Conversation

Aug 13, 2020

Realistically, I can only ever be *truly* productive for 4 hours a day. Most days, I'm lucky to even have 2 truly good, productive hours, where I'm really moving the needle. And I get by with the output of those 2 hours! I wish somebody told me this when I was like... 10

269

I once spent several days in the military just... cutting old parachutes, to get the metal bits out, for recycling. parachutes have very strong ropes. my buddies and I would sit around sawing mindlessly at the ropes with penknives for hours. it was tedious and slow and boring

at some point, I don't know why, I guess I was bored, I decided to screw around and try using great force. to my surprise – and its obvious on retrospect – I cut far deeper into the rope with one big slash, instantly, than I did with maybe 5-10 minutes of sawing motions

here's some random bits I found from googling "war quote concentration force" the idea here is that you can often save lots of time and resources if you have the courage + smarts to be very decisive in hitting the highest value things the hardest video game speedrunners do this

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Replying to

@visakanv

i can’t help but feel like this should be obvious. maybe part of the problem is that schoolwork is artificially structured to make this difficult - you can’t get out of more than one assignment’s worth of work at a time with strategy b/c there is no single task it all feeds into

8:37 PM · Aug 13, 2020Twitter for iPad

Replying to

yeah it's grotesque and dehumanizing to spend so many hours, days, years of your life on work that you can't really repurpose and reuse for anything. in comparison, all the hours I spent dicking around on forums arguing about video game characters was time extremely well spent

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

word 👍

Replying to

and

this is what led me to do a lot of cramming during university - I (subconsciously) thought what's the point of studying throughout the term if I can't speed up the process in any way. better to just study for 6 hours the night before.