Some people on some parts of the internet (I'm not going to give a constructive existence proof) seem to think that trying to be more productive means a lot of stress and driving yourself too hard. I think that's a wrong impression. At least for me, being more productive means finding relaxation and less stress, because I'm doing more and thinking less.
The trap I used to fall in a lot is analysis and overcomplication: if I just think hard enough, or come up with a clever enough strategy, I'll have an easy time solving the problem. But this is wrong.
One example from the gym is that I was having trouble keeping my shoulderblades back and down. I have decent amount of body control, so it seemed like I should just put the things in position, and that would help. However, I kept getting the same feedback: your shoulders are rolling forward. In the end, one of my coaches simply told me "stick your chest through", and that did help. Previously, I was thinking of where the shoulderblades should be, what muscles should cramp a little, etc. Instead, simply pushing the chest through as hard as I could fixed the problem.
Another example is fairly recent. A colleague posted a riddle in the chat: a spider sits on the origin of a 2d-plane. Every second, the spider takes a step in any integral direction: that is from (0, 0) it can go to (-1, 0), (1, 0), (0, 1), (0, -1), but also diagonally, to (-1, -1), (-1, 1), etc. Aside from these 8 possible steps, the spider can die. Assuming that all these alternatives occur with the same probability, what is the expected value of the (Euclidean) distance of the spider from the origin at its death?
It feels normal here to start applying your smarts to this problem, and think about distributions and integrals. Notice, for instance, that the distance travelled in the x-direction and the distance travelled in the y-direction are independent! In fact, I have been thinking about that for the last day and a half, because I want to find an analytical solution to the puzzle (I have yet to find it). However, what I did first was spend three minutes writing a Python script that simulates one million walks of the spider and calculates the mean. Turns out the answer to the puzzle is somewhere around 2.64.
Final example: the "Hair Dryer Incident". A woman with obsessive-compulsive disorder couldn't stop worrying she had turned off her hair-dryer. It was getting in the way of her career as she was driving home to check the hair dryer and missing meetings with clients as a result. She had been around the treatment block a couple times, medication, therapy, counselling, but nothing seemed to help. In the end, she found a psychologist who asked her "have you tried bringing the hair dryer with you?", and that worked! When she started to worry, she could just look at the hair dryer and know it wasn't plugged in.
The point I want to get at is this: most problems can be solved by doing something simple. If you are good at thinking about complicated things, that's not easy!
To connect this back to productivity, switching the gears from thinking to doing things has been the most important improvement in my own productivity. As a result, I experience less stress because I'm not "trying to do" so much.
Triggered by Dan Luu's excellent post on productivity and velocity. I'm not a dogmatist: your experience might not reflect my experience, sometimes I too need a kick in the butt to get things done instead of relaxing, etc. etc.
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