Beware Tractability Bias | Scott H Young

A task could be broken down. And by exploring difficulties it entails, the space becomes more valuable as the competition reduces. Tractable tasks are easier. But that also means there is more competition. Paul Graham argues this to be a major factor behind the success of companies like Stripe.

Not all important work is intractable. But it is the intersection of intractability and importance that stymies us. Paying deliberate attention to that overlap matters, because we’re more likely to neglect it.

We can make changes in our productivity systems to shift away from the easy satisfaction of checking off to-do items.

1. Elevate the status of your sincere attempts. Measure your day with progress than hours, this naturally pushes to more tractable tasks.
2. Narrow your focus to the “real” work. Keep a deep work tally. It prevents you from counting emailing and others that distorts away from more central challenges.
3. Simply stop tracking. If a metric misleads, it may be better to stop paying attention to it. If counting the books read is keeping you from doing the important tasks, stop counting.

It’s hard to feel progress when sieging a castle. With multiple attempts, failures teach you one more thing that wouldn't work in the situation. One would have to wait for failures to end and a breakthrough to finally come. There’s no progress bar because the distance is still unknown.

Real progress occurs when we hold the maxim that it is better to fail at what matters than to succeed at something trivial.