
HOWTO: Be More Productive by Aaron Swartz (2005) - tvvocold
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
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htgb
> _" Life is short (or so I’m told)"_

Oh man, this hit me in the feels. The actual text is good so far, but those
words stayed with me.

~~~
icc97
It's great that so many of his thoughts live on. Where as there are lots of
books that live on after people these books go through lots of editing and
you're never sure how much of the direct thought of the author is still there.

But these posts are direct from Aaron's thoughts, so it's much more personal
reading them.

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icc97
Similarities to the Sam Altman productivity post [0] from yesterday (other
than the regular eat well / sleep well)

* Choose good problems

* Make a list

Make a list is also very common, but both of them spoke about good problems
and lists as their highest priorities.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16802530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16802530)

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Tomminn
The section quoted below at excruciating length, to me, has the most
interesting insight. It's like a koan: complete the task without ever
assigning it to yourself.

 _Assigned problems are problems you’re told to work on. Numerous psychology
experiments have found that when you try to “incentivize” people to do
something, they’re less likely to do it and do a worse job. External
incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your
“intrinsic motivation” — your natural interest in the problem. (This is one of
the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology — over 70 studies
have found that rewards undermine interest in the task.) People’s heads seem
to have a deep avoidance of being told what to do.

The weird thing is that this phenomenon isn’t just limited to other people —
it even happens when you try to tell yourself what to do! If you say to
yourself, “I should really work on X, that’s the most important thing to do
right now” then all of the sudden X becomes the toughest thing in the world to
make yourself work on. But as soon as Y becomes the most important thing, the
exact same X becomes much easier.

This presents a rather obvious solution: if you want to work on X, tell
yourself to do Y. Unfortunately, it’s sort of difficult to trick yourself
intentionally, because you know you’re doing it. So you’ve got to be sneaky
about it.

One way is to get someone else to assign something to you. The most famous
instance of this is grad students who are required to write a dissertation, a
monumentally difficult task that they need to do to graduate. And so, to avoid
doing this, grad students end up doing all sorts of other hard stuff.

The task has to both seem important (you have to do this to graduate!) and big
(hundreds of pages of your best work!) but not actually be so important that
putting it off is going to be a disaster. Don’t assign problems to yourself

It’s very tempting to say “alright, I need to put all this aside, hunker down
and finish this essay”. Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing
something, like saying “alright, if I just finish this essay then I’ll go and
eat some candy”. But the absolute worst of all is to get someone else to try
to force you to do something.

All of these are very tempting — I’ve done them all myself — but they’re
completely counterproductive. In all three cases, you’ve basically assigned
yourself a task. Now your brain is going to do everything it can to escape
it._

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mterwill
The rest of the article was good, but this wasn’t the best example and caught
me off guard:

> Another way to make things more fun is to solve the meta-problem. Instead of
> building a web application, try building a web application framework with
> this as the example app. Not only will the task be more enjoyable, but the
> result will probably be more useful.

