You're Not Doing Enough Work
But that doesn't mean you have to make your life harder
Last week I wrote a piece called Don’t Do Extra Work. I thought it would be interesting to follow up with a post that is not quite its opposite, but that still goes sharply in a different direction.
Each of the two pieces is meant to stand alone, but my hopes around the two of them together is to show the ways that “doing more work” and “doing less work” do not exist along a single axis, through the ways that the two discussions complement, rather than contradict, each other.
Once upon a time, I was meeting with a life coach, and I was talking to her about my struggles to eat more protein (for the purposes of body sculpting).
Paraphrasing—
Coach: “You can choose proteins you like, and then eat them over the course of the day before you eat other things to hit your target grams of protein per day. That way you stay full.”
“Yeah that seems like a good idea. I’d tried it before but…protein is…hard.”
“Hard?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, sticking to the plan?”
“no I mean the process of eating the protein.”
“what.”
“Well you know. It just can be hard to eat and digest.”
“What do you mean hard? What are you eating?”
“uh”
“There are hundreds of proteins are there. You will like a bunch of them. You can pick those and eat those.”
I kept thinking about this.
Insofar I had assumed that protein was hard to eat, I wasn’t looking widely enough to find the ways that a lot of other people who had the same goals as I do have managed to not get trapped in the same problem.
I cared about the problem, and I was making my own life harder in my effort to solve it, but I still would say that I was not doing enough work on the problem.
Harder versus more
There is a conventional mindset that more work has to mean something hard being added to your life.
And so if a person is already tired, doing more work can seem like a drain of energy, versus something that is necessary or appealing.
Like drawing water from an already empty vessel.
Hard at best, often impossible.
I disagree. I think sometimes more work can actually be a really nice tradeoff against something else hard that you are already doing, that you may not be noticing.
That is, more work can be a counterweight to hard work.
But this is still going to seem like an impossible task if you think of work as pulling energy from your vessel.
In the ways that people say “work smarter, not harder,” you can also “work longer, not harder” — especially when you are not sure what smarter would look like, and harder feels like it is not giving you the rewards you were hoping for.
Where this is useful, is when with the longer/harder trade-off, you accidentally create situations where you work almost none at all because the work is too hard. If the boulder is far too large and too heavy, you can push against it without the boulder going anywhere. Longer - 0. Harder - 100.
This implies that you may be able to do the opposite. Longer - 100. Harder - 0.
I can’t currently imagine a scenario where either side is actually 0 or actually 100, but I am setting up these axes to show that they can be adjusted.
If something feels hardness - 80, you may be able to compensate on progress by doing something with hardness - 20 (such that it doesn’t really feel like work and isn’t pulling energy out of the same vessel) and work on it for longer.
A trick here is that “longer” also often doesn’t end up being as long as it actually is when you set up the original trade-off. You start to figure out some of the original snags pretty quickly, and get excited and feel rejuvenated to work harder again, in whatever way is your natural way in your mode when you are not compensating for a lack of energy.
When you had optimized for something, and are not sure of the limitations of your own optimization, continuing to go in the direction of your optimization may not solve your problems. Going around what you think you know, meanwhile, may help you recalibrate. This may feel like going backwards and sideways, but it still has the potential of making progress on your problem in a way that going forward may not.
In my scenario above, I was stuck on a hard general case (it is factually true that protein is harder to eat as a macro than other macros).
I had gotten to the idea that this is the right optimization in a fairly standard way, through following a pretty normal process and normal recommendations.
Learn I need to eat more protein from trusted sources
Set daily target levels for my goal specification
Measure target levels daily
Notice discrepancy between actual and goal levels
Try to increase protein
Fail
Try again
Fail
Try again
Come up with hypothesis about the cause of the failure
Edit my approach given the hypothesis
Try again
Fail
Come up with a different hypothesis
Try again
Fail
Feel stuck, be confused about what is happening
Take note and remember where I ended up
This is a reasonable process, and it is reasonable to remember both the process and where I ended up!
However, if I still care about my goal and am stuck on how to achieve it, it is possible that I had gotten something wrong that I wouldn’t figure out if I continued forward as if the process I followed was airtight.
In my case, I ended up with a baseline problem statement that was kind of twisty.
“How do I get the body I want while failing to eat the protein I need to accomplish that?” became my updated problem statement.
And this is a much harder problem with many more constraints than the already hard problem of “How to get the body I want.”
Then when all the advice I get is “eat protein,” it gets messy, because the constraint I had set up for myself is that eating protein won’t work for some reason, because I had failed at this before.
It can be surprisingly easy to feel stuck for a long time in a maze of constraints you had forgotten you yourself had set up, or had not noticed you had set up.
There may not be good reasons for those constraints, or there might be good reasons for those constraints.
Sometimes it is possible to check — but sometimes checking can be hard, and require the kind of energy for hard work that you do not have.
People try different things all the time, and come to various conclusions on what about what they tried was working, versus what was not working. It is easy to be incorrect about this. People get discouraged by all sorts of things all the time, and something that felt like it was not working before may start to work when you approach it again in the future in a different way.
Going back into a wide search and asking “are there any proteins I can eat that don’t feel so hard for me personally?” can feel like more work, because it involves looking at a large quantity of objects.
Compare this to what I was previously doing, which was looking at my one object — the one unsolved problem.
And having one supposedly known unsolved problem in your mind can sometimes feel easier than opening yourself up to many new unknown problems, even if each of those problems is easy.
Going back to a broad search can feel like undoing previous work. I had already tried eating more protein and I couldn’t do it — that test was run, what’s the next test? I am tired, why would I redo a previous one?
More work in the seemingly wrong direction can feel like a waste of time. But sometimes it can be useful, and easier than what you had already committed yourself to doing — which was trying to solve your problem on top of your maze of rules and constraints around what you had decided would and would not work.
Situations where this works well
When there’s a chance you don’t know what the blocker actually is
If you feel like you’d hit a wall, turning around and going in the other direction can be more productive than continuing to hit yourself against the same wall. The wall might not be the right wall!
When you had changed state in the course of trying to solve the problem
This is likely if you’d been working on the problem for a long enough time that it feels like it got very hard, or had hardened into an impenetrable callus.
Solutions that you had dismissed before may well be available now. The way this works is that you may not have been ready for something, or needed to figure out other components before a different component could “slot in,” but this means that something that you were right about not working before may well be the solution you are looking for now.
When what you are doing currently feels very hard, and doing more of something but in a less trying way sounds very appealing by comparison
If this post is appealing to you then go ahead and try it out!
When other people have solved the problem
Other people are fundamentally different from you, and would be coming at the problem from different directions due to their different paths in life. This means that your specific path isn’t necessarily the path that is the only right path, and they may have figured out how to take a path that doesn’t involve your current wall you’ve hit.
When the problem is common
If the problem is common, that means people in all kinds of situations end up at that problem, and it means that you can probably borrow from a lot of people’s processes.
When your particular sticking point is rare
If other people have solved the problem and seem like they have gone around your particular sticking point, it’s worth thinking about if your sticking point is a necessary point in the process, or if you can make progress by backtracking and taking a less onerous route to your goal.
When there are a lot of books about the topic
Many books means that there are many places for you to casually look at, peacefully at home or in a coffee shop, absentmindedly, until a line that changes everything jumps out at you and is the answer you didn’t even know you were looking for.
When you don’t consider yourself an expert on the topic, and there are experts on the topic
By walking you through the process as they see it in its entirety, they may be able to help you notice where you have a contradiction in your thinking, or where you added something up incorrectly.
This would require “going sideways” and seeking out an expert to talk to, read, or listen to.
When you’ve had the same problem for a long time, without much progress
This might mean you don't have methods for working through hard problems that are working for you, reliably, and so you may want to try out a process that either doesn’t depend on being able to work through problems of your level of difficulty, or try out working on the meta problem of figuring out how to work on hard problems.
Situations where this works less well or not at all
When you are a world-leading expert in the thing you’re struggling with
Sometimes you are an expert and you’d already done an enormous amount of research, for the purpose of figuring out something specific, and you know you are already at the right spot in your thinking and that it’s supposed to be hard. You are working on the hard problem because that is where you want to be. In that case, you may have techniques for figuring out hard things already, and know that this set of techniques explained here isn’t what you want to be doing.
When you don’t have any energy
Sometimes any amount of “more work” feels like it will burn you out completely, even if it’s easy, and so you may want to look at solutions around the fact of the burnout (perhaps a change of scenery or a change of movement patterns) to give yourself more juice before you work on anything that may be considered a “problem.”
From my experience, the number of situations that people get into in the second category is generally not that many, and if they are in situations like that, those situations are generally confined to a certain specific social group, project, workplace, set of tasks they are responsible for, or goal they want to reach. In other words, even exhaustion can be context-dependent.
For a lot of different things, you have a lot more flexibility than you think you do!
And then doing more work, that feels easier overall, can lighten the total burden.