Weirdly enough, I was doing something today that made me think about this comment. The thought I had is that you caught onto something good here which is separate from the pressure aspect. There seems to be a benefit to trying to separate different aspects of a task more than may feel natural. To use the final exam example, as someone mentioned before, part of the reason final exams feel productive is because you were forced to do so much prep beforehand to ensure you’d be able to finish the exam in a fixed amount of time.
Similarly, I’ve seen benefit when I (haphazardly since I only realized this recently) clearly segment different aspects of an activity and apply artificial constraints to ensure that they remain separate. To use your VAE blog post example, this would be like saying, “I’m only going to use a single page of notes to write the blog post” to force yourself to ensure you understand everything before trying to write.
YMMV warning: I’m especially bad about trying to produce outputs before fully understanding and therefore may get more bandwidth out of this than others.
Weirdly enough, I was doing something today that made me think about this comment. The thought I had is that you caught onto something good here which is separate from the pressure aspect. There seems to be a benefit to trying to separate different aspects of a task more than may feel natural. To use the final exam example, as someone mentioned before, part of the reason final exams feel productive is because you were forced to do so much prep beforehand to ensure you’d be able to finish the exam in a fixed amount of time.
Similarly, I’ve seen benefit when I (haphazardly since I only realized this recently) clearly segment different aspects of an activity and apply artificial constraints to ensure that they remain separate. To use your VAE blog post example, this would be like saying, “I’m only going to use a single page of notes to write the blog post” to force yourself to ensure you understand everything before trying to write.
YMMV warning: I’m especially bad about trying to produce outputs before fully understanding and therefore may get more bandwidth out of this than others.