Efficiency is the Enemy

This post was initially titled "Slack," though not the Slack you might be thinking of. A few years ago, I realized that being optimally efficient rarely made me optimally productive. I need to build time into my schedule for letting my mind wander, exploring ideas, and prototyping things that may not be directly applicable today. It all pays dividends in the long run. This post resonates with me today more than ever, as I now work for myself and have complete control over how I spend my time.

Trying to eliminate slack causes work to expand. There's never any free time because we always fill it. Amos Tversky said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you're headed in the right direction.

"Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. And bad ones only obsess about removing it."

Ideas Are Just A Multiplier Of Execution

I read this post over a decade ago, and I still find it to be one of the most effective formulations of how much work it takes to build a real business.

Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Flow state: Why fragmented thinking is worse than any interruption

This post is written primarily for developers, but there's a valuable lesson here for all types of information work. It's not just the nonstop Slack notifications that are disrupting your flow; it's something far sneakier — fragmented thinking. Something as simple as switching from writing code to thinking up an effective commit message can disrupt your flow. So, how can we build better workflows to avoid these disruptions and perform our best work?

Flow state, in its original meaning, had little to do with complex problem-solving. Csikszentmihalyi’s initial inspiration was painters who would, he said, “finish a work of art, and instead of enjoying it…put it against the wall and start a new painting.”

Their drive wasn’t about the painting, he realized—it was about entering, maintaining, and enjoying what he’d eventually call a “flow state.” A flurry of studies followed in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing the concept closer and closer to public understanding.