The weight of a day

How much should one expect from a day? How heavy is a day?

I had a very unproductive day this week. In general, the week overall didn’t feel very productive. Yet, this is the week where I told my colleague that we finally had progressed to another stage. A few years back then, this progress would seem far-fetched. We had no idea how we could possibly reach this stage.

The productivity guilt always makes me stressful. I do not qualified as a workholic who works 60 or 70 hours a week, but certainly I can’t go easy on myself about not doing something meaningful to my life. The constant feeling of all the “potentials” I could be adds another layer of stress on it. “If I just reply one more applicant, someone may be joining sooner”, or “if I just code this module, colleagues will work smoother because of it”. Basically, at every moment, there is something I can do to make something better.

The above statement is of course true. In theory, the more you do, the better it gets, isn’t it? However, I feel uneasy about it sometimes. Sometimes I am sure that I am tired and cannot do more. Some other times, I observe something else: the extra effort you put into doesn’t matter.

I am not saying that we don’t need to “ignore the pain and charge forward”, but I observed that whenever I feel the unease, it usually because there are other factors that render the possible effort less effective, or even useless. For example, it is not that I do not want to hire more people sooner, but it is that my colleagues aren’t running smoothly, adding this one person will possibly make things slower. In other words, there is a natural rate of onboarding new programmers to a project.

The same situation happens for many other things. It seems that for every action, there is some “physics” behind that determines its velocity. Simply throwing bodies at the problem won’t work. The point is to be hardworking about doing the right thing, not blindly doing things. When you think about it, if an important problem can be solved by sheer will without any intelligence, it is unlikely to be a problem worth to be solved.

Will and determination are important on the macro level. But they have to be combined with a careful study of the reality. You need to diagnose what the problem is, before you try different solutions to tackle it. Many of your solutions will fail. Here is when will and determination come in, to drag yourself through the ephemeral hopelessness, not to make you try brute-forcing a solution out of it.

Brute-force may work for once or twice, but it is a very costly strategy in the long run. An elegant solution is not about its intellectual beauty, but because it reflects a proper understanding of the actual shape of problem. This solution does not only make things easier, but also more long-lasting. Otherwise, you’ll just find yourself putting out fire later on that are caused by all the duct-tapes you’ve put on problems.

Connecting the dots

Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.

I believe that behind every phenomenon that appears “non-linear”, it can be understood in a linear way if we put the problem in a meta level, or in another perspective. For the above statement, the factor missing is the relationship between individual effort and its respective outcome, which isn’t a direct causal relationship.

On a micro level, something you do will guarantee to get certain results. But on a macro level, it is not just about what you do, but also what other people do at the same time. These fluctuation causes greater uncertainty in both short term (more uncertain results from our direct actions) and long term (more previously unknown opportunities open up). Hence, we feel the above statement everywhere in our life.

So back to my opening of this post. How much should I expect from a day in my life? There is no easy answer. When I am clear that I am not looking forward to solve a trivial problem, all I can do is to learn the “physics” behind it as much as I can. I’ll never be able to learn everything from it, so whatever I think I know, I’ll find out that I’m wrong and need to consider more factors in my mental model.

So I need to ask myself: does everything work now? If not, what is the thing you can do with the highest marginal return? Sometimes, it is to do the coding yourself. Sometimes, it is giving the opportunities to nurture future potentials. Sometimes, it is to accept “imperfection” because you can never know what will come next.

You can’t measure or compare your progress to a external standard, because there is no such standard by definition, when you’re doing something new and complex. The unease is a signal.

Before you go to bed, recall what you have done today. How do they connect to your top-level goal(s)? What would be the next one top thing you should do tomorrow that is within your control?