very helpful along these lines.
Get feedback early and often.
Common pitfall: hoard idea and work in isolation.
The more you 80⁄20 things the easier this will be.
Why do more things? Tl;dr It feels good and is highly correlated with other metrics of success.
Partial counterargument: I find that I have to be careful not to do too many things. I really need some time for just thinking and reading and playing with models in order to have new ideas (and I suspect that’s true of many AIS researchers) and if I don’t prioritize it, that disappears in favor of only taking concrete steps on already-active things.
You kind of say this later in the post, with ‘Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things,’ which seems like a bit of a contradiction with the original premise :D
Yes, this is true—law of reversing advice holds. But I think two other things are true:
Intentionally trying to do more things makes you optimise more deliberately for being able to do many things. Having that ability is valuable, even if you don’t always exercise it
I think most people aren’t ’living their best lives”, in the sense that they’re not doing the volume of things they could be doing
Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things
It’s possibly not worded very well as you say :) I think it’s not a contradiction, because you can be doing only a small number of things at any given instant in time, but have an impressive throughput overall.
I think it’s not a contradiction, because you can be doing only a small number of things at any given instant in time, but have an impressive throughput overall.
I think that being good at avoiding wasted motion while doing things is pretty fundamental to resolving the contradiction.
“How to do more things”—some basic tips
Why do more things? Tl;dr It feels good and is highly correlated with other metrics of success.
According to Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualization is the ultimate need. And this comes through the feeling of accomplishment—achieving difficult things and seeing tangible results. I.e doing more things
I claim that success in life can be measured by the quality and quantity of things we accomplish. This is invariant to your specific goals / values. C.f. “the world belongs to high-energy people”.
The tips
Keep track of things you want to do. Good ideas are rare and easily forgotten.
Have some way to capture ideas as they come. Sticky notes. Notebooks. Voice memos. Docs. Emails. Google calendar events. Anything goes.
Make sure you will see these things later. Personally I have defaulted to starting all my notes in Todoist now; it’s then very easy to set a date where I’ll review them later.
80⁄20 things aggressively to make them easier to do.
Perfection is difficult and takes a long time. Simple versions can deliver most of the value. This advice has been rehashed many times elsewhere so I won’t elaborate.
Almost all things worth doing have a shitty equivalent you can do in a day. or in a few hours.
Focus on one thing at a time. Avoid ‘spreading attention’ too thin.
Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things.
“What is the most important thing you could be doing?” … “Why aren’t you doing that?”
I personally find that my motivation for things comes in waves. When motivation strikes I try to ‘ride the wave’ for as long as possible until I reach a natural stopping point.
When you do have to stop, make sure you can delete the context from your mind and pick it up later. Write very detailed notes for yourself. Have a “mind like water”.
I’ve found voice recordings or AI voice-to-text very helpful along these lines.
Get feedback early and often.
Common pitfall: hoard idea and work in isolation.
The more you 80⁄20 things the easier this will be.
Partial counterargument: I find that I have to be careful not to do too many things. I really need some time for just thinking and reading and playing with models in order to have new ideas (and I suspect that’s true of many AIS researchers) and if I don’t prioritize it, that disappears in favor of only taking concrete steps on already-active things.
You kind of say this later in the post, with ‘Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things,’ which seems like a bit of a contradiction with the original premise :D
Yes, this is true—law of reversing advice holds. But I think two other things are true:
Intentionally trying to do more things makes you optimise more deliberately for being able to do many things. Having that ability is valuable, even if you don’t always exercise it
I think most people aren’t ’living their best lives”, in the sense that they’re not doing the volume of things they could be doing
It’s possibly not worded very well as you say :) I think it’s not a contradiction, because you can be doing only a small number of things at any given instant in time, but have an impressive throughput overall.
I think that being good at avoiding wasted motion while doing things is pretty fundamental to resolving the contradiction.