Productivity: Working towards a summary of what we know

[-]Raemon8y250

The approaches listed here are essentially the approaches I've adopted over the past few years (reading many of the same books). But I want to flag that there's an alternate approach some people have argued for, which isn't represented here, roughly summarize as "the integrated approach" or "the non-adversarial approach."

i.e. My entire productivity scheme is about outwitting my baser instincts. Facebook automatically disabled for hours at a time every day. My computer automatically turns off every half hour between 11pm and 7am. I train habits to reduce willpower costs, etc. My inner monkey (and inner lizard) are crazy and "I" (my inner sage) just try to not even give them the option of messing up my inner sage's plans.

But there's an alternate approach that's more about integrating your various desires. Dialoging between the part of your brain that wants to veg-out on Netflix and the part that wants to work on writing and the part that wants to prepare for interviews at day-jobs you expect to hate.

And the goal is something like

a) figure out what all those parts want

b) actually explore the evidence until all pieces of you actually share a common conception of how the world works. i.e. both understanding that if you watch netflix all day you'll run out of money and this is bad, and have a plan to acquire money that your monkey-brain actually believes in. (whereas sometimes people have latched onto a crude plan like "if I work harder and use more willpower I will have more money", which the monkey is rightfully skeptical of).

c) don't rely on willpower - using willpower is evidence that you are doing something suboptimally. You should use willpower to metaphorically move a boulder onto a hill, and then let the downhill move the boulder the rest of the way to its destination

I haven't actually gotten this to work for me. I know of a few people who seem to make it work for them. My impression is that it's more up-front effort but ends with a more powerful sort of productivity that you get by trying to outwit yourself.

[-][anonymous]8y70

See Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares for a sequence on how to get to this sort of mindset: http://mindingourway.com/guilt/

ePUB version here: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/rFrefJgPvYkdtG7Pt/nate-soares-replacing-guilt-series-compiled-in-epub-format

I think the way I approach productivity falls more into the camp you describe, and I'm glad to see more being written up about it, like this comment.

[-]Adam Zerner8y20

I think this comment mainly applies to the sections on preventing procrastination and on following through.

Thank you for bringing this up! I should have mentioned this initially. I updated the post to make a note of it. Personally I am skeptical of the integrated approach, but I don't know much about it and am interested in hearing from those who do.

[-]Chris_Leong8y10

"Don't rely on willpower" - I've seen a lot of guides talk about the importance of habit so as to minimise the amount of willpower required.

[-]ozymandias8y160

The biggest pieces of advice I have are:

(1) Try things. Testing most productivity hacks is really cheap. Try it for a week and if you don't have a noticeable success, stop doing it. Most things you'll try might fail, and that's fine; you only lost a few days of effort.

(2) Don't be afraid to switch things up if they've stopped working for you. For example, I've been feeling pretty sick in the morning lately, so I moved my recreational time from the evening to the morning. Just because evening recreational time worked great for me in the past doesn't mean it's suited for me right now.

(3) If you're mentally ill, don't assume that you can't pay any attention to productivity advice until you're better. Yes, there's a cap on how well you'll do as long as you're still mentally ill; yes, advice specific to your mental illness will probably also help. But productivity advice can make the difference between a totally wasted day and two hours of good work.

[-]waveman8y100

This is a beautifully written article and a model for other lesswrongers to consider. Thank you.

A couple of thoughts...

A trigger action plan for when it's time to take a break: When you are feeling frustrated and irritated it may be time for a break. Not just "this is hard" but "I am getting nowhere".

The importance of systems. If things in your life are annoying you, maybe you don't have a good system for them. Find the best way to organize the thing (or decide not to do it, or to outsource it, etc) and then do that. After a few months these systems become effortless habits. Deciding whether you feel like going to the gym is not a good use of brainpower. Is it Wednesday morning 7am (alarm goes off)? Yes ? Am I sick? No? Go to gym.

[-]James Brooks8y80

Thanks for compiling this. It's frustrating that there isn't an indepth resource of productivity tecnhiques that you can sort by epistemic rigour and effect size. (e.g. <https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence-summaries/teaching-learning-toolkit> ) I think it would be a fantasic resource for the community if we could create this but it's a lot of work. Corectly reading the research is not easy (on that point you have got Mental Contrasting wrong) but would be needed for something like this to be valuable.

[-][anonymous]8y70

I think this is a very good post that captures a lot of useful information.

I admit, though, that I did not read all of it, and I merely went through to see what might be new to me / how you categorized the different things.

Slight tangent:

I worry about the practicality of writing rationality stuff and how the medium affects the practice. Like, to what extent does writing something like this have an impact on allowing people to actually learn / execute on such skills?

EX: There seem to be pedgagoical techniques even in the writing medium that we could take more advantage of, e.g. Eliezer's old Advanced Epistemology 2012 sequence which gave readers puzzles to think about, or, if we allow the full power of interactivity, stuff like what what Coursera does with homework / quizzes.

One thing that seems important is the state that you're in when you read stuff / what the framing is. EX: If you're reading this stuff on your downtime and not at an opportunity where you can actively practice stuff, then the chance of this sort of info cashing out into real actionables is definitely lower.

(Of course I'm not saying there's no value in having stuff like this primed / available / integrated into your models. Just that there's a difference between that (which I think is what happens to most people when they read stuff like this) and actually going out into the world and doing stuff.)

It's often hard to do this when you've already got time going into trying to do other things; the right opportunities in your day that allow you to be actively engaged or doing deliberate practice seem limited.

So there seem to be a few things here:

1) One is about how we probably could improve the whole platform on which we're trying to teach rationality and extend it past these ridiculous essays (of which many of us are guilty of writing) and actually try applying more of the techniques regarding effective learning that we write about: stuff in the general vicinity of optimizing for reader consumption / takeaways.

2) Two is about how creating the affordances in 1) might not even be enough because doing basically anything well requires a dedicated level of attention and effort that most people have a limited budget of. Realistically, I expect only a few people who read a massive post like this to have it affect their real-life actions. There's still an intention-action gap here that we can't fully bridge via text. But it's not just this gap; it's also about how people don't always have enough of a budget to integrate this stuff because other things demand their limited attention.

3) Conflicting endgames: There's definitely a whole bunch of value in charting out and trying to summarize existing research into a nice synthesis. And this post is an example of that, so maybe the point isn't that we hope people can learn all of them from this post alone. But given that most productivity / research synthesis posts on LW look like this, I worry that we might conflate posts like these with posts that are designed to try and teach you a skill, which might look quite different. (I think operationalization, answering the question of "What does this abstract skill look like in practice?" is a huge part of it, and it's still largely neglected 'round these parts.)

[-]Adam Zerner8y20

Interesting thoughts. I agree that straight informational text like this probably isn't the most pedagogically effective.

[-]Raemon8y50

Small supplemental point (I think worth adding into the relevant section): Freedom.to is a variant on the SelfControl concept that lets you schedule regular sessions across all your devices. (i.e. I have my computers and iDevices all disable distracting sites during working and sleeping hours, with small breaks throughout the day)

Freedom costs money whereas self-control doesn't, but I've found it very worth it.

Freedom is slightly easier to circumvent if you're technically savvy and are dedicated to circumventing it - I found it valuable to "train" on SelfControl for awhile to get used to the idea that I had a thing I couldn't circumvent,

[-]Adam Zerner8y40

THANK YOU!!! I've updated my post to include Freedom, and am really excited to give it a shot myself.

I have some trouble resisting WSOP (an online poker app) and the Messages app, so the feature of blocking apps is something that I'm excited about.

I'm also excited about the schedules. Sometimes I forget to turn on SelfControl, and then find myself procrastinating. With schedules, that won't be a problem anymore!

[-]RainbowSpacedancer8y40

Great post! Some small formatting fixes that might help people searching this list.

'Exercise' the last section under 'Rest' isn't listed in the contents.

Two of the headings have non obvious renames for anyone doing a really quick skim. 'Expect to actually make progress' becomes 'Expect work to be effective' and 'Actually care about the task you're doing' becomes 'Increase the value of your task'.

[-]Adam Zerner8y20

Thanks!

'Exercise' the last section under 'Rest' isn't listed in the contents.

Fixed.

Two of the headings have non obvious renames for anyone doing a really quick skim. 'Expect to actually make progress' becomes 'Expect work to be effective' and 'Actually care about the task you're doing' becomes 'Increase the value of your task'.

I like "Expect work to be effective" over "Expect to actually make progress". The latter does indeed seem unclear. It seems to beg the question, "progress on what?". So I have updated the article to use the former.

However, I still like "Actually care about the task you're doing" over "Increase the value of your task". The latter seems unclear to me. It seems to beg the questions, "What does that mean? That I should do tasks that are more socially valuable? More likely to have me make progress towards my long term goals? Things I subjectively value?".

[-]romeostevensit8y40

I don't know the google trace for this off the top of my head, but I recall a systematic review of top tier innovators which found that the only truly consistent thing among all of them was ritualized walks (as in regular and intentional).

More broadly, my own efforts in this area output the upstream action of sharpening perceptual clarity, because I perceived the two biggest levers: noticing opportunities to chunk into deliberate practice, and noticing when impulses/palliatives were affecting me were both predicated on noticing. It worked far beyond what I naively guessed was possible.

Speaking to the efficacy of rituals: they help build the meta system of self trust which enables better coordination between the parts of yourself that care about vastly different things. Leak proof boxes are way more efficient for containing focused work. Internal parts that can trust boxes not to leak don't try to hijack core attention as often.

[-]bfinn4y30

Thanks for this - a useful resource.

As it happens I've read many books & web sites about productivity over the last decade or so, and made vast numbers of notes & mindmaps, though not organized it into a form suitable for dissemination like this. (I've had plans for a while to write up many new thoughts arising from all this research/thinking, but that's a big job.)

One recommendation arising: of the various authors I've read, the one with the most original and well-thought-through ideas (and usually, though not always, right IMO) is Mark Forster. His easiest read is his most recent book (being a bit of a listicle) - Secrets of Productive People: 50 Techniques To Get Things Done.

[-]benmiller2y10

Thank you for this deep dive into productivity strategies. The sections on "Uncrowd your mind" and breaking tasks into small, actionable steps really resonate with me. These strategies align with the cognitive principle that our brains can focus better when not juggling multiple, vague tasks. The granularity of breaking down overwhelming projects into digestible parts is a game-changer for productivity and mental clarity.

[-]Adam Zerner2y20

That's great to hear!

[-]Gordon Seidoh Worley8y10

I like this in that I have also noticed there is very little in the way of bundling up this kind of well-known how-to-live advice, so having it all in one place is possibly useful. I suspect why there's not a lot of this sort of thing, though, is that most of the value is in compiling the information and very little of it is in the reading of it.

One thing that I've discovered as I've successfully become more effective at shaping the world is that everyone was telling me all of this advice for ages but I either didn't believe it or didn't know how to use it. Simply knowing of it was not enough, and in fact often just knowing what to do led to weird anti-effective strategies of trying to cargo-cult the advice, like spending so much energy tracking and documenting tasks that there was little left over for actually doing said tasks.

Again, I think this is a great first step. After all, I knew all this stuff but hadn't bothered to really write it down anywhere (well, I sort of did try to do that once but not very well). The challenge seems to be how to share this knowledge in a way that people will pick it up, and if current self-help literature is any indication it seems to be a pretty tricky business.

[-]Raemon8y60

Related to this: there are several points in the article where you mention (but don't link) a book that explains a concept in more detail. (i.e. "Deep Work.")

And on one hand you have sort of summarized the core point of Deep Work... but part of the reason books like Deep Work or Peak are useful is because they provide lots of context and anecdotes and inspiring speeches that cause you to take the ideas seriously.

So another update I think'd be useful here is for each section to directly link to the places that explain things in more detail, with notes like "if you'd like to really act on this, here's an easy next step you can take right now."

[-]Adam Zerner8y20

Great points. Regarding the lack of links, I was thinking that I had linked to it enough and that it can be annoying to have too many links. But on second thought, I don't think it's actually that annoying, and I intend for this post to be very modular, so for the use case where someone just arrives at a particular section that doesn't have a link, well that wouldn't be good.

And on one hand you have sort of summarized the core point of Deep Work... but part of the reason books like Deep Work or Peak are useful is because they provide lots of context and anecdotes and inspiring speeches that cause you to take the ideas seriously.

I very much agree, thank you for making this point. I updated the post to make a note of this. I did try to include lots of links to resources that elaborated on what I was talking about. I guess I could have an explicit Further Reading section for each subsection of this post, but that sorta seems like overkill to me, especially since Deep Work and Peak would be recommended numerous times, which gets repetitive. So instead I just noted the resources that are used heavily in this post up front. That plus the links to blog posts and stuff within the section seems like it'd be enough.

What do you think?

[-]Chris_Leong8y20

"I suspect why there's not a lot of this sort of thing, though, is that most of the value is in compiling the information and very little of it is in the reading of it." - I don't expect that many people will get much value from this post if they simply read through it once. On the other hand, if they return to it a few times and scan through looking for techniques they haven't tried or which they were doing and got out of the habit of doing and experiment with it, I expect that it would have a significant effect. This is much easier when you have it all in the one place, instead of spread across a large number of articles.

[-]Adam Zerner8y20

I agree that difficulty seems to be in how to actually implement the advice, rather than simply knowing about the techniques.

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Productivity: Working towards a summary of what we know

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Slight tangent:

Epistemic effort

Meta

Other preliminary notes

High level outline

Lower level outline

Uncrowd your mind

Capture your tasks

Get small tasks out of the way

Break tasks into small actions

Underschedule

Deal with psychological issues

Develop your "focus muscles"

Embrace boredom

Deliberately train

Prevent procrastination

Remove temptations

Use schedules/planning

Use social pressure and precommitment

Record yourself

Expect work to be effective

Increase the value of your task

"Pregame" before deep work

Use routines/rituals

Utilize location

Think hard

Think hard

Utilize active recall

Utilize spaced repetition

Use a coach

Focus on the wildly important

Rest

Take time to decompress

Get enough sleep

Take naps

Take breaks when appropriate

Experience solitude

Exercise

Think easy

Perform "productive meditation"

Follow through

Reflect

Use a productivity cheat sheet

Reward yourself

Punish yourself

Departing advice: Don't make yourself crazy