Saved

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

The same applies to writing. For example, when one topic doesn’t seem to fit a narrative structure, it often feels like a problem I need to “get out of the way”. It’s much better to wonder: “Hm, why do I have this strong instinct that this point’s related? Is there some more powerful unifying theme waiting to be identified here?”

Often I need to improve the framing, to find one which better expresses what I’m deeply excited about. If I can’t find a problem statement which captures my curiosity, it’s best to drop the project for now.

I’m much less likely to flinch away when I’m feeling intensely curious, when I truly want to understand something, when it’s a landscape to explore rather than a destination to reach. Happily, curiosity can be cultivated. And curiosity is much more likely than task-orientation to lead me to interesting ideas.

Savor the subtle insights which really do occur regularly in research. Think of it like cultivating a much more sensitive palate.

“Why is this so hard? Because you’re utterly habituated to steady progress—to completing things, to producing, to solving. When progress is subtle or slow, when there’s no clear way to proceed, you flinch away. You redirect your attention to something safer, to something you can do. You jump to implementation prematurely; you feel a compulsion to do more background reading; you obsess over tractable but peripheral details. These are all displacement behaviors, ways of not sitting with the problem. Though each instance seems insignificant, the cumulative effect is that your stare rarely rests on the fog long enough to penetrate it. Weeks pass, with apparent motion, yet you’re just spinning in place. You return to the surface with each glance away. You must learn to remain in the depths.”

Depth of concentration is cumulative, and precious. An extra hour or two of depth is enormously valuable. I reliably get more done—and with more depth—in that 6-7 hour morning block than I’d previously done in 9-10 hours throughout the day.This feels wonderful. By 2PM, I’ve done my important work for the day. I know that no more depth-y work is likely, and that I’ll only frustrate myself if I try—so I free myself from that pressureI notice that some part of me feels ashamed to say that I’m “done” working at 2PM. This is probably because in my previous roles, I really could solve problems and get more done by simply throwing more hours at the work. That’s just obviously not true in my present work, as I’ve learned through much frustration. Reading memoirs of writers, artists, and scientists, I see that 2-4 hours per day seems to be the norm for a primary creative working block. Separately, and I don’t want to harp on this because I want this essay to be about quality, not quantity, but: I think most people are laughably misled about how much time they truly work. In a median morning block, I complete the equivalent of 1225-minute pomodoros. When I worked at large companies, getting 8 done before 6PM was a rarity—even though I’d assiduously arrange my calendar to maximize deep work!. I take meetings; I exercise; I meditate; I go on long walks. I’ll often do shallower initial reads of papers and books in the afternoon, or handle administrative tasks. Sometimes I’ll do easy programming work. It’s all “bonus time”, nothing obligatory. My life got several hours more slack when I adopted this schedule, and yet my output improved. Wonderful!

no internet on my phone before I sit down at my desk. I don’t want anyone else’s thoughts in my head before I start thinking my own.

If I spend a working interval flailing, never sinking below the surface, the temptation is to double-down, to “make up for it”. But the right move for me is usually to go sit in a different room with only my notebook, and to spend the next working interval writing or sketching by hand about the problem.

Administrative tasks are a constant temptation for me: aha, a task I can complete! How tantalizing! But these tasks are rarely important. So I explicitly prohibit myself from doing any kind of administrative work for most of the morning. In the last hour or two, if I notice myself getting weary and unfocused, I’ll sometimes switch gears into administrative work as a way to “rescue” that time.

I’ve noticed that unhealthy afternoon/evening activities can easily harm the next morning’s focus, by habituating me to immediate gratification.

most of the benefit just seems to come from regularly reflecting on what I’m trying and what’s happening as a result. It’s really about developing a rich mental model of what focus and perseverance feel like, and what factors seem to support or harm those states of mind.

Sometimes I just need to execute; and then traditional productivity advice helps enormously. But deep insight is generally the bottleneck to my work, and producing it usually involves the sort of practices I’ve described here.