Productivity vs. creativity dilemma
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Maximization of productivity
This text presents an important enhancement to my productivity in 2023. It might be useful for those who struggle in multicriterial optimization aimed at maximizing productivity in several creative pursuits.
As soon as I entered college, my life was a never-ending battle between creativity and productivity. These are highly synergistic forces. This battle is a pleasure. However, creativity tends to run wild and take you in unpredictable directions. For example, the first four years of my college were a constant conflict between passions for science and for music. Music died on the battlefield for the sake of productivity. I had to make a rational decision to execute a painful radical cut, and to focus on science. I wrote 3 letters to the 3 music bands I was involved in, and I quit at the time of highest promise.
For four decades, I kept ramping up productivity that was never to limit my creative potential. In 2023, I came up with yet another enhancement to that toolset. This is pretty surprising if you consider that the battle has been waged for 43 years now, and it took just a decade to reach what seemed to be the limit. These days, I would rather expect to be on a declining slope as should naturally happen to people nearing the retirement age. However, as appetites are undiminished so is innovation.
I reported a risk to my productivity at the time when I opened the door to social media (see: Cost of modern lifestyle). I got involved in plans to reform education. However, with my schedule packed tight from early morning to bedtime, I should expect some productivity ripples when adding one more major goal into my life. This necessitated a bit of a rethink.
It was easy to be highly productive in the early 2000s, when I was entirely focused on incremental reading. Today, not only did I add extra goals and obligations, but I am also actively involved in rescuing individual families from the clutches of the oppressive education system. That family counsel job provides enough material to make for a full-time job.
In this text, I will present my short history of productivity enhancements, and how I managed to squeeze in more goals into 24h without reducing appetites, passions, creativity, or health.
My story
I immodestly claim that my productivity is remarkable. At the same time, I know I should never suppress my appetites for doing things in life. Today, there seems to be no more room for doing more! I sleep little, and I eat fast. I cannot give up sports, as I would probably quickly surrender to aging. I seemingly cannot add new dreams without undermining old dreams. However, in 2023, I still came up with a trick that might push the limit. The trick is hard to explain without understanding my story, and my productivity terminology. In shortest possible terms it can be described as: using maximum creativity peak for picking the best creativity option for the day.
Here is my story that you can skip if you know tools such as micro-rules, Plan, and tasklists. It is also helpful to know my claims in reference to sleep, creativity cycle, and optimal problem solving.
The story of my productivity (incl. essential milestones):
- 1962-1980: total improvisation in younger years: natural development, lots of learning, lots of exercise, no significant productivity issues, sensible performance sparked by freedom and passions. I diverged into seemingly time-wasting directions such as boxing, music, pet zoobiology, harmless "ecoterrorism" [link], and even "competitive crime" [link], etc. However, in this time, I also seeded my interests in science, biochemistry, brain and memory.
- 1980-1983: increasing dissatisfaction with my productivity due to the arrival of ambitious goals. For example, IVS theory made me think that humans should strive at immortality. This instantly made me think that my days and my life are too short. My interest in science solidified, and my dissatisfaction with my own memory led to the concept of spaced repetition (see: True history of spaced repetition)
- 1983: micro-rules of productivity dramatically changed my life (e.g. with progress in learning human biology, math, physics, and English).
- 1983-1990: I advanced from some 65 min. of targeted productivity (e.g. aimed at health, learning, playing musical instruments, etc.) towards whole days packed with efficient learning aimed at long-term goals (see: IVS). Some of my micro-rules started causing some highly educational "social friction". For example, when I declared I would not attend weddings or funerals, I instantly gained weeks of productive life. I also learned how to withstand social pressure by which culture seriously suppress creative thinking. Some of my crazy rules introduced in the following decades became a form of excuse. For example, when I am being invited to political life, I point to my barefoot lifestyle as a serious obstacle (see: bio notes)
- 1986-1987: first attempts to plan the day with the help of a computer. The effort was thwarted by the chaos of life and computational complexity (ZX Spectrum); interestingly, Bill Gates started with a similar task in his "programming career". Unlike me, he succeeded in planning a class schedule for his school
- 1990: using a fixed schedule Plan (on paper). It only became possible once I could give up the chaos of the university life. My day became repeatable, but not monotonous. That repeatability is the rule to this day
- 1993: introducing tasklists in which mountains of jobs could be sorted by productivity yield (
priority = value/time) (primitive task scheduler was written on Nov 18, 1993) - 2000: schedule Plan in SuperMemo provides more creative freedom away from fixed time slots. Creativity slots can squeeze the rest of the schedule on good days. Natural creativity cycle is well-accommodated as the entire schedule can be shifted depending on the wake time. Bedtime and other fixed slots can be adjusted accordingly
- 2003: introducing a set of rules that is to be reviewed daily so that it could always be kept fresh in focus. The rules might include: Plan is God, start the day from the creative slot, and ... start the day from reviewing the rules! The rule review is to tackle immortal productivity weaknesses such as diverging from the schedule, being late with late jobs, wasting best creative time on activities that do not require peak brain, etc.
- 2003-2017: high productivity focused on incremental reading in SuperMemo
- 2017: adding writing for SuperMemo Guru to my jobs. Interestingly, my writings were originally supposed to serve others. However, the use of Media Wiki makes it possible to work incrementally and use that effort to boost my own memory, and my own understanding of things I write about. Interestingly, I keep learning things about myself when comparing notes written a few years ago with the present day. When reviewing this text, for example, I re-learn and solidify my understanding of my own productivity
- 2020: adding liberation of children to my job loads (school strike, education bill, etc.). This is part of a natural progression from the efficiency of learning towards the maximization of intelligence on the planet. My involvement in the attempts to reform the education system resulted in a temporary drop in productivity due to the impact of chaos, social interaction, and social media (see: Cost of modern lifestyle)
- 2023: a new approach to juggling creative slots in the morning by employing the guidance of creative passions (see next). In short: the first thing in the morning is the review of main creative projects to see which one will spark best passion/productivity. I do it daily except for days when a great idea dominates the morning mind, and pushes itself ahead of everything else (the idea itself and the presented article was a result of such a morning inspiration on Oct 27, 2023)
Warning! If the above testimony makes you want to start super-hard work tomorrow, remember that micro-rules are the way. All milestones require adaptation that may take weeks, months, or perhaps even years. If you plan a marathon tomorrow, you will only get injured!
Too many things on the plate
Simplicity of 2000-2010
For me, in the early 2000s, maximizing productivity was easier. I had two interleaving and synergistic things to do: (1) learning with incremental reading, and (2) improving incremental reading technology. I was able to tackle some important issue, e.g. the neurophysiology of sleep, learning about sleep, learning how to learn better about sleep, and work on tools that would make learning more efficient. It was the time of the arrival of Wikipedia that assisted with all areas of learning needed to build good models of the studied phenomena.
Coffee slot
Along the principles of the natural creativity cycle, the best time for creative effort comes in the morning. I start my day from 500 ml coffee and get down to work as soon as I sense the brain peak, which coincides with the end of drinking coffee (see: My morning routine). In the coffee slot, I usually seek inspiration with incremental video. Occasionally, I walk around ruminating an important problem to solve (see: How to solve any problem?). In the latter case the mental energy is likely to be much higher, and the slot much shorter.
In coffee-powered incremental video, I delve into interesting topics which seed my brain with new streamlets of creative inspiration.
Primary creative slot
In the early 2000s, I would usually start from my primary creative slot with programming some rudimentary tools of incremental reading and interleave that with learning itself. I would often encounter bugs, problems or things that needed fine tuning (such as countless heuristics used in the learning process). I would then go back to programming or spend more time learning while testing new tools. I had no morning dilemmas. My first creative slot was called SuperMemo, and it looked very similar over the years.
Intrusion of coercive schooling
Around the year 2016, I realized that I might be one of the most qualified people to speak about the need to end compulsory schooling. With 30 years of data, I have unique understanding of the dynamics of the process of acquiring knowledge in free learning. Incremental reading is a great model for free learning with an additional advantage of documenting all individual steps. I can see with mathematical precisions how interests grow and branch out, how new pieces of knowledge arrive and fade. I can model the process with an eye to the lifetime perspective (see: How much knowledge can human brain hold). In contrast, the school system keeps its short-term focus on cramming, grades, test and exams. It blinds people to the true nature of learning. As much as Peter Gray who devoted his life to studying free children, I have a unique window into my own learning process, which helps me see the parallels with a child brain or a rat's brain alike. The school system works against the achievements of the evolution. With this new realization, I started building up a set of new goals that suddenly populated my life with additional areas of activity. The synergy between learning, SuperMemo and educational freedom is powerful. However, I now live with a dilemma: what should I devote my first 30-120 minutes of the day to?
SuperMemo Guru
In 2017, I added incremental writing to my morning creativity set of activities. I experimented with two approaches: (1) project periods, and (2) Plan slot selectors.
In a "project period" approach, I would take a project, e.g. writing a text about optimum problem-solving strategies. I would devote 10-100 days to the project. In that time, my day would start from the project slot (e.g. writing), and SuperMemo would play second fiddle 1-3 hours later. For each project, I would use a different schedule template in Plan to optimize the allocation of time.
In "Plan slot selectors" approach, with no major project in focus, I would use the concept of multiple Activities in Plan. It would randomly allocate a selected slot as first. For example, it might be (a) writing (b) programming or (c) learning. Multiple activities may also be assigned to specific days of the week, e.g. writing on Monday, etc. In this automated approach, I would override Plan's choices when on a streak (e.g. when having an important text or an important procedure to finish).
Multiple projects
In 2020, this approach was insufficient. Suddenly, I faced too many areas of creative involvement. Interestingly, some of those involved social media, which is a treacherous ground for a creative effort. As you may have noticed, social media has never been designed for incremental approach. Instead of assisting, it may have a net negative impact on productivity. Social media has a great power to inform, stimulate and inspire, however, it leads to "effort dispersion" that is counterproductive. If you write for Facebook or Twitter, your text may explode today and die tomorrow leaving little mark in human memory. It is the opposite of Wikipedia, which ensures a steady march towards modelling all essential human knowledge.
By mid-2023, I arrived at 7 major areas of creative effort that combine synergistically in my quest towards IVS. SuperMemo and learning with SuperMemo are still in the center. But now I also feel obliged to participate in the effort to abolish the compulsory school system. The latter cannot be relegated to my "stress slots" or "sports slots". As we now think of formulating a simple law that could provide a blueprint for other countries, I need to use my best morning brain for that area of activity from time to time. 7 areas might nicely fit into 7 days of the week; however, the proportions of emphasis are uneven. What is worse, the priorities keep changing. This is when I came up with the experiment for "creativity juggling". Instead of starting my creative day with a micro-rules review, and with the creative slot determined by Plan, I would start from reviewing "peak passions" of the morning in order to pick one that would maximize productivity.
Creativity juggling
In the years 2021-2022, my productivity dropped as a result of my involvement in a school strike and school reform initiatives. This necessitated learning new areas of activity. This included social media. It became obvious that social media is designed for engagement, not productivity. To get a grip on productivity in social media, I employed SuperMemo tools of which tasklists are essential to prop up a robust Plan schedule. However, the increase in the number of projects I am involved in, necessitated also a major rethink of my morning creativity. In 2023, I started experimenting with creativity juggling to maximize productivity while seeking minimum damage to the power of a creative thought. In short, I use the level of passion and excitement to choose the first morning creative slot.
Here is the outline of the original idea (if it is unclear, peek at the practical example below):
- List of activities: produce the list of the activities or projects that are most dependent on the creative insight: Activities. These are the activities that dramatically lose on their effect if executed at later hours of the day. For example, writing texts like this one must happen at the time of peak brain. Otherwise, they lose on core qualities. Spelling, structure or grammar may be relegated to less creative hours. However, the creative chaos of the morning is essential for capturing the core value (with passion). When a big idea hits, even a few days of delay may deprive it of the fresh spark of new associations. At that time, expanding upon an idea becomes as inefficient as homework at school. At times, even the most essential core is hard to recapture in its essence. The old creative rule is to strike iron while its hot. Document the thought in a way that it can be decoded later without a need to retrace the train of thought
- List of tasks for each activity: each project is naturally governed by a tasklist or an incremental reading process in relevant collections devoted to activity classes (e.g. SuperMemo, writing, mail, etc.). However, some ideas at the top of the list are always richest in creative fruits, or tangible fruits that are a measure of productivity. Those top ideas or pursuits (Tasks) need to be kept fresh in mind. I keep the list of Activities in a collection called tasks.kno. It is a simple text topic. Each activity is a separate bullet adorned with a few keywords, which are notes on projects or tasks that are most vibrant, most essential or most urgent. For example, in the activity School revolution, I may have a creative job of organizing independent vectors (a formula for organizing most active people into a form of social concept network), or a petition to the Child Rights Ombudsman, or an urgent 2-minute jobs of an "e-mail to the new minister of education". Beyond the dilemma topic, the collection tasks.kno on its own is not involved in the dilemma resolution. It is 2 decades old and groups all tasks that cannot be classified into main task categories corresponding with activity slots on the schedule (e.g. buy a new chair, organize a folder on a disk, write an important e-mail, etc.)
- Resolve the dilemma: every day, instead of reading the rules, or setting up a schedule template, before my Plan schedule is even ready, I start with a slot called Dilemma (i.e. creativity-productivity dilemma). In this slot I read my Activities list with their most exciting Tasks. Today the list is 8 bullets long, each has 4-8 exciting tasks. The entire text is half a page long. In this process, I see which specific tasks spark most creative passion. This is not an approach based on priority or tasks/value ratio. It is just a rudimentary introspection that tells me how much of a creative push a given task can receive. In other words, passion is the main decider here
- Set up schedule: once my choice was made, I set up a schedule, and move the relevant slot directly to follow the "dilemma" slot
The time needed to resolve the productivity-creativity dilemma may range from seconds to long minutes. The cost is zero when I am working on a small project that requires a few days to complete.
Upon waking, I usually instinctively know what that slot is. There is no dilemma, and there is no cost. However, there are also days where the answer is unclear. Either there is a crowding of important inspiration, or the reverse, I wake up uninspired, i.e. nothing seems to loom as the passionate topic of the day. In those cases, scanning the list with focus and deliberation helps settle the mind. Some tasks may lose their shine. The list itself may seem stale and reviewing tasks for a given activity may be the best strategy.
Interestingly, passion tends to spark more passion. When I noticed that a specific activity starts dominating, reviewing the other activities starts being cursory. This is the time, when another criterion may come into play: activity neglect. This is why, on a day when a major project is over, and no clear new winner comes to the top, I use the criterion of neglect. I ponder where the inevitable neglect built up to the highest degree. Picking up a task from a neglected activity has an inevitable effect of the revival of passions. All my prime areas of activity are no less than fascinating. All it takes to boost the passion is to do a bit of work in the area.
Is the above approach going to make a major change in my life? I do not know. It feels so. I still hear complaints from all quarters about neglecting opportunities. However, the presented approach seems to minimize the damage that stems from having only one life, one day per day, and too many areas where others bank on you.
New Year 2024 resolutions
While many people make New Year's resolution, I am relatively helpless. With a Titanic of a maze of micro-rules, it is very difficult to change the course. It is hard to add new goals, or even change the trajectory towards the goals. As much as knowledge undergoes consolidation leading to an increase in the inertia of models, so is a life of a productivity freak. Thus 2024 will not differ much from 2023. My life will still be dominated by learning, health, education and SuperMemo. I cannot even decide to lose a kilogram or two because even "dieting" can be only achieved by harmonizing the lifestyle (see: Optimal diet).
For comfort, I have a little tradition based on a nice superstition: "whatever you do at midnight on New Year's Eve will dominate your life in the newly arrived year". This is relevant for this text. I resolve my productivity dilemma first thing in the morning. This time I took the dilemma approach to midnight 2023/2024. What should I do in hope of influencing my mindset in 2024. My first thought was to pick the area that is most neglected. Perhaps more consistent sports that were messed up with ridiculous micro-injuries in 2023. Perhaps more time for plugging up potholes in SuperMemo 19 along user requests? Perhaps outstanding mail that calls for new strategies due to a never-ending pile up?
In the end, I chose simple repetitions in SuperMemo. This choice was dictated by the fact that incremental reading has a magic quality of creatively enhancing my reasoning in all areas. It is unpredictable. It may boost my knowledge of health, brain, history, or education. It may spark a new idea. Caveat: for this "magic" effect, the collection needs to be large and rich in hard work done in the past. It is not a solution for tomorrow nor even 10 months.
At midnight 2023/2024, during repetitions, I hit some old item about calcitonin. Repetition was dated as "made" at 10 sec. past midnight. It prompted some research on correlations between the levels of this and other hormones with schooling, helplessness and depression. Nothing special, except for a chance to reiterate once again that creativity forms the basis of a happy and productive life. Good choice. Good test for the "productivity dilemma" approach.
Happiness factor
While going into detailed analysis of the productivity dilemma, I realized that I missed a vital ingredient in my formula for happy life. There is a happiness-generating magic in tasklists (and SuperMemo collections in general). On one hand there is no limit to the number of ideas (or tasks). This eliminates the FOMO component of modern life (esp. in social media). On the other, on the worst of worst days, I can peek into my options, and there are always so many that I can match the worst day: sleepy, injured, overwhelmed, stressed, whatever. The key to intelligence is freedom of choice. Similarly, the key to happy life is a great deal of options to choose from at any given moment. If your day starts with an array of happy choices, by a good pick you maximize productivity and the associated happy state of mind. This is the opposite of what an average kid on the planet faces today in his day of compulsory schooling.
Intelligence is based on the freedom of choice. Physics drives the brain to reward intelligence. This is why rich options are a key to rich reward.
Example: Jul 30, 2024
When I woke up on July 30, 2024, morning routine and morning dilemma dominated my mind. I decided to describe the process. Even though my Jul 30 dilemma was resolved (in the shape of the decision to describe the resolution process), I needed to simulate the effort to get a new resolution, which I could describe below.
In the productivity dilemma slot, I first peek at my dilemma page it tasks.kno collection. There I see 8 bullets for 8 different areas of activity such as writing, programming, learning, etc. In the bullet devoted to writing I see "Hanford error". After a bit of analysis, I decided to remove that point as it lost details to generalization. For this however, I review my Hanford notes in "Don't teach your child to read" (both at supermemo.guru and the relevant incremental writing collection), fixed a few bugs in the text, and deleted Emily from "top passions" list. Then I see that my "knowledge valuation diagram" is not fully described at supermemo.guru. This is high value knowledge that helps explain the pleasure of learning. For this job, minuscule work needed, and a great value of the result combine to mean great passion (and great priority). I quickly finish the text about knowledge valuation diagram. While doing that I recall I was to analyze the reasoning error committed by one of the smartest teachers I know. He does not understand concept networks nor force of intelligence. This makes it hard to see the emergence of high-quality knowledge in free learning. I added that mini task to my guru.kno tasklist. The tasklist is 977 positions long today in a collection of 56,000 topics. If it seems a lot, note that this collection also includes your mail if you send your ideas or suggest corrections to my texts. It also includes comments to my texts found anywhere in social media (incl. Polish Facebook).
Next, I inspected my SuperMemo 19 project and its top priority bullets. Synchronization with supermemo.com is an exciting issue, but vacation might not be the best time to set up the overall model as we may need to synchronize 6 brains to meet and talk at the same time. There is also an issue of easier use of unlock passwords to facilitate the use of SuperMemo on two computers. This seemingly boring topic is poorly related to the value of SuperMemo in education. It landed on my list of passions due to its emotional importance to some users.
I then took a peek at my SuperMemo 19 tasklist and recalled that bugs in YouTube scripts make learning less effective, e.g. while watching movies. Here the job will take me just a minute: I need to read mail from a colleague who wrote those scripts and proposed an update. Finally, I notice the true top passion of the day: a painful bug in article splits that was revealed days ago due to some changes at Wikipedia. That will be my next thing I worry about. There is also a user who wants to see the end to 2GB limits on text registries. That could be a very simple tasks if my intuitions are right. However, Wiki splits are more important as they affect a larger number of users (incl. myself).
Next, to illustrate the inspirational power of incremental reading, I decided to make just a few repetitions as part of the productivity dilemma resolution. First item reminds me of my own hypothesis on how dopamine and opioid receptors interplay while the hippocampus helps compute novelty of newly acquired knowledge. The next item also speaks of the interaction between VTA and NAc in learning (i.e. pleasure of learning again). The first article in increading spoke of the status of a Polish teacher. Teachers keep quitting, which reminds me of the horrible state of Polish education. The system must collapse. That's inevitable. That inspires me to give a helping hand and better explain how free learning works. Sadly, teachers do not read my texts, nor do they understand them. The gap of knowledge and philosophy is hard to bridge. Secondly, in Poland I would rather need to write in Polish. The longest texts in Polish I probably wrote in high school. I started writing a biology textbook at the age of 13 or so. For half a century, I did not even write an application or letter longer than a few sentences.
In my dilemma list, I see also that I am to make a vital contact with a Polish parliamentarian, explain the power of imports from Edge in SuperMemo, study the affiliate program for SuperMemo, review SuperMemo 19 beta-testing mail (689 pieces to read, incl. leftovers from earlier versions of SuperMemo), etc. Soon I realize it is mid-day. As I plan early sports, not a single major task was taken on from the list. It is ok. Recall that the main goal of the morning, which was to describe the actual resolution of the dilemma and the analysis of the dilemma resolution itself. This resolution example text is the product of the effort. In the next 3 days, my morning routine and the productivity dilemma stayed as the main focus. In the meantime, the problem of Wiki splits in SuperMemo was resolved in lower priority echelons (i.e. later in the day, after the top priority morning slot).
For another example, see My morning routine (of Jun 20, 2024).