Useless Work

Busyness is a choice. I choose to get things done, not be busy. Most actions are futile or irrelevant to your goals. Most things you care about are not being taken care of.

“I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.” –Tim Kreider

Do you want to get things done or be busy? Choose wisely.

Do less, better.

During College I was volunteered, to my deep dismay, to discuss how I got “so much done”.

The student I was talking to asked me all sorts of questions but he truly believed you either had to do choose of the following: sleep, good grades, or socialize. He thought it was impossible to do all three.

This is both false and fundamentally wrong.

He was shocked I never pulled an all nighter in my life.

He couldn’t believe I had an active social life as well.

In fact, after finishing the book How to be a Straight A Student by Cal Newport I noticed a pretty obvious pattern. People who are successful are usually good at getting the foundational things right: sleep comes first and so does health, only after these things can one be effective.

You must actively choose between tradeoffs and stacking activites properly to get everything that actually matters done.

I remember hearing a story that the space between words was invented and it was a massive achievement. You could take away many things from that, but most importantly that both the content and space between them matter.

In intensely innovative and creative activities the time to sit, contemplate, and meander around are as important as the time doing heads down work.

Why? There are many scientific reasons related to how our brains work but the important part is we know this for a fact.

There was a large scale study of scientific productivity and what was found is that a scientist working about 8 hours a day with 3-5 hours of “Deep Work” was optimal. This is about human limits but also the fact that more work isn’t better.

More work isn’t better, in fact it was detrimental.

This goes against a lot of grind culture and hustle culture.

Meandering time matters.

If you are accomplishing what matters most to you you’re usually focused on a small number of important things. It is a form of minimalism.

It is a form of liberation.

Most labor is maintaining things, make sure they’re the right things.

Measure things in time, your time.

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Live simply and deeply. Life is easier this way and you will not be busy.