Well, I’ve never used email because I don’t find it would help me with anything I’m doing. I just couldn’t be bothered about it.
What interests me about Nolan’s answer is not the details of his technology choices (his ability to avoid e-mail is specific to his incredibly esoteric job), but instead the thought process he applied in making them.
Maura Kelly begins her 2012 manifesto in The Atlantic with a Pollan-esque exhortation:
Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.
Kelly is just one voice in the growing Slow Reading movement (c.f.., here and here). The motivating idea behind this movement is simple: it’s good for the soul and the mind to regularly read — without distraction or interruption — hard books.
There was a time when intellectual engagement necessarily included long hours reading old-fashioned paper tomes. But in an age when a digital attention economy is ascendant, it’s now possible to satisfy this curiosity without ever consuming more than a couple hundred highly digested and simplified words at a time.
Thoughts on Thinking “Thinking [is] a very special type of psychic activity, very uncomfortable, but also very exciting…” This quote comes from the influential twentieth … Read more
These tasks are crucial to my job as an academic — as they are to many creative fields — so I devote a lot of attention to understanding how best to tackle them.
Today I want to share three tips along these lines that have worked well for me…
In the first chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt introduces the metaphor of the rider and the elephant. When trying to conceptualize his own weakness in the face of his best intentions, he explains:
I [am] a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.
Ever since I first read these words, they stuck with me as useful for understanding the working world in particular. The whole edifice that we now call “productivity advice” distills, I realized, to instructions for cajoling the elephant. If you’re not firm, it’ll do what it wants to do.
It’s against this backdrop that I present the following truism about this metaphorical quadruped: if you’re not exceptionally clear about where you want it to go, it will wander.
In 1928, the mathematician David Hilbert posed a challenge he called the Entscheidungsproblem (which translates to “decision problem”).
Roughly speaking, the problem asks whether there exists an effective procedure (what we would today call an “algorithm”) that can take as input a set of axioms and a mathematical statement, and then decide whether or not the statement can be proved using those axioms and standard logic rules.
Hilbert thought such a procedure probably existed.
In this paper, Turing proved that there exists problems that cannot be solved systematically (i.e., with an algorithm). He then argued that if you could solve Hilbert’s decision problem, you could use this powerful proof machine to solve one of these unsolvable problems: a contradiction!
Though Turing was working before computers, his framework and results formed the foundation of theoretical computer science (my field), as they can be used to explore what can and cannot be solved by computers.
Over time, theoreticians enumerated many problems that cannot be solved using a fixed series of steps. These came to be known as undecidable problems, while those that can be solved mechanistically were called decidable.
The history of theoretical computer science is interesting in its own right, especially given Hollywood’s recent interest in Turing.
But in this post, I want to argue a less expected connection: Turing’s conception of decidable and undecidable problems turns out to provide a useful metaphor for understanding how to increase your value in the knowledge work economy…
In 2013, during a period of only three months, Stephen King published two full-length novels: Joylandand Doctor Sleep. This is unusually productive, even for a writer whose published fifty-five novels in his career (and sold over 350 million copies along the way).
Nestled half way through this list was a piece of advice that caught my attention:
“The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”
This tip resonates with my experience well beyond just book writing. Things worth doing take time, but if they take too much time your intensity might begin to wane to unproductive levels.
