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.
A few weeks ago, I described this personality shift to my husband, saying that it had been the most impactful meta-change I'd experienced. He was positive about it overall, and added, "One thing I worry about is.. well.. you know that famous speech...".
This simple algorithm is only applicable if you are the kind of person who gets distracted from bringing in the groceries by seeing a piece of trash you could pick up on the way, and you only realize hours later that you never finished bringing in all the groceries. ...
Would I rather have a small shot at emitting what is in me – what is great within me – or would I rather be well known and liked? This was a very difficult question. You might think this an obviously false dichotomy, since being great will let you be known and liked.
I used to have more ideation than follow-through in my early twenties. Now that I'm older, the ratio has flipped, and we can achieve intertemporal symbiosis.
(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 irritability productivity in an attempt ...
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. I also liked that the author is not someone who himself struggles much with PB: I almost hesitate to tell you that I keep my desk clean and organized, that I rarely strain to meet deadlines, that I am almost never stymied in my work.
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.
