Being Someone who Does Things
Developing High Agency
I really want to be someone who does things. Broadly, I can spend my time in the following ways:
Pure leisure: things where I am entirely sitting back and don’t even appear to be productive. Watching TV, eating at restaurants, looking at Instagram. It’s good to have some pure leisure to relax and I’m fairly good about not spending too much time on this. But when I spend too much time on leisure it starts to feel bad.
Passive productivity: these things look or feel productive but tend to have diminishing returns. They usually involve consuming information — listening to podcasts, reading, scrolling through twitter. I spend a ton of time doing these, because I find things in this bucket enjoyable or comfortable.
Active productivity: these things tend to involve doing new things or creating something. Writing, learning to cook something new, accomplishing something important at work, starting a business, moving to a new place. These often have compounding effects where the returns increase exponentially the more time you spend on them. But I find things in this bucket less comfortable so I don’t spend enough time on them.
To really make this an overly-academic exercise, this chart illustrates the value I think I get from each type of activity:
If I spend perhaps 30 hours in a week on pure leisure, I feel worse than if I’d spent 8 hours on pure leisure; the extra 22 hours of watching TV are detrimental.
If I spend a few hours each week reading industry news and listening to podcasts, being “passively productive,” that’s helpful, but doing it an extra 10 hours per week doesn’t help much.
Finally, if I spend 5 hours per week doing things that are actively productive, that’s valuable, and it would actually be more than 4x as valuable to spend 20 hours per week on actively productive things.
This becomes more interesting over the course of a decade or so, because you can clearly see the compounding benefits of actively productive activities, and you can see too much leisure have real negative effects. People who write every week get book deals, friends who spend too much time on leisure are out of shape and unhappy. And I can personally feel that having spent a decade or so doing lots of passively productive things has been helpful and made me pretty well-informed, but it hasn’t been as powerful as if I’d spent more of that time doing actively productive things.
So, I am trying to do more. Shifting from passive productivity to active productivity requires a feeling of agency. I recently saw this thread from Emmett Shear, who ran Twitch and was very briefly tapped to be the interim CEO of OpenAI before Altman was reinstated. I liked it as a framework to cultivating agency:
The key aspects to his approach seem to be to articulate what you want to have happen, develop any sort of approach to starting to tackle it, and then act on that approach. You can change course as needed but taking action repeatedly is what matters.
It sounds very simple when I write it down but figuring out how to develop higher agency and shift more of my activity from passively productive to actively productive seems very beneficial. So that will be my main focus as we move into a new year.
Happy holidays! Thanks for reading.
Thanks for the stimulus to do what I would put into the category of active productivity.
1--Some non-productive activities give me joy: listening to La Traviata, walking in the woods.
2--Some productive activities give me no pleasure but things I feel I should do: walking on my elliptical machine, keeping up with world events and politics. Watching podcasts as I exercise helps get both out of the way.
3--Some routine productive activities give me pleasure if I know I am doing them well.
4--Other productive activities give me far greater pleasure: creating something, doing something in a new and better way.
5--I am not sure where to put learning about what is already known or created by others: in a way it is passive intake but it is also changing or creating myself.
6--And finally, being in a loving relationship: continually learning (about oneself and the other) and continually creating.
I believe that productivity is difficult because, like velocity, it has a speed and a direction. Just "doing more work" can be bad if you don't know what you're working towards. Part of being productive is working on the right thing and some of your time should be spent on checking whether or not that's the case. In that sense I find leisure to be important because it lets you detatch and view everything in a bigger picture.