{"id":97,"date":"2006-06-25T22:24:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-25T22:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=97"},"modified":"2006-06-25T22:24:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-25T22:24:00","slug":"websbane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=97","title":{"rendered":"Websbane"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to ancient complexity lore, at a saddle point high in the mountains of Oberwolfach lies buried a single flask of a mystical elixir known as Websbane, or the Hammer of Firefox.  Some say that the productivity-enhancing potion was brewed from the sweat of Erd\u00f6s and the toenail clippings of Euler; others that it was mixed, condensed, and extracted for the Prophesied One centuries hence who will derandomize BPP.  Yet all agree on the tonic&#8217;s awesome efficacy: it is said that one drop would furnish lifelong protection against Slate and Salon; a teaspoonful would lift Wikipedia&#8217;s stranglehold on the soul.  He who once imbibed would neither reread Onion articles from dusk till dawn, nor follow hyperlinks till scarcely a blue word remained amidst the purple, nor while away a Thursday googling a Montreal-born <a href=\"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=90\">singer-songwriter<\/a> mentioned in an email of de Wolf.  Papers would get finished &#8211; books written &#8211; reimbursement forms turned in &#8211; blog entries posted without delay.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s topic is what we can do until the Websbane is unearthed from its resting-ground.   I offer four suggestions below; any additions are welcome.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Use the embryo strategy.<\/strong>  Whenever you&#8217;re procrastinating on something, someone is bound to tell you &#8220;divvy it up into smaller chunks, then tackle &#8217;em one at a time.&#8221;   I&#8217;ve found that to be terrible advice.  When I&#8217;m starting a project, I have no idea how to divvy it up.  I might commit myself to writing chapters on A, B, and C, only to realize later that A and C are trivial and that everything worth saying pertains to B.   Or I might start the introduction, then freeze for days because I can&#8217;t decide what belongs in the introduction and what belongs in the &#8220;meat&#8221; until I&#8217;ve already written them.What I&#8217;ve found to be more effective is what I&#8217;ll call the &#8220;embryo strategy.&#8221; Here you simplify your project so dramatically that you can finish the entire thing (more or less) in one afternoon.  For example, if before your goal was to write a ten-page popular article about quantum computing, now your goal is to write two paragraphs.  Then, once you&#8217;ve finished something, you progressively add layers to it.  This seems to be the approach taken by most successful software projects, not to mention by Nature herself.  The advantages are twofold: firstly, everything is built around one initial idea.  This changes what the end product looks like, but I think for the better.  And secondly &#8212; here&#8217;s the real beauty &#8212; at no point are you ever working on something that will take &#8220;unimaginably long,&#8221; compared to the amount of time you&#8217;ve already spent.  (Give or take a small additive constant.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Exploit the &#8220;quantum Zeno effect.&#8221;<\/strong> One to keep a quantum state from drifting uncontrollably is just to measure it over and over in some fixed basis.    Roughly speaking, the mere fact that you&#8217;re looking means that the state &#8220;can&#8217;t try anything funny.&#8221; Similarly, I&#8217;ve taken to having my girlfriend spend the night with me when I need to finish a paper.   What ensues is a long, romantic evening, wherein I sit at my computer and do my work, and Kelly sits at her computer and does her work.  Interestingly, her mere presence often has the effect of projecting me onto a non-procrastinating subspace.  (Kelly reports a similar effect on her as well.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Don&#8217;t eat.<\/strong>  When you&#8217;re trying to prove theorems about quantum complexity classes, hunger is your friend and linguini-induced sleepiness your enemy.    As obvious as that sounds, it took me almost a decade fully to understand its importance.   These days I usually eat only one meal per day &#8212; my &#8220;brinner&#8221; &#8212; and don&#8217;t even try to work till three or four hours after it.  (Does anyone know  the physiological reason why humans seem unable to multitask between brains and stomachs?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Find yourself a &#8220;boss.&#8221;<\/strong>   When I was at Berkeley, Umesh was my boss.  That doesn&#8217;t mean he told me what to work on (he didn&#8217;t); it means that I got a warm fuzzy feeling from eliciting his opinion of what I had worked on.  Since graduating, to stay productive I&#8217;ve had to seek out a succession of new &#8220;bosses&#8221; &#8212; from Avi Wigderson at IAS, to collaborators like Greg Kuperberg and Daniel Gottesman.   Indeed, if you get a long, technical email from me, it&#8217;s not necessarily for your benefit.  Mathematicians might be machines for turning coffee into theorems, but the fuel I run on is feedback.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Follow these rules, and you might someday become as disciplined and productive as I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to ancient complexity lore, at a saddle point high in the mountains of Oberwolfach lies buried a single flask of a mystical elixir known as Websbane, or the Hammer of Firefox. Some say that the productivity-enhancing potion was brewed from the sweat of Erd\u00f6s and the toenail clippings of Euler; others that it was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest","category-procrastination"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}