As unproductive people often do, I think and write about ‘productivity a lot’. I wanted to tag those posts with something other than ‘productivity’, because I really want to gesture at a broader concept than that – motion, ease, goal-action alignment, will to power, flow, satisfaction, eudaimonia. Centrally I would say the topic is knowing what you want to do, actually doing it, doing it happily.
Spinoza had a concept for this – conatus – which is “an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself … of happiness and the perpetual drive toward perfection.” Nietzschean will to power is a descendant of Spinozan conatus. This also gave us the word ‘conation’: the ability to apply intellectual energy to a task to achieve its completion or reach a solution.
(I actually use Google Sheets because I use web apps whenever possible, but I said Excel for legibility and terseness.) Since 2018, I’ve been logging some subset of my mood (single figure, min avg max, morning afternoon evening) energy depression/anxiety ...
Full disclosure: I didn’t like this book very much, because there were 10-15 pages out of several hundred that I found relevant or interesting, and I resented marching through so much book. However, the parts I did get were useful.
For a long time I didn’t rest effectively. I spent much of my time either in long periods of deep focus, or be a zombie (i.e. play games or mindlessly scroll social media). I greatly preferred the former to the latter so I’d constantly be scheming to enter deep focus.
