His math literally doesn't add up.
If you multi-task you need to ADD multiple multiplications, one for each task.
For example, if you perfectly divide all attention, time and effort in two tasks, you ideally get:
0.5 * 0.2 + 0.5 * 0.15 (given that the value of the first task is 0.2 and the value of the second task is 0.15)
One important point is likely, that there is overhead in multitasking, so the actual formula becomes 0.45 * 0.2 + 0.45 * 0.15 + 0.1 * 0
where 0.1 of the time is wasted in useless (value = 0) overhead (of switching tasks, getting into the zone and so on).
You may or may not enjoy spending time in this 'useless' overhead...
Multitask repetitive or time consuming tasks only. When I was in college I worked for a mom and pop type PC repair store.
Doing PC re-imaging, I set up 6 stations and would kick off one refresh and while it was running, start up the next one and so on. Using disks to install took ages, so I figured out how to make bootable USB sticks, so I would have all 6 or occasionally more (by stealing bench seats) stations humming away while I was also doing part upgrades or builds on another station, only pausing to check up on progress.
That is ideal multitasking, where you need to pay a small amount of attention to one arduous group of tasks and the remainder of your time is free to focus on fine detail high mental demand tasks with ease.
Right. It feels like Op uses wrong math but gets a good conclusion in the context of doing daily job: focus on one shit.
However, in general sense, the return of an investment is considered as random variable, so the problem is not just max value, but max value while minimizing risk, and the solution is multitask/portfolio
Your comment helps me. I think I'm getting closer to the mechanism of what causes me to procrastinate. When many tasks are due, all important but of tiny ROI, like washing dishes and vacuuming, I feel overwhelmed because my mind can't sort them by expected reward.
I also noticed that I engage in extreme procrastination when the rewards of a high effort task are uncertain. It's like my body recoils at the idea of expending energy unnecessarily. For example, creating a "portfolio-worthy side project" immediately queues up questions, "But I heard recruiters don't look at them. If they do they'll look at it for a second. What if they think my code sucks and I blow myself out instead?" Etc etc
If anyone has some sort of mental model or frame which they're conscious of in these situations, I would love to hear it. I started researching CBT for ADHD last night and now I have 30 tabs of research articles, infographics, blog posts, book reviews and god damn it if I didnt go and get stuck in Wikipedia instead...
+1. Your 0.1 estimate is an underestimate. Context switching is a very costly if I'm balls deep in a bug fix where I already need to care about 10 thinks. When I go back it's very easy to miss out on something which makes my productivity 0 because you introduced a new bug while fixing the older one lol.
This is meta, but I'm not a fan of this trend of adding a pull quote to add emphasis to a sentence that was never really lost in the text to begin with, e.g.,
Pull quotes in general usually irritate me. I'm sure there's a place for them, when done correctly. But usually I'll see things like you pointed out. Or worse, the pull quote will come from a paragraph far above it (and so no longer relevant to the section I'm currently in), or far below it (so way out of context; I haven't even got to that part yet!)
I think they made sense in a world filled with paper magazines. You could quickly pickup a magazine flip through pages and see if anything caught your eye, if so then you buy the magazine.
On the internet it only makes sense if people scroll through an article to decide if it's worth reading. Does anyone do that? I generally don't. The scroll bar tells me how long the article is, and the heading and subheading usually tells me if it's something I care about.
Pull quotes could still make sense for long articles (1600-2000+ words, which take 10+ minutes to read), especially in online magazines. For these lengthy articles, a reader could be interested from the heading and subheading, but then stop reading or skim a section due to the length.
I do skim through articles that are a time commitment to read to decide if it's worth reading in full, but I generally look for section headings (e.g. that would let an article be split into multiple shorter articles). If there aren't any, pull quotes are decent strings to look for; and if not, it's manual skimming to better understand the structure (e.g. the first sentence of each paragraph).
Maybe. I still think just heading and subheading would suffice. However, if pull quotes are used, they should function as links to bring you to the part that caught your interest and to give context for the quote. Or, alternatively, provide that context in a pop-up on hover, with the quote itself bolded.
This mentality seems like a recipe for procrastination. Yes it would great if I always could be at my optimal functioning for whatever task is at hand. This never happens and my brain tries to convince me that I am too tired, hungry, or whatever else before starting an important task.
On the very important areas of my life, it is much more helpful that I do something each day to try to make progress. On the busiest or hardest days, this might just be watching 5 minutes of a video on that topic. That keeps up my habit of doing something and makes it less likely that I will forget things.
If I am 100% productive at doing something that isn't important, the result on my life is no progress.
I was never a strong math student but this is the kind of math I can get behind--not strictly logical, but also analogical. It tells a story, and the significance is partly up to the reader. For the specific case of "when we operate at a fraction we compromise output" I find it to be extremely true in my own life. This is about more than focus, it's about intention, and beginning with the end in mind. When I approach a task with an "ugh guess I have to do this" attitude, I inevitably slack off, take too many breaks, and end up with a worse experience than if I had simply begun with the attitude of "this is what I will do now and I will use the powers available to me to do it correctly and as quickly as is reasonable." I suspect most people could benefit from something like the author's post-it by their desk to remind them at every moment of the very real power they have to create better outcomes in everything they do.
I was thinking of something more like Drake's equation.
P = T * Hbar * Cbar^Dh * E * (Po)^N
P = Productivity
T = Tiredness
Hbar = 2PI/(HackerNews posts read)
Cbar = 2PI/(speed of light)
Dh = Disruptions per hour
E = Environment
Po = Productivity of people you work with
N = Number of people you work with
I thought that was yesterdays thinking, last I heard "mindfulness" as-in forcing your brain to fully concentrate on just one thing is not good for our brains and they are not good at it.
I was shoving a sandwich in my mouth while I was reading the article.
I start most days with 1 hour of manual labor required for my side business which doesn't require mental effort. Because I am not behind schedule, maximizing productivity is not the goal so I simultaneously listen to an educational podcast.
Is there anyone that would argue that one would benefit, perhaps mentally, from not listening to a podcast when doing routine manual labor ? Maybe trying to work 2x speed first and then listening to the podcast 2x after ? Note I do not consider sweeping/cleaning mentioned in someone else example as routine labor since there is something unique about every cleaning operation.
This is some top-notch clickbait coupled with some serious fabrication. I have serious doubts this guy dreamt about this, but boy it made a really "gripping" introduction to this breakthrough on productivity!
Also, first he's an astrophysicist, and then later, he's a rocket scientist. Which one is it? My money is on neither, but I'm sure he has a fancy degree.
Little's Lemma directly relates work in process to throughput.
Replace customer with "work" and you have a simple equation to transform your productivity, not some millenial woo-woo resume-boosting nonsense like in this post.
L = Lambda * W
L = Avg. number of customers in system
Lambda = Avg. customer arrival rate
W = Avg. time customer spends in system
If this post resonated with anyone, you might want to check out Deep Work by Cal Newport. Similar idea—in our distracted world, the ability to sit and focus on one thing is becoming increasingly important, and rare. I enjoyed it a lot.
i dont know about this. i cant get on the treadmill/elliptical unless there is some soccer match or action film streaming on the tv.... I could focus on the pain of doing exercise but that seems to be counter productive...
Actually, next time, why not try focusing on the pain? I do this sometimes when I run. Instead of trying to ignore the pain, really focus on it, and sense what it is about it that’s discomforting, and when you realize that it’s not going to harm you in any significant way, it kind of loses its power over you and you sort of accept it and keep going.
Although I am not a mathematician, and this article isn't actually about math, I had a realization in college that the entire number space really is stored between 0 and 1. In this space, 1 is actually 0 and 0 is infinity.
> If you multiply two numbers together, shouldn’t the result be greater than each part?
Well, it is. 0.16 is bigger than 0.2 and 0.8, because it has 3 digits instead of 2, and 16 is bigger than 2 and 8. (and 4/25 is obviously bigger than 1/5 and 4/5 too)
The problem actually is to (really) understand that the opposite is true. As soon as the denominators are different enough, we can't easily (just by looking at the numbers) compare two fractions like 26551/3690 and 26545/3689
I think "productivity tricks" and stuff like this are similar to regular diet and exercise. There is a vast market of people willing to sell you whatever you want to hear as it's much easier than, you know, just doing the thing you're supposed to do. Every time I see some "crazy new diet" or "8 minute abs" style thing I always mutter to myself: "anything but a conservative diet and regular exercise"
> "When people meet a great leader, they often say, “She made me feel like I was the only person in the room.” Imagine giving that type of complete attention to everything you do—and making that thing the only thing in the room."
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." ― Alan Watts.
(In the sense that physically doing nothing else, but secretly thinking about other things, is also distraction).
I never really considered myself a 'true' zen practitioner, but years ago I did regular zen retreats. It included sitting meditation, walking meditation, a mindful lunch with other practitioners, and... chores. (Maybe they used a different word - I don't recall.) One time I spent our ~hour washing dishes. Another time, sweeping the zendo.
The point of it, beyond contributing to the greater community, was to do these chores mindfully. There was no higher spirituality to it; just be present. When washing dishes, I was only focusing on washing, rinsing, drying, and putting them away. When sweeping, I was only sweeping the floor to collect dirt. When I collected the dirt, I was only collecting it. And so on. It sounds a bit silly, but it was a tremendous practice to force yourself to only do one thing and to think about that thing while you're doing it.
You said you participated in that years ago. In my recent past I accumulated hundreds of hours of meditation.
Do you see any lasting benefits from your experiences? I personally still struggle with focus and attentiveness, especially when the demand is external. I haven't concluded whether I wasted my time, or if I need to get back to meditating. It's time-consuming!
From the meditation, no. Unfortunately, that was during the season of my life when I had very young kids, and I was dedicating myself to work. Consequently, I struggled with devoting time to sitting and not thinking. I was trying to bootstrap a good practice, so Zen retreats were a great way to force myself to do it. It wasn't sustainable, though: where I lived, there was no local group (the retreats were >1hr away). So I didn't actually do a ton of meditation.
However, I feel like the retreats were a positive for me, albeit not in the same way that meditation might be. Sitting, walking, and doing "work practice" (the term they used) mindfully gave me a great perspective shift. I found doing dishes truly enjoyable and worth my effort even if it wasn't changing the world.
Maybe I enjoyed it so much because of my personality. Or maybe the retreats helped me appreciate silence and downtime, thereby changing my personality. I can stand in line at the grocery store without needing to be entertained by my phone, which is a herculean effort for many people I know. It's too hard to say :)
If you are peeling the potatoes and have a bit of whole-hearted potato peeling and then immediately go off "wow, I was really focused there, what Zen potato peeling!" for a minute, well, those thoughts are not Zen spirituality. It's a common problem with reading or listening to stories about whole-hearted activity - one fills up with "Zen thoughts" for a while.
It is a good example of absorption when the objects and subjects drop away leaving just the action. However, as the Sutra’s say: “to encounter the absolute is not yet enlightenment.” One can argue with family in the same zone of full attention and ease of effortless action.
I don't dislike Alan Watts, but by his own admission he is an entertainer. If you're actually interested in zen the best place to start is with the texts:
Strongly disagree. The playful nature that Alan Watts conveys ideas with completely blew my mind. He combined so many influences. Entertaining or not by his own admission, it’s a hundred, a thousand times more accessible. At its core it is also so much more transmissible back to the day to day life as an organism on this planet. I still have yet to encounter anything like it. The stuff you list right here reeks of long study in a library to me. There are gurus who sit for hours every day meditating, eat their single bowl of rice, clean the temple, sleep on hard stone. And there are gurus who drink, smoke, and laugh, wandering the countryside. A thousand ways indeed. I know which path I prefer. I think of Alan as the latter, whatever he may have said. Play is at the core of the deep lessons, for me. So him straying towards that side rings much more true.
I would start with this short series of animated Alan Watts lectures by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VvrfnE7Q-0w, listen to some of his lectures (the ones where he’s drinking are often the best), read The Book, and then just have fun with all the other books/content he put out there. Alongside it, dive into the deep texts, Zen, the Vedanta, etc.
Wouldn't the natural behaviour of thinking about other things while peeling potatoes be an advantage, instead of a disadvantage to be solved with Zen?
Many discoveries or solutions to problems (from scientific to the everyday) are found on walks when the mind is working on problems in the background, and I believe this creativity could be lost with mindfulness of the current activity all of the time.
I don't pretend to be a Buddhist or Zen student, but as I understand it the advantage comes from understanding another Buddhist idea, that desire causes suffering.
When you want a big car and you don't have one, you suffer. When you want to keep up with the neighbours and cannot, you suffer. When you desire to be out of the cold, you suffer both coldness and unfulfilled desire. If you released your desire to be out of the cold, you would experience coldness, not suffer it.[1] From that kind of thinking, desiring to solve problems and worrying that you cannot is a suffering. Desiring to solve problems so people look up to you is a suffering. Desiring to make the most out of every moment and not waste time "merely peeling potatoes" because you want to be better, smarter, cleverer, more productive, more important, living a more exiciting or higher status life than people who merely peel potatoes is a suffering.
Go through life from start to finish like a river, the river does not seek to be somewhere else, to do something else, to be more or less than it is. Nor will you escape aging, disease, and death, by thinking about other things while peeling potatoes. Nor will you have a better life by solving problems while peeling potatoes, for everything is body sensations and breathing and seeing and hearing, from the cheapest clothes to the most expensive, from the cheapest hut to the luxuryiest apartment, the lables 'cheap', 'luxury', 'comfortable', 'uncomfortable', 'homely', 'ugly', are labels in our heads taught to us by marketers trying to sow social discord and sell products. You have potatoes to peel, peel them. Attend to the movement of your fingers, the sharpness of the blade, the pulsing of your heartbeat, the firmness of the flesh, the way the peel falls, the mud, the splashing water, the scent of raw vegetable, would it be different if you were peeling Venusian potatoes dressed in Flash Gordon shiny silver spaceclothes in a Dyson Swarm pod? Well, I'd rather someone else peeled the potatoes while I did something more exciting, you say, sitting at your computer reading this on HN having an unexciting life, waiting year after year for your exciting life to start, desiring it, suffering for its lack, sadly aware that you have teeth to brush, hands to wash, food to prepare, possibly potatoes to peel, in the imminent future.
[1] the only way I can make sense of this is to be willing to accept that it may result in physical pain, damage, even the end of your life, and accept that, too. Desiring to prolong your life when you cannot do so, is suffering also. Desire for a healthy body when you are injured, is suffering. If you can go inside out of the cold, do so. Take action, have a preference. But if you cannot, do not. [If you can avoid peeling potatoes, and wish to do that, do so. If you cannot, do not]. Do not add suffering by longing for log fires and blankets and hot tea, and self-chastising for letting yourself get stuck outside, or resenting your coworkers or family who dragged you out, or your bad luck for your bus to be late, and so on. If 'experiencing cold' is your life now, then experience it attentively and do a good job of it. [I believe it goes on that the physical discomfort becomes a sensation like speech becomes noise, and then people have surgeries without anaesthetic not because they can stop feeling sensations but because they can stop desiring to not feel pain, they can experience sensations without labelling them as "pain" and needing them to stop.].
I am not very familiar with the cult, but this just seems like regular self-help advice. Could someone explain how this relates to a sex cult(based on the wikipedia article)?
> In 1998, Raniere and Nancy Salzman founded NXIVM, a personal development company offering "Executive Success Programs" (ESP) and a range of techniques for self-improvement
The leader used all sorts of mathy pseudologic to make connections between equations and human feelings. It managed to gain some pretty smart members in spite of the bullshit.
I have a similar "math" equation; who knows, I might write a blogpost about it one day.
It relates Boyle's law to productivity. It goes something like this:
Boyle's law, or the ideal gas equation is: PV = nRT
Pressure, Volume, and Temperature.
n is the number of 'moles' of the substance in question
R is a constant which is specific to the gas in question (whose pressure, volume and temperature one might fluctuate)
I find that this equation also describes nicely 'academic' work (or software work, or this kind of work)
and for the sake of using the same letters, even though other letters might have been better, hahah
we'll define
P = Professionalism (i.e. Quality of output, or personal standards of quality)
V = Volume (or amount) of work that can / is expected to be done
n = Number of projects one is undertaking at the same time
R = A 'constant' unique to the individual
T = time available / allocated for the work
First, let's define R exactly.
It is a constant, unique to the individual (under constant circumstances), describing the quality that can be expected, for a single unit of work (on a single project), for a unit of time allocated.
While R is a 'constant', this does not mean that it cannot change - indeed it can change due to circumstances ... but that means that your R has changed. E.g. burnout, psychology etc. Or motivation on the other end.
But for the purposes of studying your work output as a closed system, it is a constant.
And this is a very important part of this realisation.
So
the main parts of the system, are P, V, and T.
In boyle's law, this says that, given constant pressure, an accompanying increase in temperature must be accompanied by an increase in volume. Or given constant volume, increase in temperature must be accompanied by an increase in pressure, etc.
When it comes to work:
An increase in volume of work, must necessarily lead to:
- either an increase in time allocated for the work
- or a reduction in expected quality.
This, btw, was the insight that kickstarted this analogy, because there's a famous dilbert comic effectively saying the same thing (let me try and find it quickly...)
So. Let's examine keeping the other variables constant.
Expected professionalism / quality of output needs to improve. This necessarily means that
- Volume of work needs to be reduced, given for the same deadline.
- Time allocated needs to go up for the same amount of work
Let's examine time. The deadline has been pushed forward:
- Volume necessarily must go down, or
- Quality must go down.
The other directions also lead to nice insights.
You just got an extension. If you choose to use up this allocated time, you can choose to:
- Try to improve quality of already existing material (i.e. procrastination, lol)
- Try to improve amount of work at the same quality
Your volume has gone down (an unexpected project is now off the table). Do you:
- Choose to finish things up on time
- Improve the quality, but stick to the same deadline (i.e. Parkinson's Law / Procrastination) :p
Your boss has told you that you can afford to not be so nitpicky. Do you
- Do more work at a lower quality.
- Finish things up faster.
etc etc
Now. Let's attack n
When talking about Boyle's law, there are two versions (kinda).
PV = cT vs PV = nRT the difference being, in the latter case, we assume we're dealing with n moles of the same gas, whereas the former is general enough to assume generic volume, which may be of a mixture of gases
Therefore
If one is talking about n 'projects', which can be interpreted to all carry more or less the same volume of required work
e.g. "how many experiments do I need to conduct for my PhD"
then PV=nRT is appropriate.
otherwise you should be a bit more generic and treat 'volume' as a more generic "amount of work" situation
however, the n offers another insight into this work model.
meaning
"One way to improve quality / reduce workload / save time, is to stop bloody accepting every project you're offered"
(guilty as charged )
which could totally also mean personal projects, such as learning monads for absolutely fuck all reason
or
conversely
the case of increasing n - "by all means take up more projects, as long as you feel you can handle the increase in volume, or the increase in time you will have to spend, or the reduction in quality on all your other projects"
or something like that
now, here's where it all comes together.
I would like to believe, that in any reasonable employment, one is hired for their (perceived) R
at least as perceived at the time of interview :p
which, can be considered a "constant" in closed system terms.
however
the system is not really 'closed'.
E.g. burnout will invariably reduce your R. This means that for the same expectation of quality, and allocated time, you will be able to produce less volume of work (or alternatively, for the same deliverables, you'll only be able to do less work)
UNFORTUNATELY, for someone like me, this is an emotionally negative path
which risks reducing your R even further in a vicious cycle of psychological negativity
therefore, what we tend to consider first, is increasing T as a counterbalance
i.e. "I'll work more hours than I should"
problem is, this is not sustainable, and often serves to reduce your R even further, compounding the problem
Furthermore, if you have made the mistake of creating false expectations in your bosses about a high R
but this high R comes (possibly unbeknownst to them) from an artificially inflated T, rather than from a genuinely organically high R constant
then this will lead to more V, or possibly a higher expectation of P ... even when time T is suddenly unavoidably low
etc etc ... I'm sure you can think of similar scenarios / cautionary tales
In any case, what PV=nRT has done for me is the following:
If my bosses ask me to increase V, with no increase in T, I am now unashamedly willing to reduce my P
rather than steal T from personal time and suffer consequences that at the end of the day make things worse by 'opening' the system and affecting my R
and in fact, people seem to expect this
I have battled with my psychological aversion of low P for a while, but this thought helps me do it without suffering the negative thoughts so much.
"It will not reflect badly on me if my quality drops. I should simply point out it's a natural cause of the reduction of the other variables in a closed system"
And my employer should NOT expect me to change my R
In other words, they should not expect me to:
"Do better work (without giving me the right ammunition to do so)"
"Increase my workload (without giving me the time and resources required for it"
"Finish this quickly" (without helping me mitigate my workload, or expecting the same effort and quality)
And also, it has made me a bit more pragmatic about saying no to projects, even though they could benefit me (genuinely or not).
Or at least, it has taken away much of the guilt for not doing those projects even though they're on my list etc.
How does technical debt fit into the whole PV=nRT framework.
The story goes like this. "We have n tasks. Unit tests are an extra task. We don't have time for n+1 tasks"
In reality, technical debt is not an additive, it's a modifier. It applies a modifier a to the current task, and a modifier b to all related tasks after it.
So it's more like having E[n] = 1 * a + (n-1) * b, where a > 1, and 0 < b < 1
E.g. if writing a unit test makes your task double, but your remaining tasks now take half the time, then you didn't really make n into n+1 with unit tests, you made n become 2 + (n-2)/2
So, for the above (admittedly unrealistic) modifiers, if you have 8 projects to do, and you're thinking should I do unit tests
In your mind you may be thinking, fukit, I can't afford to do 16 tasks instead of 8 (i.e. 8 tasks plus 8 unit tests)
But because geometric processes are so hard to reason with, it's hard to see the benefit, but the benefit is massive!
octave:16> f = @(n) 2 * n;
octave:17> g = @(n) 4 - 2 .^ (2-n);
octave:18> [ f(1:8); g(1:8) ]
ans =
2.0000 4.0000 6.0000 8.0000 10.0000 12.0000 14.0000 16.0000
>As a result, our output suffers. What we produce becomes less than what we put in. We achieve only an iota of what we’re capable.
This is assuming output is multiplicative. Output is usually additive if you're an employee as you only reap benefits in terms of salary. Thus it is in your best interest as an employee to apply 0.8.
For an entrepreneur output is multiplicative because your output scales with customers. As an entrepreneur it is in your best interest to apply all your effort as when more customers use your product you gain more benefit.
Several comments take issue with that same quote but fail to grasp the context: it was his naive dream-self who had this thought.
> But in the dream, I was staring at this equation as a mathematical beginner, completely befuddled by the result. How could that be? If you multiply two numbers together, shouldn’t the result be greater than each part?
When people share stories online and forums such as HN take parts out of context to insult the author, it’s a horrible experience.
0.5 * 0.2 + 0.5 * 0.15 (given that the value of the first task is 0.2 and the value of the second task is 0.15)
One important point is likely, that there is overhead in multitasking, so the actual formula becomes 0.45 * 0.2 + 0.45 * 0.15 + 0.1 * 0 where 0.1 of the time is wasted in useless (value = 0) overhead (of switching tasks, getting into the zone and so on).
You may or may not enjoy spending time in this 'useless' overhead...