Overall, I’m quite happy w my need for productivity and needing to optimize, it often comes in handy; but as w any drive, they sometimes push you into the wrong direction:
One example is feeling a near desperate need to watch or listen to lectures or other tasks at high speeds. This might be one of the most visceral and common ones; even if I know I’d get more out of it doing it a bit slower, it takes a lot to resist the lure of being able to finish a task even just slightly faster.
Then there are variants of using every last minute/second:
- What first brought this pattern to mind was the realization that I was almost about to create more dead time than I was about to safe in pursuit of making “good use” of the dead time!
To explain: for about 2 weeks I was applying the estrogen gel scrotally1, which involves waiting for a while for it to dry – a time that could be put to good use by listening to a good podcast! Except, I didn’t wanna start consuming media within minutes of waking up, so I was almost about to wait quite a while before applying the gel, just so I could make use of the time for it to dry by listening to a podcast!
Once I realized this I ofc applied the gel and just waited then, but it made me remember that this is a pattern - Sitting in a train and feeling like I gotta make use of laptop time until the very last minute, looking for something to do and hastily closing and stowing away my laptop and rushing out before the train leaves the station.
I don’t actually get a meaningful amount of work done during the last 30s but increase the chance of missing the exit-window, as well as of forgetting smth. - Or wanting to multitask when I’m waiting for Claude to finish thinking. For Claude Code, this is often fine when it works on stuff for quite a while, but especially for regular Claude it’s more that I’m more being impatient and strain my mind through lots of context switching without really getting meaningful amounts of extra work done.
- To try and get work done even if I’m tired and I’ll do worse output in more time. This, for the most part, I’ve been able to quench and now tell myself that it doesn’t make sense to do this now and it’s better to instead rest and recover and do more when I have more energy. Also see The Evening Illusion
On the other hand, I also often don’t start writing emails or messages on my phone bc not being able to type as fast as on a full-sized keyboard feels so bad, that I mostly wont do it. Here, the same drive pushed me in a different direction: rather than squeezing out every last minute, it makes me avoid the work now since “I could be so much more productive under better conditions”.
At first, this just pushed me towards doing other things that – even if not as valuable – are better suited for this environment, which is more of a mixed result. But eventually2 I started bringing my laptop to almost everything just so I could write in case I get a seat.
Whilst some instances of “being productive” is also wanting to be entertained, stimulated, and avoiding boredom, there often is a sense of wanting to progress and use time in a more meaningful way. For example, when I was at my grandma’s birthday celebration, I could have just gone and sat somewhere else and watched videos on my phone and kill time that way, since the conversation options there weren’t that great. But instead I figured I might as well give meditation another try. It wasn’t particularly successful and definitely the less entertaining option, but it was the one that seemed more valuable to me, even if less pleasant or appealing.
This is to say, our drives, even those that are mostly great, can easily misfire and get trapped in ways that are not achieving the goal that they strive towards. In those cases, realizing that this is happening and pushing against it - even if it’s very tempting to give into the desire - is very valuable: becoming more patient and being able to live with a drive pushing you in a direction and not giving in.
This reminds me of to two things:
- we have become very good at satisfying desires without satisfying their goals and values3; see Tricked Desires - 2nd order superstimuli
- that whilst some things are sneakily not right, there are also sometimes obvious holes, that are actually The right holes in incentive systems
Footnotes
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the thin, vascular skin takes up the gel better, which raises E more than when applying the gel on ones arms ↩
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after overcoming contamination anxiety ↩
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yes yes, sex with protection is the common example, but that’s not really what I mean: there are things for which I have a value, but the desire for that is easy to trick ↩