LSANKAR

I've been thinking about the dichotomy between 'meandering' among tasks that feel good and 'focusing' on whatever the highest priority thing is in the work we do.

Prioritization between multiple tasks remains challenging for me, especially when there are so many work threads for me to attend to at any one time. In the past, I realized that a semi-greedy algorithm tuned to finding the most painful or most scary tasks produced the best results. I think this came from a Tim Ferriss podcast (or other such men's self help content). The theory being that the task that we most fear is likely the highest priority task and certainly the one we've been avoiding.

Straining in this way is not a meander, it's a focused effort against the grain. It's clear where it sits on the dichotomy that's emerging in this post. Only approaching work this way is sure to lead to burnout. It's less fun. To sustain, there needs to be time to meander, even while accepting that the fear-seeking approach may be the most 'effective.'

But I also think there's reason to think it's not always the most effective. Years ago, I read a book that was very formative called "A technique for producing ideas" by James Webb Young. The book laid out a '5-step program' for producing ideas (I know, Tim Ferriss would have loved it). The crucial step for the meander is step 3. "Put the problem out of mind and go do something else that excites and engages you". The idea being that succumbing to the subconscious mind with tasks is a place from which creativity and inspiration can be born.

I feel this often. I'm grinding on a task that's the most relevant and I eventually feel that I've reached diminishing returns on progress. I've squeezed most of the inspirational juice out of the task. But while I was grinding, especially while I was enjoying the progress, my mind subconsciously discovered some inspiration/solution to one of the other tasks I'd catalogued. Just this past week, I found myself to have solved a tricky statistics/data science problem while I was refactoring a large piece of data infrastructure.

Interestingly, I've seen this pattern with indie game developers. Lucas Pope, the prolific creator of "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Papers Please" said once in an interview that he takes a similar approach with long projects. He's a one man army with the games he develops, doing everything from the graphics engine to the music/sound design to the writing. I can't comprehend how many tasks are on his plate in parallel. In the aforementioned interview, he said he continuously attacks the task that most excites/energizes him until it doesn't anymore. And just grinds that way for years.

Of course, this 'greedy algorithm' is also going to be faulty. For the same reason Ferriss's fear-seeking algorithm fails. And I don't think Lucas Pope actually was fully greedy in his work approach (or he wouldn't ship games).

Perhaps part of the art of creating is forming the judgment and confidence to select between these two states.

A mixture model between meandering and focusing.