Productivity and velocity
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Really enjoyed this, Dan, particularly the footnote on the ? of asynchrony of typing/thinking while writing.
I'd love to instrument this for myself. I type at 110WPM; writing a ~5k word essay (involving original ideas) consistently takes me 5-6hrs, or 13-18WPM.
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I probably rewrite most sentences at least once, often two or three times, but that's still far below the 110WPM. I don't think I really can "think while typing." Typing is probably just "dead time"; if so, and if I rewrite ~2x, then I burn 90m "just typing."
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And so if I could increase my typing speed from 110WPM to, say, 150WPM, I could reduce that 90m to 50-60m. The whole thing is still taking me circa 5 hours. One thing I notice is that doing this roughly consumes "a day's creative work"—i.e. I can't do *another* thing afterwards.
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Not because I don't have time, but because I'm "spent" in some way. I wonder how much reduction from 5-6h would be necessary before it no longer felt like it consumed the "slot" for primary creative work for the day.
Another aside, while I'm rambling: for "high-stakes" or "important" essays, I'll often spend tens of hours writing a few k-words. Most of that time is spent refining my understanding of the idea. That does involve typing (lots of notes); wonder how typing-speed-bound that is.
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The real question here, I suppose, is: how to become faster at the non-typing parts of the process? I don't really understand the processes at work there very well at all, much less how to optimize them!
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yeah—for me, little speedups aren't important because they're a big fraction of time spent
instead, it's because they can eliminate the little creative frictions that sap energy away, which is much more valuable to me than raw time
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