If you want to create great works, you have to be ruthless about avoiding upkeep.
Good and Bad Procrastination (Paul Graham) is spot-on in its analysis of the nature of upkeep (which he refers to as “errands”) and why it is deadly. Summary article, essential reading.
It’s hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there’s a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes—anything that might be called an errand.
The people who want you to do the errands won’t think it’s good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get anything done. The mildest seeming people, if they want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to avoiding errands.
Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowing the lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put them off. In principle it shouldn’t work to put off the second kind of errand. You’re going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Why not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?
The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands don’t: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.
When I talk to people who’ve managed to make themselves work on big things, I find that all blow off errands, and all feel guilty about it. I don’t think they should feel guilty. There’s more to do than anyone could. So someone doing the best work they can is inevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone. It seems a mistake to feel bad about that.
Although Paul uses the word “errand”, “upkeep” might be a more useful term. It extends the definition by subtly pointing at an underlying cause. When one refers to an errand, it is simply something to do. When one refers to an upkeep, one cannot help but scrutinize the person or object that upkeep is for. Upkeep lends itself to more useful model of analysis, detailed below.
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule (Paul Graham) expands on the theme by offering a character analysis of who need to avoid upkeep and why. Figure out which schedule you operate under. Supplementary article, highly recommended: coined the terms “maker’s/manager’s schedule.” Also great essay to give to unenlightened others, similar to the introvert one.
But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
This essay strikes deeply to how I manage my lifestyle: I always knew (the anticipation of) small interruptions destroyed my productivity and shifted my schedule accordingly. During my hardest semester at college when I was taking OS and founding DSO, I even modulated my sleep into 48-hour cycles.
While I don’t recommend everyone take such an extreme approach, this gives a glimpse at the length to which a maker will go to get uninterrupted time to work. Some others, pulled from my own habits, watching other CS majors, and reading responses to pg’s article:
Endnote: this is related to the concept of flow.
Stuff (Paul Graham) talks about the hidden costs behind having too much stuff. More speculative than his above articles. Tangentally related article, read if you find below blockquote insightful.
A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
The reasons Paul come up with for why objects takes away energy are ambiguous. Instead, I would move toward a more concrete model. Everything you own has an associated upkeep:
Of course, some items in our lives are necessary (clothes). But others aren’t (television) or have “cheaper” variants (some clothes require dry cleaning instead of simply laundering, which tacks on additional upkeep.) Most people are pretty good at considering the added utility and upfront costs of an object. But I would argue that the most important factor to take into consideration, if you want to create great works, is the upkeep cost.
(Note: This argument is slightly naive. If we assume that money and time are slightly illiquid, interchangable goods, we could discount and take the NPV of upkeep. But remember that this is not a precise mathematical model: it is designed solely for its thought-provoking properties.)
Surprisingly, we can generalize this model to apply to our relationships with other people, groups, institutions, ideas. Whenever we claim relationship to another entity, we incur upkeep costs. Claiming a girlfriend requires regular outings, being part of a group of friends requires spending time with them, holding a degree from a given college requires reading alumni mail/email. Even social graces (being fashionable, greeting people, taking showers) incur upkeep.
The point I want to drill is that these relationships are absolutely dangerous if you want to create great things. The more relationships you claim, the more upkeep you incur, the fewer long blocks of time you have, the less likely you are to do great things. We only have 365 days every year. Sure, the toaster only breaks once a year, but multiply that by all hundreds of the things we own, people we love, organizations we belong to, social rituals we observe. In the mundane course of everyday life, 365 days of creativity quickly contracts to a mere handful.
So ultimately, the moral of this story is that if you want to do great things, you need to get to a comfortable level of upkeep where you balance the obligations that bring you greatest utility with how badly you want to go great things. Reducing that upkeep is not easy: it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven and we are all rich here. Mais si tu m’apprivoise, nous aurons besoin l’un de l’autre.