Realistically, I can only ever be *truly* productive for 4 hours a day. Most days, I’m lucky to even have 2 truly good, productive hours, where I’m really moving the needle. And I get by with the output of those 2 hours! I wish somebody told me this when I was like… 10

“The trick is to spend a few minutes retrospectively analyzing the end of each day. eventually the data becomes hard to argue with.

I barely took any vacation days when I was working at my last job, and I regret that so much, especially now that travelling isn’t even an option anymore. It didn’t make me more productive. I can see clearly now that I would’ve been more productive with breaks. But the thing about overworking yourself is that it’s like getting drunk. You don’t realize how bad it’s getting when you’re going too far.

I once spent several days in the military just… cutting old parachutes, to get the metal bits out, for recycling. parachutes have very strong ropes. my buddies and I would sit around sawing mindlessly at the ropes with penknives for hours. it was tedious and slow and boring

at some point, I don’t know why, I guess I was bored, I decided to screw around and try using great force. to my surprise – and its obvious on retrospect – I cut far deeper into the rope with one big slash, instantly, than I did with maybe 5-10 minutes of sawing motions.

here’s some random bits I found from googling “war quote concentration force”. the idea here is that you can often save lots of time and resources if you have the courage + smarts to be very decisive in hitting the highest value things the hardest video game speedrunners do this.

all of this is still somewhat removed from the real truth of productivity for creatives IMHO, which is that the right moment of inspiration, the mood/vibe hitting just right, the right 30 seconds can give you the most valuable bit of creative work that defines YEARS of your life.

but you can’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, that’s the hubris at the other end of the spectrum. inspiration has to find you working, or ready to work. hence the 2-4 hours. sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night w a thread to write

but you can’t be working so mindlessly hard that you’re unable to recognize when you’ve accidentally made something uncommonly good! there has to be a lightness to it

this thread is so meta actually I never planned this thread, it’s an elaboration of a reply I had to someone in my discord who asked about one of my videos it’s something that happened organically and naturally but this is also stuff i’ve thought + written about a lot before.