"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks."
> the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
Wow does that ever ring true for me right now...
Over the last couple of months I've had some major work items at about 80% complete but just couldn't find the motivation to push them over the line. I'd have free time but I'd always waste it.
A couple weeks ago, an exec came to me and a couple of colleagues and asked us for a major assignment to be complete in two weeks. At first I balked but after thinking it through I saw an obvious path and bore down.
The work was fast and furious and with the deadline looming I put in late nights and used all my free time to get the work done.
It was incredibly satisfying!
But a weird thing happened: I suddenly got motivated to finish those other assignments and knocked off a number of them in short order.
Somehow I've gotten back into the mental headspace of just knocking tasks off my to-do list and I find the momentum keeps me going. I always knew that about myself--my productivity has always been very spikey--but this experience was truly eye opening.
> the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
Not at all my experience. I hate not feeling unproductive and so spend almost 100% of my free time programming open source projects. But I seem to be unable to care about anything else, and there are long periods of time where I cabnot bring myself to do anything else besides keep working on these projects until 2 in the morning - so-called hyperfocus. As a result I keep feeling exhausted when it comes to anything besides working on said projects, and the first thing I do when not thinking of anything is to gravitate back to them at the expense of everything else. The most trivial things like cleaning my room or even eating a proper lunch become an unbearable slog if I'm in the middle of something important, and sometimes I just skip over them entirely.
I believe this is making me a shallow person because I have no understanding of literally anything else, and is also keeping me in this bubble where there's so much more to life which would be fulfilling that I will never see, but at the same time I just can't bring myself to care about much else that isn't a productive activity. I can't have it both ways, even though I constantly say I should be doing things that aren't productive like playing video games or watching television, and then shoot them down immediately because I feel like I'm not creating anything. I will tell myself that those are the kind of things that humanity usually squanders its free time on, and that I'm not about to fall into that trap.
In the example, if someone gave me that paper to fill out while I was busy and I don't care about filling out the paper, I wouldn't fill out the paper. Not unless my paycheck and continued survival depend on it.
It does not feel like I chose my hobbies, it feels like they chose me.
> the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks
In my experience, there's a limit to that. If being busy doing tasks gives you regular rewards (and I mean daily, not a monthly paycheck), and you trust yourself to keep the rhythm, then it seems to work. But if you lose the momentum, get swamped in tasks you hate with no clear way out - that's a fast track to complete burnout. Been there, done that, and I like to feel I've finally recovered after many years, but sometimes I'm not so sure.
"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks."