herrdu
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3 years ago “你花这么多时间看电视，”他告诉我，“你现在可以写一部小说了。” 很难不同意这种观点——写小说无疑比看电视更能利用时间——但隐藏的假设呢？这样的评论意味着时间是“可替代的”——看电视的时间可以很容易地花在写小说上。可悲的是，事实并非如此。
时间有不同的质量等级。如果我步行到地铁站，忘记了笔记本，那么我很难写超过几段。当你不断被打断时，很难集中注意力。还有一个心理因素：有时我感到快乐和动力并准备好做某事，但有时我感到非常悲伤和疲倦，我只能看电视。
如果你想提高工作效率，你必须认识到这个事实并处理它。首先，你必须充分利用每一种时间。其次，你必须努力让你的时间更有质量。
有效地消磨时间 选择好问题 生命是短暂的（或者我被告知）那么为什么要浪费它做一些愚蠢的事情呢？开始做某事很容易，因为它很方便，但您应该始终对此进行质疑。有什么更重要的事情你可以做吗？你为什么不这样做呢？这样的问题很难正视（最终，如果你遵循这个规则，你将不得不问自己为什么你不在世界上最重要的问题上工作）但是每一个小步骤都会让你更有效率。
这并不是说你所有的时间都应该花在世界上最重要的问题上。我的当然不是（毕竟，我正在写这篇文章）。但这绝对是我衡量生活的标准。
有一堆 另一个常见的误区是，如果你选择一个问题并专注于它，你会做得更多。我发现这几乎不是真的。例如，就在这一刻，我正在努力纠正我的姿势，锻炼一些肌肉，喝一些液体，清理我的办公桌，与我的兄弟进行 IM，并写这篇文章。在这一天的课程中，我一直在写这篇文章，读一本书，吃点东西，回复一些电子邮件，和朋友聊天，购物，写了几篇其他的文章，备份了我的硬盘，整理了我的书单。在过去的一周里，我参与了几个不同的软件项目，阅读了几本不同的书，研究了几种不同的编程语言，搬走了我的一些东西，等等。
有很多不同的项目会让你在不同的时间里工作。此外，如果您卡住或感到无聊，您还有其他事情要做（这可以让您有时间摆脱困境）。
这也让你更有创意。创造力来自将你在其他领域学到的东西应用到你工作的领域。如果你有很多不同领域的不同项目，那么你就有更多的想法可以应用。
做一个列表 想出一堆不同的东西来处理应该不难——大多数人都有很多他们想要完成的事情。但是，如果您试图将其全部记在脑海中，它很快就会变得不知所措。必须记住所有这些的心理压力会让你发疯。解决方法也很简单：写下来。
一旦你列出了你想做的所有事情，你就可以按种类组织它。例如，我的清单是编程、写作、思考、跑腿、阅读、聆听和观看（按此顺序）。
大多数重大项目都涉及一系列不同的任务。例如，写这篇文章涉及阅读其他拖延系统、思考文章的新部分、清理句子、给有问题的人发电子邮件等等，所有这些都在编写文本的实际工作之外。每项任务都可以放在适当的部分下，以便您可以在适当的时间完成。
将清单与您的生活相结合 一旦你有了这个清单，问题就变成了记得看它。记住看它的最好方法是让看它成为你无论如何都会做的事情。例如，我的办公桌上放着一叠书，我正在阅读的书放在最上面。当我需要阅读一本书时，我只需从书堆中取出最上面的那本书。
我对电视/电影也做同样的事情。每当我听说我应该看的电影时，我都会把它放在我电脑上的一个特殊文件夹中。现在每当我想看电视时，我就打开那个文件夹。
我还考虑了一些更具侵入性的方法来做到这一点。例如，每当我尝试查看一些博客时，就会弹出一个网页，其中包含我的“要阅读”文件夹中的文章列表。或者甚至是一个窗口，偶尔会弹出工作建议，供我在我偷懒时查看。
让您的时间更优质 充分利用你拥有的时间只能让你走到这一步。更重要的问题是为自己创造更多高质量的时间。大多数人的时间都被学校和工作之类的事情占用了。显然，如果你参加其中之一，你应该停下来。但是你还能做什么呢？
缓解物理限制 携带笔和纸 我认识的几乎每个有趣的人都有某种随身携带的袖珍笔记本。笔和纸在各种情况下都可以立即派上用场——如果你需要为某人写下某事、记下某事、草拟一个想法等等。我什至在地铁里写了整篇文章。1
（我曾经这样做过，但现在我只是随身携带我的电脑电话。它不允许我物理地向人们提供信息，但它通过给我一直阅读的东西（电子邮件）和直接推送我的笔记来弥补它进入我的电子邮件收件箱，在那里我被迫立即处理它们。）
避免被打扰 对于需要高度专注的任务，您应该避免被打断。一种简单的方法是去干扰者找不到的地方。另一种方法是与周围的人达成协议：“关门时不要打扰我”或“如果我戴着耳机就给我打电话”（然后你可以忽略即时消息，直到你有空）。
你不想做得太过分。有时，如果你真的在浪费时间，你应该分心。与坐下来阅读新闻相比，利用时间帮助他人解决问题要好得多。这就是为什么制定特定协议是个好主意：当你没有真正集中注意力时，你可能会被打断。
缓解精神束缚 吃饭、睡觉、运动 饥饿、疲倦或抽搐的时间是低质量的时间。改善它很简单：吃、睡和锻炼。然而，我以某种方式设法搞砸了这一点。我不喜欢去买食物，所以我经常饿着肚子继续工作，结果累得我无法让自己去买食物。2
很容易对自己说，“我知道我很累，但我不能小睡——我有工作要做”。事实上，如果你小睡一会儿，你会更有效率，因为你会提高一天剩余时间的质量，而且无论如何你都得睡觉。
我的运动量并不多，所以我可能不是提供这方面建议的最佳人选，但我确实会尽我所能。当我躺着阅读时，我会做仰卧起坐。当我需要步行去某个地方时，我就跑。
与开朗的人交谈 缓解精神约束要困难得多。有帮助的一件事是拥有开朗的朋友。例如，在与 Paul Graham 或 Dan Connolly 交谈后，我总是发现自己更倾向于工作——他们只是散发能量。人们很容易认为你需要远离人，把自己关在房间里才能做任何真正的工作，但这可能会令人沮丧，实际上效率较低。
分担负荷 即使你的朋友不高兴，和别人一起解决难题也会让事情变得容易得多。一方面，心理负担分散在两个人身上。另一方面，有其他人在场会迫使您工作而不是分心。
拖延症与精神力场 但所有这些都在回避问题。人们真正的生产力问题是拖延。这是一个肮脏的小秘密，但每个人都会拖延——很严重。不仅仅是你。但这并不意味着你不应该试图阻止它。
什么是拖延症？在外部观察者看来，您似乎只是在做一些“有趣”的事情（例如玩游戏或阅读新闻），而不是在做实际工作。（这通常会导致外部观察者认为你又懒又坏。）但真正的问题是：你脑子里在想什么？
我花了很多时间试图探索这一点，我能描述的最好的方式是你的大脑在一项任务周围建立了一种精神力场。曾经玩过两个磁铁吗？如果您正确定位磁铁并试图将它们推向彼此，它们会强烈排斥。当你移动它们时，你可以感觉到磁场的边缘。当您尝试将磁铁聚集在一起时，磁场会将您推回或推向另一个方向。
心理障碍似乎以同样的方式工作。它不是特别坚固或可见，但您可以在边缘感觉到它。而你越是想接近它，它就越是把你推开。因此，毫不奇怪，你最终会走向另一个方向。3
就像你不能通过真正用力推动两个排斥磁铁坐在一起一样 - 一旦你停止推动它们就会退回 - 我从来没有能够通过纯粹的意志力克服这种精神力场。相反，你必须偷偷摸摸——你必须旋转磁铁。
那么是什么导致了精神力场呢？似乎有两个主要因素：任务是否艰巨以及是否已分配。
难题 打破它 第一种难题是太大的问题。假设您想构建一个食谱组织程序。没有人可以真正坐下来建立一个食谱组织者。这是一个目标，而不是一项任务。任务是您可以朝着目标采取的具体具体步骤。一个好的第一个任务可能是“绘制一个显示食谱的屏幕模型”。现在这是你可以做的事情。4
当你这样做时，接下来的步骤就会变得更加清晰。您必须决定配方由什么组成，需要什么样的搜索功能，如何构建配方数据库，等等。你建立了一种动力，每项任务都会导致下一项任务。当你的大脑在这个主题上加倍努力时，解决这个主题的问题就变得更容易了。
对于我的每一个大项目，我都会考虑我接下来可以为它们完成的所有任务，并将它们添加到我的分类待办事项列表中（见上文）。当我停止做某事时，我会将其下一个可能的任务添加到待办事项列表中。
简化它 另一种难题是过于复杂或大胆的问题。写一本书似乎令人生畏，所以从写一篇文章开始。如果一篇文章太多，从写一个段落摘要开始。重要的是马上做一些事情。
一旦你有了一些东西，你就可以更准确地判断它并更好地理解问题。改进已经存在的东西也比在空白页面上工作容易得多。如果你的段落进展顺利，那么它可能会变成一篇文章，然后变成一本书，一点一点地，从头到尾都是一篇完全合理的文章。
想一想 通常，解决难题的关键是获得一些灵感。如果您对该领域知之甚少，显然应该从研究开始——看看其他人是如何做事的，了解地形。坐下来尝试并充分了解该领域。做一些小问题，看看你是否能解决它。
分配的问题 分配的问题是您被告知要处理的问题。许多心理学实验发现，当你试图“激励”人们做某事时，他们不太可能去做这件事，而且做得更糟。外部激励，比如奖励和惩罚，会扼杀心理学家所说的“内在动机”——你对问题的天然兴趣。（这是社会心理学中被最彻底复制的发现之一——超过 70 项研究发现奖励会削弱对任务的兴趣。）5人们的头脑似乎非常避免被告知该做什么。6
奇怪的是，这种现象不仅限于其他人——它甚至发生在你试图告诉自己该做什么时！如果你对自己说，“我真的应该在 X 上工作，这是现在最重要的事情”，那么突然之间 X 就变成了世界上最难让自己工作的事情。但是一旦 Y 成为最重要的事情，完全相同的 X 就变得容易多了。
创建一个错误的分配 这提供了一个相当明显的解决方案：如果你想在 X 上工作，告诉自己做 Y。不幸的是，故意欺骗自己有点困难，因为你知道你正在这样做。7所以你必须偷偷摸摸。
一种方法是让别人给你分配一些东西。最著名的例子是研究生，他们被要求写论文，这是他们毕业时需要完成的一项艰巨的任务。因此，为了避免这样做，研究生最终会做各种其他困难的事情。
这项任务必须看起来很重要（你必须这样做才能毕业！）和大（你最好的作品的数百页！）但实际上并不重要到推迟它会是一场灾难。
不要给自己分配问题 很容易说“好吧，我需要把这一切放在一边，坐下来完成这篇文章”。更糟糕的是试图贿赂自己做某事，例如说“好吧，如果我刚完成这篇文章，那么我就去吃糖果”。但绝对最糟糕的是让别人试图强迫你做某事。
所有这些都非常诱人——我自己都做过——但它们完全适得其反。在所有三种情况下，您基本上都为自己分配了一项任务。现在你的大脑会想尽办法逃避它。
让事情变得有趣 有人告诉我们，努力工作不应该是愉快的。但事实上，这可能是我做的最有趣的事情。当你试图解决一个棘手的问题时，不仅会完全吸引你，而且在完成如此严肃的事情之后你会感觉很棒。
所以让自己做某事的秘诀不是说服自己必须去做，而是说服自己这很有趣。如果不是，那么你需要让它变得有趣。
当我不得不为大学写论文时，我第一次认真对待这个问题。写论文并不是一项特别艰巨的任务，但它肯定会被分配。谁会自愿写几页连接两本随机书籍的观察结果？所以我开始把这些文章变成我自己的小笑话。一方面，我决定用自己的小风格写每一段，尽量模仿各种形式的演讲。（这具有填充内容的额外好处。）8
另一种让事情变得更有趣的方法是解决元问题。与其构建 Web 应用程序，不如尝试使用它作为示例应用程序构建 Web 应用程序框架。不仅任务会更有趣，而且结果可能会更有用。
结论 有很多关于生产力的迷思——时间是可以替代的，专注是好的，贿赂自己是有效的，努力工作是不愉快的，拖延是不自然的——但它们都有一个共同的主题：真正工作的概念违背你的自然倾向的东西。
对于大多数人来说，在大多数工作中，情况可能就是这样。你没有理由倾向于写无聊的文章或提交毫无意义的备忘录。而且，如果社会无论如何都要强迫你这样做，那么你需要学会把脑海中告诉你停下来的声音拒之门外。
但是如果你想做一些有价值和有创意的事情，那么关闭你的大脑是完全错误的方法。生产力的真正秘诀是反过来：倾听你的身体。饿了就吃饭，累了就睡觉，无聊的时候休息一下，做一些看起来很有趣的项目。
这似乎太简单了。它不涉及任何花哨的首字母缩略词或自我决定或成功商人的个人推荐。这几乎是常识。但是社会对工作的观念把我们推向了相反的方向。如果我们想提高生产力，我们需要做的就是扭转局面。
进一步阅读 如果您想更多地了解动机心理学，没有什么比Alfie Kohn更好的了。他写了很多关于这个主题的文章和一整本书，我强烈推荐的惩罚。
我希望在以后的文章中讨论如何退学，但你真的应该出去拿起《青少年解放手册》。如果您是一名计算机人员，那么辞职的一种方法是向Y Combinator申请资金。与此同时，米奇 Z 的书《我的岁月里的谋杀》以艺术家和活动家为特色，描述了他们如何在做自己想做的事的同时设法维持生计。
笔记 信不信由你，我实际上在地铁里写过。很容易找借口解释为什么你实际上没有工作——你在下一次约会之前没有足够的时间，楼下有人吵闹等等——但我发现当灵感来袭时，我可以实际上在地铁上写下东西，那里的声音非常大，我只有几分钟的时间才能下车开始走路。 ↩
睡眠也存在同样的问题。没有什么比累得不能睡觉更糟糕的了——你只是觉得自己像个僵尸。 ↩
现在事实证明，我在另一个领域经历了同样的现象：害羞。我经常不想打电话给陌生人或在聚会上和某人交谈，我有完全相同的精神场将我推向其他方向。我怀疑这可能是因为害羞也是有问题的童年所导致的一种特征。（参见“分配的问题”。）当然，这都是推测性的。 ↩
虽然我在这里使用的术语（“下一个具体步骤”）源自 David Allen 的Getting Things Done，但这里的许多原则（甚至可能是无意识地）应用于极限编程 (XP)。极限编程作为这个系统来保持程序的组织性，但我发现其中很多实际上是避免拖延的好建议。
例如，结对编程会自动将任务的心理负担分散到两个人身上，并在质量较低的时间为人们提供一些有用的事情。将项目分解为具体的步骤是 XP 的另一个关键部分，就像立即完成工作并对其进行改进（下文中的“简化” ）一样。这些只是不特定于编程的东西。 ↩
有关文献的精彩概述，请参阅 Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards。这一具体主张来自他的文章挑战行为主义教条：关于金钱和动机的神话。 ↩
我最初只是假设这在某种程度上是生物学上的，但 Paul Graham 指出它更有可能是学来的。当你还小的时候，你的父母会尽他们最大的努力来操纵你。他们说做你的功课，你的思想试图自由地蠕动并考虑其他事情。很快，扭动就变成了习惯。无论哪种方式，这都将是一个难以解决的问题。我已经放弃尝试改变这一点；现在我尝试解决它。 ↩
理查德·费曼（Richard Feynman）讲述了他如何尝试探索自己的梦想的故事，就像我试图探索自己的拖延症一样。每天晚上，他都会试着观察自己入睡时发生的事情：
一个晚上我像往常一样做梦，进行观察，……然后我意识到我一直在睡觉，我的后脑勺靠在一根黄铜棒上。我把手放在脑后，感觉后脑勺软软的。我想，“啊哈！这就是为什么我能够在梦中进行所有这些观察：黄铜棒扰乱了我的视觉皮层。我所要做的就是在头下放一根黄铜棒睡觉，我可以随时进行这些观察。所以我想我会停止对这个进行观察并进入更深的睡眠。”
后来醒来的时候，没有铜棒，后脑勺也没有软软的。不知何故……我的大脑编造了错误的理由来说明为什么我不应该再[观察我的梦]。（你肯定是在开玩笑，费曼先生！，50）
你的大脑比你强大得多。 ↩
因此，例如，我没有写“相比之下，Riis 并没有引用很多人的话。”，我写道：“然而，Riis 是否因为收集听觉传播的人所需的基于技能的能力的个人缺陷 -将同时代的民族志集中到已发表的纸质信息帐户中，或者只是对社区信息通讯员的报道缺乏偏好，这表明在产生可比结果方面完全失败。”
这位教授显然对糟糕的写作严重麻木，似乎从未意识到我在开玩笑（尽管与我一对一地翻阅论文！）。 ↩
您应该按照我的Twitter这里。
“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case.
Time has various levels of quality. If I’m walking to the subway station and I’ve forgotten my notebook, then it’s pretty hard for me to write more than a couple paragraphs. And it’s tough to focus when you keep getting interrupted. There’s also a mental component: sometimes I feel happy and motivated and ready to work on something, but other times I feel so sad and tired I can only watch TV.
If you want to be more productive then, you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. First, you have to make the best of each kind of time. And second, you have to try to make your time higher-quality.
Spend time efficiently Choose good problems Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? It’s easy to start working on something because it’s convenient, but you should always be questioning yourself about it. Is there something more important you can work on? Why don’t you do that instead? Such questions are hard to face up to (eventually, if you follow this rule, you’ll have to ask yourself why you’re not working on the most important problem in the world) but each little step makes you more productive.
This isn’t to say that all your time should be spent on the most important problem in the world. Mine certainly isn’t (after all, I’m writing this essay). But it’s definitely the standard against which I measure my life.
Have a bunch of them Another common myth is that you’ll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively. I find this is hardly ever true. Just this moment for example, I’m trying to fix my posture, exercise some muscles, drink some fluids, clean off my desk, IM with my brother, and write this essay. Over the course the day, I’ve worked on this essay, read a book, had some food, answered some email, chatted with friends, done some shopping, worked on a couple other essays, backed up my hard drive, and organized my book list. In the past week I’ve worked on several different software projects, read several different books, studied a couple different programming languages, moved some of my stuff, and so on.
Having a lot of different projects gives you work for different qualities of time. Plus, you’ll have other things to work on if you get stuck or bored (and that can give your mind time to unstick yourself).
It also makes you more creative. Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in. If you have a bunch of different projects going in different fields, then you have many more ideas you can apply.
Make a list Coming up with a bunch of different things to work on shouldn’t be hard — most people have tons of stuff they want to get done. But if you try to keep it all in your head it quickly gets overwhelming. The psychic pressure of having to remember all of it can make you crazy. The solution is again simple: write it down.
Once you have a list of all the things you want to do, you can organize it by kind. For example, my list is programming, writing, thinking, errands, reading, listening, and watching (in that order).
Most major projects involve a bunch of these different tasks. Writing this, for example, involves reading about other procrastination systems, thinking up new sections of the article, cleaning up sentences, emailing people with questions, and so on, all in addition to the actual work of writing the text. Each task can go under the appropriate section, so that you can do it when you have the right kind of time.
Integrate the list with your life Once you have this list, the problem becomes remembering to look at it. And the best way to remember to look at it is to make looking at it what you would do anyway. For example, I keep a stack of books on my desk, with the ones I’m currently reading on top. When I need a book to read, I just grab the top one off the stack.
I do the same thing with TV/movies. Whenever I hear about a movie I should watch, I put it in a special folder on my computer. Now whenever I feel like watching TV, I just open up that folder.
I’ve also thought about some more intrusive ways of doing this. For example, a web page that pops up with a list of articles in my “to read” folder whenever I try to check some weblogs. Or maybe even a window that pops up with work suggestions occasionally for me to see when I’m goofing off.
Make your time higher quality Making the best use of the time you have can only get you so far. The much more important problem is making more higher quality time for yourself. Most people’s time is eaten up by things like school and work. Obviously if you attend one of these, you should stop. But what else can you do?
Ease physical constraints Carry pen and paper Pretty much everyone interesting I know has some sort of pocket notebook they carry at all times. Pen and paper is immediately useful in all kinds of circumstances — if you need to write something down for somebody, take notes on something, scratch down an idea, and so on. I’ve even written whole articles in the subway.1
(I used to do this, but now I just carry my computerphone everywhere. It doesn’t let me give people information physically, but it makes up for it by giving me something to read all the time (email) and pushing my notes straight into my email inbox, where I’m forced to deal with them right away.)
Avoid being interrupted For tasks that require serious focus, you should avoid getting interrupted. One simple way is to go somewhere interrupters can’t find you. Another is to set up an agreement with the people around you: “don’t bother me when the door is closed” or “IM me if I have headphones on” (and then you can ignore the IMs until you’re free).
You don’t want to overdo it. Sometimes if you’re really wasting time you should be distracted. It’s a much better use of time to help someone else with their problem than it is to sit and read the news. That’s why setting up specific agreements is a good idea: you can be interrupted when you’re not really focusing.
Ease mental constraints Eat, sleep, exercise Time when you’re hungry or tired or twitchy is low-quality time. Improving it is simple: eat, sleep, and exercise. Yet I somehow manage to screw up even this. I don’t like going to get food, so I’ll often work right through being hungry and end up so tired out that I can’t bring myself to go get food.2
It’s tempting to say to yourself, “I know I’m tired but I can’t take a nap — I have work to do”. In fact, you’ll be much more productive if you do take that nap, since you’ll improve the quality of the day’s remaining time and you were going to have to sleep sometime anyway.
I don’t really exercise much so I’m probably not the best person to give advice on that bit, but I do try to work it in where I can. While I’m lying down reading, I do situps. And when I need to go somewhere on foot, I run.
Talk to cheerful people Easing mental constraints is much harder. One thing that helps is having friends who are cheerful. For example, I always find myself much more inclined to work after talking to Paul Graham or Dan Connolly — they just radiate energy. It’s tempting to think that you need to get away from people and shut yourself off in your room to do any real work, but this can be so demoralizing that it’s actually less efficient.
Share the load Even if your friends aren’t cheerful, just working on a hard problem with someone else makes it much easier. For one thing, the mental weight gets spread across both people. For another, having someone else there forces you to work instead of getting distracted.
Procrastination and the mental force field But all of this is sort of dodging the issue. The real productivity problem people have is procrastination. It’s something of a dirty little secret, but everyone procrastinates — severely. It’s not just you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to stop it.
What is procrastination? To the outside observer, it looks like you’re just doing something “fun” (like playing a game or reading the news) instead of doing your actual work. (This usually causes the outside observer to think you’re lazy and bad.) But the real question is: what’s going on inside your head?
I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to explore this and the best way I can describe it is that your brain puts up a sort of mental force field around a task. Ever play with two magnets? If you orient the magnets properly and try to push them towards each other, they’ll repel fiercely. As you move them around, you can sort of feel out the edges of the magnetic field. And as you try to bring the magnets together, the field will push you back or off in another direction.
The mental block seems to work in the same way. It’s not particularly solid or visible, but you can sort of feel it around the edges. And the more you try to go towards it the more it pushes you away. And so, not surprisingly, you end up going in another direction.3
And just as you can’t get two repelling magnets to sit together just by pushing real hard — they’ll fling back as soon as you stop pushing — I’ve never been able to overcome this mental force field through sheer willpower. Instead, you have to be sneaky about it — you have to rotate a magnet.
So what causes the mental force field? There appear to be two major factors: whether the task is hard and whether it’s assigned.
Hard problems Break it down The first kind of hard problem is the problem that’s too big. Say you want to build a recipe organizing program. Nobody can really just sit down and build a recipe organizer. That’s a goal, not a task. A task is a specific concrete step you can take towards your goal. A good first task might be something like “draw a mockup of the screen that displays a recipe”. Now that’s something you can do.4
And when you do that, the next steps become clearer. You have to decide what a recipe consists of, what kind of search features are needed, how to structure the recipe database, and so on. You build up a momentum, each task leading to the next. And as your brain gets crunching on the subject, it becomes easier to solve that subject’s problems.
For each of my big projects, I think of all the tasks I can do next for them and add them to my categorized todo list (see above). And when I stop working on something, I add its next possible tasks to the todo list.
Simplify it Another kind of hard problem is the one that’s too complicated or audacious. Writing a book seems daunting, so start by doing an essay. If an essay is too much, start by writing a paragraph summary. The important thing is to have something done right away.
Once you have something, you can judge it more accurately and understand the problem better. It’s also much easier to improve something that already exists than to work at a blank page. If your paragraph goes well, then maybe it can grow into an essay and then into a book, little by little, a perfectly reasonable piece of writing all the way through..
Think about it Often the key to solving a hard problem will be getting some piece of inspiration. If you don’t know much about the field, you should obviously start by researching it — see how other people did things, get a sense of the terrain. Sit and try and understand the field fully. Do some smaller problems to see if you have a handle on it.
Assigned problems Assigned problems are problems you’re told to work on. Numerous psychology experiments have found that when you try to “incentivize” people to do something, they’re less likely to do it and do a worse job. External incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your “intrinsic motivation” — your natural interest in the problem. (This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology — over 70 studies have found that rewards undermine interest in the task.)5 People’s heads seem to have a deep avoidance of being told what to do.6
The weird thing is that this phenomenon isn’t just limited to other people — it even happens when you try to tell yourself what to do! If you say to yourself, “I should really work on X, that’s the most important thing to do right now” then all of the sudden X becomes the toughest thing in the world to make yourself work on. But as soon as Y becomes the most important thing, the exact same X becomes much easier.
Create a false assignment This presents a rather obvious solution: if you want to work on X, tell yourself to do Y. Unfortunately, it’s sort of difficult to trick yourself intentionally, because you know you’re doing it.7 So you’ve got to be sneaky about it.
One way is to get someone else to assign something to you. The most famous instance of this is grad students who are required to write a dissertation, a monumentally difficult task that they need to do to graduate. And so, to avoid doing this, grad students end up doing all sorts of other hard stuff.
The task has to both seem important (you have to do this to graduate!) and big (hundreds of pages of your best work!) but not actually be so important that putting it off is going to be a disaster.
Don’t assign problems to yourself It’s very tempting to say “alright, I need to put all this aside, hunker down and finish this essay”. Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing something, like saying “alright, if I just finish this essay then I’ll go and eat some candy”. But the absolute worst of all is to get someone else to try to force you to do something.
All of these are very tempting — I’ve done them all myself — but they’re completely counterproductive. In all three cases, you’ve basically assigned yourself a task. Now your brain is going to do everything it can to escape it.
Make things fun Hard work isn’t supposed to be pleasant, we’re told. But in fact it’s probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you’re trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.
So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it’s fun. And if it isn’t, then you need to make it fun.
I first got serious about this when I had to write essays for college. Writing essays isn’t a particularly hard task, but it sure is assigned. Who would voluntarily write a couple pages connecting the observations of two random books? So I started making the essays into my own little jokes. For one, I decided to write each paragraph in its own little style, trying my best to imitate various forms of speech. (This had the added benefit of padding things out.)8
Another way to make things more fun is to solve the meta-problem. Instead of building a web application, try building a web application framework with this as the example app. Not only will the task be more enjoyable, but the result will probably be more useful.
Conclusion There are a lot of myths about productivity — that time is fungible, that focusing is good, that bribing yourself is effective, that hard work is unpleasant, that procrastinating is unnatural — but they all have a common theme: a conception of real work as something that goes against your natural inclinations.
And for most people, in most jobs, this may be the case. There’s no reason you should be inclined to write boring essays or file pointless memos. And if society is going to force you to do so anyway, then you need to learn to shut out the voices in your head telling you to stop.
But if you’re trying to do something worthwhile and creative, then shutting down your brain is entirely the wrong way to go. The real secret to productivity is the reverse: to listen to your body. To eat when you’re hungry, to sleep when you’re tired, to take a break when you’re bored, to work on projects that seem fun and interesting.
It seems all too simple. It doesn’t involve any fancy acronyms or self-determination or personal testimonials from successful businessmen. It almost seems like common sense. But society’s conception of work has pushed us in the opposite direction. If we want to be more productive, all we need to do is turn around.
Further reading If you want to learn more about the pscyhology of motivation, there is nothing better than Alfie Kohn. He’s written many articles on the subject and an entire book, Punished by Rewards, which I highly recommend.
I hope to address how to quit school in a future essay, but you should really just go out and pick up The Teenage Liberation Handbook. If you’re a computer person, one way to quit your job is by applying for funding from Y Combinator. Meanwhile, Mickey Z’s book The Murdering of My Years features artists and activists describing how they manage to make ends meet while still doing what they want.
Notes Believe it or not, I actually have written in subways. It’s easy to come up with excuses as to why you’re not actually working — you don’t have enough time before your next appointment, people are making noise downstairs, etc. — but I find that when the inspiration strikes me, I can actually write stuff down on a subway car, where it’s absurdly loud and I only have a couple minutes before I have to get out and start walking. ↩
The same problem exists for sleep. There’s nothing worse than being too tired to go to bed — you just feel like a zombie. ↩
Now it turns out I experience this same phenomenon in another area: shyness. I often don’t want to call a stranger up on the phone or go talk to someone at a party and I have the exact same mental field pushing me off in some other direction. I suspect this might be because shyness is also a trait that results from a problematic childhood. (See “Assigned problems”.) Of course, this is all very speculative. ↩
While the terminology I use here (“next concrete step”) is derived from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, a lot of the principles here are (perhaps even unconsciously) applied in Extreme Programming (XP). Extreme Programming is presented as this system for keeping programs organized, but I find that a lot of it is actually good advice for avoid procrastination.
For example, pair programming automatically spreads the mental weight of the task across two people as well as giving people something useful to do during lower-quality time. Breaking a project down into concrete steps is another key part of XP, as is getting something that works done right away and improving on it (“Simplify it” infra). And these are just the things that aren’t programming-specific. ↩
For a fantastic overview of the literature, see Alfie Kohn, Punished By Rewards. This specific claim is drawn from his article Challenging Behaviorist Dogma: Myths About Money and Motivation. ↩
I originally simply assumed this was somehow biological, but Paul Graham pointed out it’s more likely learned. When you’re little, your parents try their best to manipulate you. They say do your homework and your mind tries to wriggle free and think about something else. Soon enough the wriggling becomes habit. Either way, it’s going to be a tough problem to fix. I’ve given up trying to change this; now I try to work around it. ↩
Richard Feynman tells a story about how he was trying to explore his own dreams, much the way I’ve tried to explore my own procrastination. Each night, he’d try to observe what happened to himself as he fell asleep:
I’m dreaming one night as usual, making observations, … and then I realize I’ve been sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is soft. I think, “Aha! That’s why I’ve been able to make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head and I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I’ll stop making observations on this one and go into deeper sleep.”
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow … my brain had invented false reasons as to why I shouldn’t [observe my dreams] any more. (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 50)
Your brain is a lot more powerful than you are. ↩
So, for example, instead of writing “By contrast, Riis doesn’t quote many people.”, I wrote: “Riis, however, whether because of a personal deficit in the skill-based capacity required for collecting aurally-transmitted person-centered contemporaneous ethnographies into published paper-based informative accounts or simply a lack of preference for the reportage of community-located informational correspondents, demonstrates a total failure in producing a comparable result.”
The professor, apparently seriously desensitized to bad writing, never seemed to realize I was joking (despite going over the paper with me one-on-one!). ↩
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