What helps creative people get more done

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Simple advice for those who are tired of wasting time.

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and received the Nobel Prize for his discoveries. But to his colleagues at Cornell University, he seemed lazy. He avoided administrative work and other similar duties, did not join teaching commissions.

Neil Stevenson, the famous science fiction writer, can also seem like a lazy person. After all, he does not have a public email address to communicate with readers, he asks not to invite him to conferences and not to involve him in discussions on social networks. He even warns those who still want to invite him to perform that he takes a lot of money and does not prepare.

I have been studying the habits of creative people for 10 years and have noticed many such examples. Many talented professionals have a different working style than theirs. A paradox arises: they seem to be lazy, but they produce a lot of results. And in order to understand this phenomenon, you need to more accurately define what work is.

Many refer to it as anything that could potentially help a career. But countless cases fall under this definition, including tedious social media management or committee meetings. And this overly broad understanding of work partly explains the current culture of employment.

We often measure success by how exhausted we are in the labor process. But this is the wrong approach.

It would be more useful to divide the work into two types depending on the amount of effort involved:

• In-depth work. These are tasks that require mental exertion and concentration, as well as unique skills.
• Surface work. These are things that do not require special skills and maximum concentration.

For example, solving a complex theorem or writing a new chapter in a novel is in-depth work, while e-mails or tweets about your favorite books are superficial. There is nothing wrong with superficial tasks - they just make almost no contribution to the end result of labor.

And when viewed from this point of view, Feynman and Stevenson no longer seem lazy. They get rid of superficial work in order to pay as much attention as possible to advanced studies.

Here's how Stevenson does it in his essay “Why I'm a Bad Correspondent”: “If I have long, uninterrupted periods of time, I can write books. When these chunks are broken up into smaller pieces, my writing productivity drops. Instead of a book that will last a long time, there will be a few emails and conference talks."

It is during in-depth work that we create things that "will last a long time." Superficial work, on the contrary, interferes with this, which means it does more harm than good. If your post gets retweeted it might help your writing career a little. But in the long run, social media habits can make a difference whether you remain a budding author or become a successful writer like Stevenson.

If you strive to create something important, spend more time doing in-depth work.

Few can completely abandon superficial activities, and someone does not want to at all. Just try to change your mindset: devote more time to in-depth studies and reduce superficial ones as much as possible.

Go to your inbox less often, don't rush to try every new app, don't get carried away with memes, don't agree to every coffee invitation, and spend whole days working on one idea. This will affect how much really valuable work you do.