👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Q: Is it at all possible to multitask efficiently?
As much as everybody — starting from productivity gurus, bloggers, YouTubers, authors, advisors, conference speakers, and ballroom attendees — would like to tell us how unproductive it is, multitasking is here to stay.
In a utopia you can set your own schedule, beat resistance, get into a state of flow, and get things done by following a set of ideas, principles, guidelines, and hacks. Unless you are delusional you are pretty sure this isn’t the case in the real world. Real world is very different from the one painted in productivity books.
Maybe the people with these grand ideas have the luxury of setting their own schedule. Their ideas may apply to a niche who have the same luxury, but us common folks don’t have much of a choice, do we?
No matter how logical these ideas sound on paper, they are absurd in real life. But not all hope is lost. While we cannot have the perfect solution, we can definitely have an optimal one. In the real world, that is good enough.
Unlike that in self-help books, schedules aren’t fixed in real world. In the real world, scopes aren’t defined, time estimates are never perfect, and everything is of utmost priority.
In such a chaotic, unorganised, and unstructured world, the only sensible strategy is the ability to pause, leave something midway, and switch to another task, i.e., multitask.
Experts scorn this vehemently, but despite its side-effects, multitasking gets a lot of things done.
Before delving into the benefits, let’s understand the side-effects. For starters, multitasking is not doing things simultaneously, but rapid switching of tasks. And none of this back and forth switching is real work. It’s metawork. And metawork doesn’t really advance the state of the actual work being done.
Secondly, real work requires a good amount of “context setting”— playing with an idea in your head before actually writing it down, or meditating on a problem before attempting to solve it. For me, it takes 30 minutes to get into the zone before I can get any actual writing done. For all of us, it takes some time to heat up a metal before it’s malleable.
If I’m interrupted after getting in the zone, I’ll need a good amount of time to rediscover the zone again. Constant “context switching” leads to a series of, “Now, where was I?” moments where we waste time trying to figure out what we were actually doing.
Reaching a state of flow is hard work, and subsequent context-switching makes it impossible to get any real work done. This not only leads to delays in work, but also errors. If I interrupt you few times an hour, you are not going to get any real work done.
Despite its side-effects, metawork is important. It’s a necessary evil. The question is, how do we tame this monster so that it doesn’t turn on us.
Time will always be lost in metawork, but we have to prevent it from reaching its nightmarish extreme when all the time is spent in doing metawork, and none spent in doing real work. This happens when you take on more work than you should and there’s (theoretically) infinite overhead.
If you’ve ever had a moment where you wanted to stop doing everything just to have the chance to write down everything you were supposed to be doing, but couldn’t spare the time, you recognise this state very well.
When merely remembering everything we need to be doing occupies our full attention, or prioritising every task consumes all the time we had to do them, or our train of thought is continually interrupted before those thoughts can translate to action — it feels like panic. This is when your system (literally) crashes.
A simple tactic to avert this fate is to master the art of saying no so that you don’t have more than necessary overhead. But it has its limitations. You cannot say no to everything, especially when it comes from your boss.
The other tactic is to act dumber instead of smarter. Choosing how to schedule your day or figuring out what to do next is overwhelming enough to crash your system. It’s also time consuming. Therefore simply do things at random.
Instead of answering the “most important” emails first — which requires an assessment of the whole picture that may take longer than the work itself — just answer the emails in random order, or in whatever order they appear in your inbox.
This isn’t the smartest way, but compared to your system crashing — where you’re making no progress whatsoever — doing tasks inefficiently in the wrong order is better than doing nothing at all.
Getting real work done involves a negotiation between two principles — responsiveness (how quickly you can respond to things) and productivity(how much you can get done overall) — that aren’t fully compatible. That’s why the whole issue is so complex! And that’s the reason people hire assistants so that they can be productive while their assistants remain responsive. But all of us cannot afford assistants.The best strategy for those of us who cannot afford assistants is to slow down to an optimum level.
Commit to a task for a minimum amount of time (productivity) before you even think about context-switching (responsiveness). This way you avoid getting overwhelmed. This is what pomodoro technique is based on — commit to something for a given amount of time before thinking about anything else. As mainstream as this may sound, it’s actually very effective.
But how much time should you allocate? Although it appears tricky — because the more productive you are, the less responsive you are — it has a straightforward answer. Decide how responsive you need to be — the minimum amount — and then, if you want to get things done, be no more responsive than that.
If you don’t require to respond to emails in less than twenty-four hours, limit yourself to checking your messages only once a day. Don’t pay your credit card bills as they arrive. Instead take care of them all in one go when the last bill comes. This is planned procrastination. Procrastinate as long as you should, but not more than that.
Software startups do fixathons. They tolerate buggy products in favour of moving fast. But once it gets beyond a certain limit that it starts to hurt growth, they conduct fixathons — hackathons to crush bugs.
The secret to graceful context switching is minimum responsiveness to get most productivity. Holding office hours is a way of coalescing interruptions from students. Weekly standups is another example. Whatever their drawbacks, regularly scheduled meetings are one of our best defences against spontaneous interruptions and unplanned context switching.
Graceful context-switching is the only antidote to an ASAP culture where everything is expected in realtime which in turn gets no real work done.
From the Internet
I.
I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.
— We Won’t Remember Much of What We Did
II.
Although not confirmed until months later, my wife was having an affair. To me, it was a blow of monumental proportions. I felt betrayed, swindled, even mocked. Anger exploded in me and, over days and weeks, that anger settled into a simmering mess of bitterness, confusion and disbelief. We separated with no clear plan going forward.
III.
Whatever any man or woman gives you with your consent is private. We keep saying there’s a risk if you send nudes that they will be leaked, but that’s simply because there’s little consequence to doing so. Risk mitigation is certainly not a part of general conversation unless you’re an insurance broker, right?
— Half a Million People Have Seen Me Naked
IV.
The illusion of every age is that the way things are now are the way things will always be. It would be hubristic on the part of capitalism’s defenders to presume that we’ll always have a society organised around an economy based on profit and market forces.
— Will We See The End of Capitalism?
V.
Is The Life of Pablo a miss or a masterpiece? This video takes a look at how rapper Kanye West and painter Paul Cezanne have something in common. Both of them have explored the non finito style — art that is intentionally left unfinished.
What I’m Reading
The War of Art is what you get when a fiction writer tries his hands in non-fiction. It’s full of jazz and drama. I mean it as a compliment.
“Are you paralysed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
Being a creator is hard. Perhaps the hardest part is the battle you fight with yourself. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy. He goes to great extent to personify resistance as the ultimate evil while offering helpful ways to defeat it. He derives a lot of wisdom from his own life as a struggling writer as well. It’s relatively is a very short read. That’s why I liked it. Had it been longer, it would have become a slog.
— The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Timeless Wisdom
There are permanent skills and there are expiring skills.
Expiring skills are specific to a time, an era, an industry, or a trend. But they get more attention since they are hip—the cool new thing.
Permanent skills, on the other hand, have been around for a long time. They are commonplace which makes them look stale. They are broad and hard to define, which gives them the impression of generally accepted wisdom.
But they never lose value. Permanent skills compound over time. They have been around for centuries, which means you’ve got access to a vast amount of knowledge to master. Unlike expiring skills, permanent skills are generic and can be applied everywhere.
Acquire permanent skills. They never lose value.
Quote to Note
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy. You acquire the skill that is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs—the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your reader/gallery-goer/customer. You learn to ask yourself with every sentence and every phrase: Is this interesting? Is it fun or challenging or inventive? Am I giving the reader enough?
— Steven Pressfield, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋