What Does it Mean to Work Hard? | Hacker News Reader

What Does it Mean to Work Hard?

ribbonfarm.com

64 pointsbhousel9 comments

I take issue with:

It is work if it will impact something that will be evaluated by others, and if their reactions will have consequences for you that you care about.

And:

Take 24 hours, subtract sleep time, subtract the time you are focused on doing something where there is no customer. The rest is work.

I believe it is more useful to divide between leisure and occupation, as Seneca (1 BC-65 AD) did in On the Shortness of Life. In this sense, one can be preoccupied entirely with his own thoughts and affairs and still not be at leisure.

The post's author, Venkat, appears to consider that a third party is necessary for an activity to be "work" but, as Seneca argues, would you consider "that man leisured who arranges with anxious precision his Corinthian bronzes"? Indeed, the first commenter on the article - `dybyedx` - similarly argues: We sometimes do not realize how much work we do to satisfy our toughest customers — ourselves. In that sense, it is much easier to define relaxation and not work.

I suppose I'd say that the Corinthian bronzes are being arranged in order to impress somebody. It's a difficult line, I'll grant you -- a religious man is often rushing to serve God, for instance. That's an interesting line since the customer need not be human, nor observable in His reaction.

Perhaps more exactly, it impacts someone or something you feel to be outside yourself? That's harder to measure for others, but may be exactly as easy to measure for you, as the worker or leisurer.

To use an outdated term, something is stressful if it impacts your superego—whether or not there is a real person expecting some property X of you, the need to be/do/have X has been wired into you, through socialization, as a terminal goal that you must reach in order to be happy. Alternatively, something can be stressful if it impacts your id (I use this term more for parallel structure than utility): you can instinctually crave X (such as high-calorie food, or sex, or status, or survival in the face of near death.) And either one will cause X to be considered stressful along with as any pursuit instrumental to achieving X, however many levels removed.

On the other hand, if you can draw a line in your hierarchy of instrumental goals and say "goals below this line do not affect pursuits above this line, except in-so-much as I decide it to be so (through a bet or somesuch)", then you partition the stress into the hierarchy above, and create leisure in the hierarchy below. In game design, this line is termed the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_(synthetic_worlds) .

Of course, something can be both leisureful and stressful: if you take a stressful pursuit and then add the pursuit of mastery within it, you can usually make it feel like (stressful) fun. The pursuit of mastery is simply the push, for its own sake, to work at a higher, and more quickly increasing, level of skill than you would if simply working for consequence; because of this, mastery sometimes overwhelms the need to recognize the consequences of the work at all, at which point the work becomes leisure (i.e., if you practice until you are winning tournaments 100% of the time, the consequences of losing a tournament cease to matter. If you grind levels in a video game, the bosses cease to matter. And so on.)

Is there any way I can take these principles and use them to motivate myself to work harder / get more done?

If you want to get more done at the expense of stress, you can easily find some way to attach your goals to a parent goal that will embody such stress into them. Make the affections of a member of the opposite sex dependent on completing your goal, for example (find someone who thinks chiseled abs are attractive, and set yourself to dating them => you will stress out about getting chiseled abs.) Hypothetically, if you knew this trick when you were a child, you could make your parents act disappointed if you didn't do X—that would impress into you a great desire to do X, though you would reject doing X for a period of about 10 years at some point or another, coming back to it afterward. Obviously, make eating dependent on X—this is one reason why startups can be "exhilarating."

If you want to get more done without stress, the answer is simply game design. Make the "small matter" of your goals addictive. Guarantee yourself intermittent rewards for your work (entertaining TV episode every 1000SLOC committed, without any displayed statistic for how many SLOC you have to go, only a notification when you reach it), and so forth. Remove "lame duck" periods—times during which what you're doing won't change the outcome of the "game" (won't push you toward success or failure.) Work at the edge of your expertise, such that there is always a chance of failure, but a failure that is insulated from outer failure (your refactoring didn't work out, so you have to throw away your work and start again—but you don't have a deadline, so this is okay. It just stings a bit.)

This article really hit home for me. Over the past month or so I have been blogging about my own side-projects and things I am reading about or playing with. But now that people are reading it (very few, but people nonetheless), I start feeling obligated to make progress or start a new and interesting project.

It is becoming a double edged sword -- I started blogging because I wanted some public accountability and motivation to finish projects or learn new things, but now I find it becoming less and less appealing. I now care what my readers think and how I present myself, especially since some of my readers are coworkers, and that is making it more like work and causing me to start avoiding it.

Anyone have thoughts on striking a good balance?

My definition of "work" is that it is done for anything other than its own sake. It doesn't matter who it's done for or what the benefit of doing it is. Housework is work; writing a blog can be work; cleaning your tools after an enjoyable hobby is work. Anything done in support of something else, whether or not money or other people are involved, is work.

Only those things, like eating, sleeping, talking with friends, sex, play, that are done for their own sake are not work.

Note also that "effort" is not involved in the definition - I know many people that put more effort into their play than into their jobs.

Washing the dishes can be done for its own sake. Vacuuming can be done for its own sake. All things that are considered work can be done for their own sake and with the same amount of attentiveness and respect as things considered enjoyable hobbies.

That was hard work reading that article.

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