The other day I was speaking to one of the most productive people I’d ever met.[1] He was one of the top people in a very competitive field who was currently single-handedly performing the work of a team of brilliant programmers. He needed to find a spot to do some work, so I offered to help him find a desk with a monitor. But he said he generally liked working from his laptop on a couch, and he felt he was “only 10% slower” without a monitor anyway.
I was aghast. I’d been trying to optimize my productivity for years. A 10% productivity boost was a lot! Those things compound! How was this man, one of the most productive people I’d ever met, shrugging it off like it was nothing?
I think this nonchalant attitude towards productivity is fairly common in top researchers (though perhaps less so in top executives?). I have no idea why some people are so much more productive than others. It surprises me that so much variance is even possible.
This guy was smart, but I know plenty of people as smart as him who are far less productive. He was hardworking, but not insanely so. He wasn’t aggressively optimizing his productivity.[2] He wasn’t that old so it couldn’t just be experience. Probably part of it was luck, but he had enough different claims to fame that that couldn’t be the whole picture.
If I had to chalk it up to something, I guess I’d call it skill and “research taste”: he had a great ability to identify promising research directions and follow them (and he could just execute end-to-end on his ideas without getting lost or daunted, but I know how to train that).
I want to learn this skill, but I have no idea how to do it and I’m still not totally sure it’s real. Conducting research obviously helps, but that takes time and is clearly not sufficient. Maybe I should talk to a bunch of researchers and try to predict the results of their work?
Has anyone reading this ever successfully cultivated an uncanny ability to identify great research directions? How did you do it? What sub-skills does it require?
Am I missing some other secret sauce that lets some people produce wildly more valuable research than others?
Measured by more conventional means, not by positive impact on the long-term future; that’s dominated by other people. Making sure your work truly steers at solving the world’s biggest problems still seems like the best way to increase the value you produce, if you’re into that sort of thing. But I think this person’s abilities would multiply/complement any benefits from steering towards the most impactful problems.
Hmm, honestly, how do you know that he is one of the most productive people? Like, I have found these kinds of things surprisingly hard to evaluate, and a lot of successful research is luck, so maybe he just got lucky, but not like a “genetic lottery” kind of lucky, but more of a “happened to bet on the right research horse” kind of lucky in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to generalize into the future.
I am partially saying this because I have personally observed a lot of the opposite. Somewhat reliably the most productive people I know have very strong opinions about how they work. And to be clear, most of them do actually not use external monitors a lot of the time (including me myself), so I don’t think this specific preference is that interesting, but they do tend to have strong opinions.
My other hypothesis is just that the conversation somehow caused them to not expose which aspects of their work habits they care a lot about, and the statement about “this merely makes me 10% slower”, was something they wouldn’t actually reflectively endorse. More likely they don’t think of their work as something that has that much of a local “efficiency” attribute to it, and so when they thought through the monitor question, they substituted the productivity question for one that’s more like “how many more to-do list items would I get through if I had a monitor”. If you forced them to consider a more holistic view of their productivity, my guess is some answer like “oh, but by working on a couch I am much more open to get up and talk to other people or start pacing around, and that actually makes up for the loss here”.
The other day I was speaking to one of the most productive people I’d ever met.[1] He was one of the top people in a very competitive field who was currently single-handedly performing the work of a team of brilliant programmers. He needed to find a spot to do some work, so I offered to help him find a desk with a monitor. But he said he generally liked working from his laptop on a couch, and he felt he was “only 10% slower” without a monitor anyway.
I was aghast. I’d been trying to optimize my productivity for years. A 10% productivity boost was a lot! Those things compound! How was this man, one of the most productive people I’d ever met, shrugging it off like it was nothing?
I think this nonchalant attitude towards productivity is fairly common in top researchers (though perhaps less so in top executives?). I have no idea why some people are so much more productive than others. It surprises me that so much variance is even possible.
This guy was smart, but I know plenty of people as smart as him who are far less productive. He was hardworking, but not insanely so. He wasn’t aggressively optimizing his productivity.[2] He wasn’t that old so it couldn’t just be experience. Probably part of it was luck, but he had enough different claims to fame that that couldn’t be the whole picture.
If I had to chalk it up to something, I guess I’d call it skill and “research taste”: he had a great ability to identify promising research directions and follow them (and he could just execute end-to-end on his ideas without getting lost or daunted, but I know how to train that).
I want to learn this skill, but I have no idea how to do it and I’m still not totally sure it’s real. Conducting research obviously helps, but that takes time and is clearly not sufficient. Maybe I should talk to a bunch of researchers and try to predict the results of their work?
Has anyone reading this ever successfully cultivated an uncanny ability to identify great research directions? How did you do it? What sub-skills does it require?
Am I missing some other secret sauce that lets some people produce wildly more valuable research than others?
Measured by more conventional means, not by positive impact on the long-term future; that’s dominated by other people. Making sure your work truly steers at solving the world’s biggest problems still seems like the best way to increase the value you produce, if you’re into that sort of thing. But I think this person’s abilities would multiply/complement any benefits from steering towards the most impactful problems.
Or maybe he was but there are so many 2x boosts the 10% ones aren’t worth worrying about?
Hmm, honestly, how do you know that he is one of the most productive people? Like, I have found these kinds of things surprisingly hard to evaluate, and a lot of successful research is luck, so maybe he just got lucky, but not like a “genetic lottery” kind of lucky, but more of a “happened to bet on the right research horse” kind of lucky in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to generalize into the future.
I am partially saying this because I have personally observed a lot of the opposite. Somewhat reliably the most productive people I know have very strong opinions about how they work. And to be clear, most of them do actually not use external monitors a lot of the time (including me myself), so I don’t think this specific preference is that interesting, but they do tend to have strong opinions.
My other hypothesis is just that the conversation somehow caused them to not expose which aspects of their work habits they care a lot about, and the statement about “this merely makes me 10% slower”, was something they wouldn’t actually reflectively endorse. More likely they don’t think of their work as something that has that much of a local “efficiency” attribute to it, and so when they thought through the monitor question, they substituted the productivity question for one that’s more like “how many more to-do list items would I get through if I had a monitor”. If you forced them to consider a more holistic view of their productivity, my guess is some answer like “oh, but by working on a couch I am much more open to get up and talk to other people or start pacing around, and that actually makes up for the loss here”.