I'm productive and in a pit of distraction

Lately I'm getting more done, but also dealing with more distraction — a pit I can't seem to climb out of. I wonder where all this productivity and distraction will lead me long-term.

Nebulous Productivity

How productive do you have to be to be productive enough? Where is the end of the quest for doing more faster?

The big problem is that we never define what is enough, we just follow some nebulous metric of "better"¹. Better can't be reached, but we'll kill ourselves in the continued pursuit of it.

Claude Code has helped me get more done at work. We've tightened up our infrastructure so downtime is much less frequent. We've added features I haven't had time to add in years. We've stopped random bots from scanning for security issues on our sites.

Based on the number of tickets closed each week, I'm getting 2x as much done now as I was at this time last year. Where do I stop though? If I was getting 3x done, is that enough and should I start using the time for something else?

Wrenched from Focus

Distraction is the problem. We may want to focus on "good" things, but we continually get wrenched away from them by things we don't care about.

After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus. - Four Thousand Weeks Pg 90

This is something I've found myself doing much more lately. Scrolling Reddit instead of reading, flipping through Instagram instead of heading to bed.

• [[it doesn't matter how committed you are to focus 051020210602]]

I bet all of us go through seasons in life where we get distracted doing things we don't want to be doing. I'm in one and need to put an end to it.

Life is a Wicked Environment

In Range the author talks about wicked and kind learning environments. Kind environments have well-defined rules and your choices immediately result in feedback about the quality of the choice. Chess is an example of a kind learning environment. It's well structured and you either win or lose the game depending on your moves.

Most of the stuff we deal with day to day is not a kind learning environment though, it's wicked. The rules are ill-defined. Results vary, and likely come days or months or years after the decision was made. You don't have quick feedback loops, and it's unclear which of the 100 decisions made in the last month contributed how much to the outcome.

It's worth reminding ourselves that we're always dealing with wicked learning environments. That it's hard being human and dealing with everything that comes our way. That emulating some other person that succeeded is unlikely to work because they had a different life and a different set of circumstances that brought them to success.

We could all give ourselves a break when things aren't going as expected.