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Making Real Work More Tractable
We can make changes in our productivity systems to shift away from the easy satisfaction of checking off to-do items.
- Elevate the status of your sincere attempts. Measure your day with progress than hours, this naturally pushes to more tractable tasks.
- 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.
- 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.
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Sieging The Castle
Imagine a task of sieging a castle. First you try the front gate, and get repelled. Then you try the ramparts on the side. You dig tunnels and construct battering rams. Progress is zero until you finally break through.
Frustrations and fatigue mount with each failure.
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Thinking Real Progress
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 un...
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Tractability = 1/Opportunity
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 compani...
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Measuring Progress
We all crave progress. That craving distorts what and how we work on things. Vital pursuits with less tangible progress are frequently sidelined for trivialities we can check off a to-do list.
It's like waiting for a computer task to complete. Wouldn't it be harder if the progress ...
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438 reads
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
Making real work more tractable
There are efforts we can make in our productivity that can keep us from easy satisfaction.
- Elevate the status of your sincere attempts. Measure your day by the deep work you took on.
- Narrow what counts as the "real" work. Only keep...
Remote workers work more
Loving your job often means that you may be working more. It's harder to stop when you care.
It's deceptive to think that remote work means that you can start and stop whenever you want. Bloomberg reported that people who started working from home since the beginning of the pandemic ar...
Commit to your daily plan
- Eliminate disctractions that pull you away from your objectives for the day. Work with most of your desktop programs closed, your phone on silent, and your notifications off.
- Track your time. Tracking your time can help you work more effectively.
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