
What Does it Mean to Work Hard? - bhousel
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/11/29/what-does-it-mean-to-work-hard/
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petercooper
I take issue with:

 _It is work if it will impact something that will be evaluated by others, and
if their reactions will have consequences for you that you care about._

And:

 _Take 24 hours, subtract sleep time, subtract the time you are focused on
doing something where there is no customer. The rest is work._

I believe it is more useful to divide between _leisure_ and _occupation_ , as
Seneca (1 BC-65 AD) did in _On the Shortness of Life_. In this sense, one can
be preoccupied entirely with his own thoughts and affairs and still not be at
leisure.

The post's author, Venkat, appears to consider that a third party is necessary
for an activity to be "work" but, as Seneca argues, would you consider "that
man leisured who arranges with anxious precision his Corinthian bronzes"?
Indeed, the first commenter on the article - `dybyedx` - similarly argues: _We
sometimes do not realize how much work we do to satisfy our toughest customers
— ourselves. In that sense, it is much easier to define relaxation and not
work._

~~~
angelbob
I suppose I'd say that the Corinthian bronzes are being arranged in order to
impress somebody. It's a difficult line, I'll grant you -- a religious man is
often rushing to serve God, for instance. That's an interesting line since the
customer need not be human, nor observable in His reaction.

Perhaps more exactly, it impacts someone or something you _feel_ to be outside
yourself? That's harder to measure for others, but may be exactly as easy to
measure for you, as the worker or leisurer.

~~~
derefr
To use an outdated term, something is stressful if it impacts your _superego_
—whether or not there is a real person expecting some property X of you, the
need to be/do/have X has been wired into you, through socialization, as a
terminal goal that you must reach in order to be happy. Alternatively,
something can be stressful if it impacts your _id_ (I use this term more for
parallel structure than utility): you can instinctually crave X (such as high-
calorie food, or sex, or status, or survival in the face of near death.) And
either one will cause X to be considered stressful _along with_ as any pursuit
instrumental to achieving X, however many levels removed.

On the other hand, if you can draw a line in your hierarchy of instrumental
goals and say "goals below this line do not affect pursuits above this line,
except in-so-much as I decide it to be so (through a bet or somesuch)", then
you partition the stress into the hierarchy above, and create leisure in the
hierarchy below. In game design, this line is termed the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_(synthetic_worlds)> .

Of course, something can be both leisureful and stressful: if you take a
stressful pursuit and then add the pursuit of _mastery_ within it, you can
usually make it feel like (stressful) fun. The pursuit of mastery is simply
the push, for its own sake, to work at a higher, and more quickly increasing,
level of skill than you would if simply working for consequence; because of
this, mastery sometimes overwhelms the need to recognize the consequences of
the work at all, at which point the work becomes leisure (i.e., if you
practice until you are winning tournaments 100% of the time, the consequences
of losing a tournament cease to matter. If you grind levels in a video game,
the bosses cease to matter. And so on.)

~~~
DanielStraight
Is there any way I can take these principles and use them to motivate myself
to work harder / get more done?

~~~
derefr
If you want to get more done at the expense of stress, you can easily find
some way to attach your goals to a parent goal that will embody such stress
into them. Make the affections of a member of the opposite sex dependent on
completing your goal, for example (find someone who thinks chiseled abs are
attractive, and set yourself to dating them => you will stress out about
getting chiseled abs.) Hypothetically, if you knew this trick when you were a
child, you could make your parents act disappointed if you didn't do X—that
would impress into you a _great desire_ to do X, though you _would_ reject
doing X for a period of about 10 years at some point or another, coming back
to it afterward. Obviously, make eating dependent on X—this is one reason why
startups can be "exhilarating."

If you want to get more done _without_ stress, the answer is simply game
design. Make the "small matter" of your goals addictive. Guarantee yourself
intermittent rewards for your work (entertaining TV episode every 1000SLOC
committed, without any displayed statistic for how many SLOC you have to go,
only a notification when you reach it), and so forth. Remove "lame duck"
periods—times during which what you're doing won't change the outcome of the
"game" (won't push you toward success or failure.) Work at the edge of your
expertise, such that there is always a chance of failure, but a failure that
is insulated from outer failure (your refactoring didn't work out, so you have
to throw away your work and start again—but you don't have a deadline, so this
is okay. It just stings a bit.)

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swanson
This article really hit home for me. Over the past month or so I have been
blogging about my own side-projects and things I am reading about or playing
with. But now that people are reading it (very few, but people nonetheless), I
start feeling obligated to make progress or start a new and interesting
project.

It is becoming a double edged sword -- I started blogging because I wanted
some public accountability and motivation to finish projects or learn new
things, but now I find it becoming less and less appealing. I now care what my
readers think and how I present myself, especially since some of my readers
are coworkers, and that is making it more like work and causing me to start
avoiding it.

Anyone have thoughts on striking a good balance?

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billswift
My definition of "work" is that it is done for anything other than its own
sake. It doesn't matter who it's done for or what the benefit of doing it is.
Housework is work; writing a blog can be work; cleaning your tools after an
enjoyable hobby is work. Anything done in support of something else, whether
or not money or other people are involved, is work.

Only those things, like eating, sleeping, talking with friends, sex, play,
that are done for their own sake are not work.

Note also that "effort" is not involved in the definition - I know many people
that put more effort into their play than into their jobs.

~~~
locopati
Washing the dishes can be done for its own sake. Vacuuming can be done for its
own sake. All things that are considered work can be done for their own sake
and with the same amount of attentiveness and respect as things considered
enjoyable hobbies.

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gabea
That was hard work reading that article.

