(Un)productive

I believe there are two types of productive work: Churning and exploratory.

Churning productivity is for workloads with a concrete end goal: An issue that needs fixing, the reminders you need to complete today, or the work mail inbox you want to clear. We churn through these workloads and can tell when they're done because they are mapped in our brains to a set of actions towards a goal. There may not be a clear path for how to perform these actions, but there is a desired result, and you will have some understanding of what it looks like.

Exploratory productivity is a different beast altogether. Here you try to go from a state where you understand less of a thing to a state of understanding more. You do this by framing the things you know in different contexts and answering questions about what that new perspective looks like. In theory, this exercise shouldn't work, but it does in what Adler and Van Doren describe as a mental equivalent of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.

Churning productivity is a good fit for technological solutions. There are no insights that (should) arise from you organising your calendar every morning. You shouldn't have to go into “deep thought” to manage your weekly shopping list. Their primary purpose is not to raise your mental bar but to remove the surrounding distractions.

The requirements for exploratory productivity are simple: A brain and a piece of content above its understanding. Perhaps we can argue the use of technology to aid in finding this intellectually superior content. But the key word here is aid.

While applying technology to aid in content retrieval can be augmenting, using it to assist as a “brain” becomes a crutch instead. Let's dive into a more concrete example.

In recent years, we've seen an explosion of note-taking products (I suspect since the appearance of Roam Research) that will promise to work as a “second brain”.

If you are proficient in practising exploratory productivity, these products will augment your productivity. But if you were not, the product would not do much more than store text. What makes a difference is whether you already know how to perform without it.

In fact, if you do know how to operate without such a product, then any “killer” feature that distinguishes one product from another will come across as a detail (some features may even be perceived as distractions), not selling points. So picking any of them won't make much difference. It becomes a choice between which data store to use.

Now, if you weren't already proficient in exploratory productivity, using one of these products for anything other than “storing text” will not only stall your productivity, it may even (and sadly, often) degrade it. This degradation occurs because of hedonic adjustment.

Hedonic adjustment is a coping mechanism. It's the thing that makes the saying "time heals all wounds" true. But it also works the other way. Anything shiny and new today will degrade over time in the beholder's eyes: Your iPhone is getting slower; That meal you love to eat every day doesn't quite taste the same; and your “second brain” app is missing something.

In search of (exploratory) productivity, you try one of these “second brain” products. Initially, it seems to do the job; you may even feel like you are grokking it. But it doesn't last long. Eventually, you decide the product is good, but it would be better if Feature X were present. Maybe this feature is available in a different product, so you move over (this will likely involve data migrations too). And now you're back at the beginning; everything is "good" again until it's not as "good" as it was.

From this point, getting trapped in this hedonic circle is easy. The time and effort to jump from product to product in search of a productivity panacea is time and effort that would be better employed elsewhere. Your productivity is now effectively dropping.

So, by this stage of the article, you either relate to what you read in the last section, or you don't.

Suppose you don't; good news. You are likely ready to make good use of these "second brain" products, which will probably help you further your explorations. Go and "think big thoughts".

However, if you relate to the described hedonic adjustment circle, that's also good news. Identifying the issue is a crucial step towards addressing it. My best advice is to stop. Stop the vicious circle and get out. You are not missing anything. No product will "deliver" in the way you want it to. Your best bet is to return to basics: Pick any product, and stick to it. Give it a year. And in that time, start practising.

Pick some content that you think will raise your "mental bar" and read it once, quickly. If everything in it makes sense, this is not the kind of content you are looking for; follow whatever process you have to churn it and try again with something else. When you do find something that baffles you (in some intelligible way), that's when you go to "work".

Open your tool of choice and start writing about it. Then read, then write, then read, then write. When you reach a stage where you feel you not only assimilated the insights of the content but went further and also assimilated the insights the author used to craft this content, congratulations, you've raised your "mental bar".