Productivity, or narrowing focus to fewer activities

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” -> then, how many baskets?

“Do too much, get nothing done” -> or, too many baskets.

This post is about finding the right number of baskets

I see focus as concentrating output or outcome by narrowing the range of applied attention. So, given a number of hours in a day to devote towards progress in an activity, more progress can be made by narrowing the number of activities this effort is spread across.

This is more in terms of productivity, but the same applies to other things that benefit more from concentration of fewer inputs, such as investment growth or hobbies, or learning any skill, working toward just about any specific outcome.

There’s a compounding factor from “effort quality” which multitasking (in at, least a specific sense) can dillute.

Bad multitasking tends to be a granular and divided range of separate-domain (scope of) activities, that therefore doesn’t allow enough concentration/ability to be applied to each individual activity.

Good multitasking – Some activities themselves require domain-inherent multitasking but this can be developed or thought of as still within a domain, or a known set of related activities. Over time, the brain would rewire to handle these tasks more efficiently, and possibly find ways to streamline the effort within this domain, despite covering somewhat relatively disparate tasks.

It’s when we cross domains that aren’t used to being related, and too often, in a random manner, that progress suffers. Devoting a strict amount of time per domain is better, but there is still the problem if too many activities. I belive narrowing activities comes from deciding what you want to achieve and working backwards. What activities will currently most likely get me closer to the desired outcome or state of reality? But not too narrow where it’s only one task, I belive that puts too much emphasis on luck

Keeping goals visible

This is why it is advised to write down goals and keep them where you will see them often. It helps you keep yourself making progress by re-evaluating the outcomes you’re getting from your actitivies in an attempt to get closer to the goal or ideal reality/state. It shouldn’t be superfical (“I am not getting any closer”, or “I am getting closer, therefore something I’m doing is working”), you should be aware of what is helping or hindering and make adjustments on a regular (weekly) basis, if needed. Be aware of the potential impact the balancing of effort (and avoidance of effort dillution) has on your progress.

Flow

Flow state comes from the increased activity of domain-inherent actions, regardless of how disparate the tasks appear to be (at least, before optimization). An assembly line worker can achieve flow as much as an efficient CEO, with the asumption that the CEO must juggle a larger variance of tasks and activities. There can still be a process or method employed, at each level. Flow is achieved when the expectation of one’s ability to handle any particular task is attained with a sufficient level of confidence that no individual task seems to pass some “insourmoutable-threshold” to derail said confidence, or activity-flow.

Flow can be sustained (or compounded) in a subjective way, internally, while in it, when outcomes consistently match the normal and natural desire of outcome, or when they otherwise feel aligned with previously stated outcomes (which probably, on their own help to promote the sustainability of flow by having decided beforehand, as a goal or desired outcome, on the direction of what will be perceived as positive progress).

Things are going as I wanted them to. Flow sometimes limits conscious attention or thought. One is immersed in the activity. But there is still an awareness or evaluation of perceived progress. But when flow is sustained, luck is being generated and you’re achieving more of the TYPES of manifested results that align with your stated goal or desired outcome/state of reality. This is affected by other things such as general feeling, intention, and very often we aren’t picturing the exact outcome, so the range of outputs are evaluated in terms of how closely they match the range of outcomes that sustain a perception of success-progress.

What is luck?

Luck is generated (or the likelyhood of luck manifesting is improved) through the focused, intense skilled manipulation of reality. Luck is the favorable result, or the means to much more easily achieve an outcome. A door is opened, you simply walk through. You are handed something that will clearly take you from A to B. This is why the decision on what activities to narrow down to are so important.

What to focus on, to compound probability of success

If you master a domain, and know exactly what to do, and it is all you do in that domain, for the time allotted, and you don’t spread your time across too many domains, you will compound the probability of success in the outcomes you desire to achieve from that domain.

Even if you master many domains, progress will likely take longer to materialize, and you will miss some degree of compounding (luck generation) that you would have otherwise experienced or benefited from had you ‘focused’ on fewer activities.

Organizations innovate and grow faster because they have teams of people focused on relatively specific domains. It is like a fleet of tightly run ships, sailing together, able to communicate easily and solve problems and challenges together, in real time.

Despite the speed of digital communication, departments that work closely together should generally be expected to benefit from higher efficiency due to closer physical proximity.

A higher degree of flow will result from individual employees (even if its just you) when the circumstances promoting flow are increased in the organization. Advancement and rate of progress will compound. People will have what they need when they need it. Their outcome-perception and confidence will synergistically influence each other (in the same person) and they will become more “unstoppable”, getting more done efficiently. Efficient skilled action (efficient skilled manipulation of reality) compounds luck and this compounds across people working on related tasks toward general outcomes (hence company mission statements, quarterly goals, departmental goals, etc).

If you have a day job and a business you work on at night, and you move closer to your job and gym so you can free up more time for your business, that is increasing efficiency between domains. At the same time, the more skills you develop and mastery attained in the one domain (business), the more time you potentially (eventually) free up for another activity. For example, by automating (through employee delegation, software, other streamlining processes, etc), you narrow the scope of your activity required to sustain success. Just not when you do too many activities at once, or try to build skills in too many activities at once (unless they’re substaintially related to overall mastery in the one domain (university degree, for example)).

If you have 5 different software you use and can do everything in just one (or find a new one that does what the 5 do), that is narrowing your focus to a single domain, which will still have domain-isolated (good) multitasking, but in one user interface, one way of operating, rather than 5 (not even mentioning the potentially exponential range of diverse inputs/outputs related (external) to each software than within the app alone).

Great things can happen when desired outcome perception is aligned with increased rate of luck-generation through the increased rate of efficiently managed skilled activity.

tl;dr – Don’t spread your efforts too thinly across too many different activities. Find balance between the small (ideally 1-4) number of activities required to both maximize the compounding probability of success from one or more activities, and have enough time to actually make progress and utilize the probability-compounding of success.