Comment by komali2

Wow, I really love this site design, and the features like the floating annotations / footnotes.

> same way one might want to have ‘learned to read Mandarin’ or ‘become a bodybuilder’, but not to actually sweat through memorizing (and then forgetting) endless arbitrary characters or hours in the gym (followed by gluttony as cruel as the starvation).

Having done both of these things to some degree, I wonder where the impression is coming from that they're super hard. Certainly a certain kind of bodybuilding body is absurdly difficult to achieve and I simply don't recommend it to anyone - and every single person I know that's achieved it has body dysmporphia and is driven by it. Not worth. But achieving something "like" a bodybuilder's body is, imo, achievable for most people with the same amount of effort as most of the things people dream about - learning a language, learning to code, having an active blog, reading a book a month, etc. A few hours effort a week consistently and you'll likely have great results after a year, and the journey never ends from there!

Mandarin as well is a more than achievable goal that can be achieved with a great degree of skill with a few years of consistent effort.

I think this article is right though - a book will kill other goals and activities if you don't maintain a balance. I have many different thoughts about this that one day I'll organize, hah, into a blog post. But my thinking is basically along these lines:

1. The 40 hour workweek is the wrong way to approach maximizing human productivity

2. Humans are inconsistently productive

3. Guardrails are necessary to achieve productivity

4. Consistency is probably the most important guardrail

5. The hardest part of doing a thing isn't doing it, it's scheduling it accurately, and sticking to the schedule

If a person maintains a fun blog incidentally alongside their work, blitzing out an article here and there as the whim strikes them, they might appear quite productive. However in an office setting, a corporation would find their productivity schedule infuriating - when will the thing be done? Idk, when I feel like it? When the mood strikes me? Leave me alone, I'm reading hacker news until the mood strikes me. Hence the inconsistently productive.

I'm not making a naturalist argument though - I want to be more productive than "when the mood strikes me," and I don't mean for just capitalist endeavors, I mean for all the various activist activities I want to do as well. However I think the modern trap is thinking that the way to be productive is to set hours for activities - 40 hours for work, 9-5. Lots of work done then, right?

Instead I think it's better to combine scheduling time with an understanding of human motivation as something flexible and malleable. Most workout advocates will advise things like going to the gym every day 8am, and achieving this by making putting on your gym shorts the first thing you do when you get out of bed, engaging a Habit process, and I think this is effective. But for me what's been more effective is, the night before, determining what time I'm going to bed, and then setting my alarm 8 hours after that, and then noticing - oh wait, I have a meeting 20 minutes after I wake up, ok, in that case, I put my gym shorts next to my computer chair, and immediately after the meeting put them on and then go to the gym, because 2 hours after that I have another call. Or, it's 2am and I'm drunk, there's no way I'm going to do anything but puke my guts out if I try to go on a run in 8 hours, I'll schedule a nighttime run instead - or fuck it, it's the weekend, I'll relax instead and acknowledge it's just not happening tomorrow, but that's ok because I have another go scheduled on Monday morning.

There's another side to that which is accurate scheduling. Writing a book takes a long time and I think if it was slotted into a life correctly it would take years to write the book, when most want it done within a year or at most 2. But to achieve that they'd need to spend all their free time on it which would kill their blog hobby or whatever else. If I accurately measure out all the things I want to do in life - blogging, language study, reading, working out, riding my motorcycle, making videos showing off how beautiful taiwan is, fighting car capitalism, continuing to develop myself as an engineer, making enough money to retire - boy do I get depressed... I can do maybe 4 of those things before a week's time is spent already. It's hard to schedule things across the months, year, years, and not feel sad imo.

Also total sidenote but I think most non fiction books are way too long anyway and would work better as blogs and blog posts, and I think the market dynamics of bookselling pushes this tendency - excluding fields like academia where people are writing to include as much supporting material as possible and with the expectation of being quoted and cited extensively in future works by themselves or other authors, which with the merging of popular culture and academia is causing issues. See: "Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" as an example. A really incredible new view of history and anthropology that's imo inaccessible to most readers because it's also at least partially written for academia.