8/24/2023 0 Comments Terence tao rate my professor![]() Thank you for taking the time to engage with this topic and taking the time to share your thoughts. I have to say that your philosophy is incredibly appealing. I came across this site a few months ago, and have since worked my way through almost all of the content you’ve ever produced here. Figure out a task management system that works for you, then move on to do your remarkable work. There are some potentially remarkable people that are constantly bogged down in the minutiae of a task management system. If you wish, it makes sense to set up a review of your system (a time-based action item/to-do item) after a set period of time (3 months minimum – 6 months recommended), while allowing for small tweaks in between. It will not be perfect, but as long as it works well enough, it will provide its purpose. It is vitally important that you develop a system that works for you, then move on. Too often, we see otherwise productive folks spend the peak of their motivation cycle/deep work phase attempting to put together the perfect system for managing their more menial tasks.ĭavid Allen puts forward an interesting system and philosophy, but I have witnessed countless folks putting their high productivity moments toward further developing their system. It is also important to point out that when putting together some sort of batching system for those everyday activities/obligations which cannot be avoided, that perfection must be ruthlessly ignored. ![]() If you’re looking for the next Tao, in other words, ignore the guy checking e-mail while running to his next meeting, and look instead towards the quiet fellow, staring off at the clouds, trying to figure out what to do with his afternoon. If my theory is true - and I don’t know that it is - its implication is striking: busyness stymies accomplishment. We can imagine that this month was a down cycle between two periods of more intense thinking. On closer inspection, it turns out that most of the posts occurred in a single month: February. As mentioned, he posted nine long posts since the New Year. Returning to Tao’s blog, the specific dates of his posts support my theory. This is why people who do remarkable things can seem remarkably under-committed - it’s a side-effect of the scheduling philosophy necessary to accommodate depth. When you’ve shifted temporarily out of deep work mode, however, this approach leaves you with down time. When it’s time to work deeply, this approach leaves you the schedule space necessary to immerse. This requires that you constrain the other obligations in your life - perhaps by being reluctant to agree to things or start projects, or by ruthlessly batching and streamlining your regular obligations. To respect this reality, you must leave sufficient time in your schedule to handle the intense bursts of such work when they occur. Certain times of the day, week, month, and even year (e.g., the professor I discussed in my last post) are better suited for deep work than other times. ![]() We can’t be expected to accomplish any job any time we have the available cycles. Put another way, to ape Rushkoff, we’re not computer processors. Here’s why you should care: Tao’s downtime is not an aberration - a quirk of a quirky prodigy - it is instead, I argue, essential to his success. I conjecture, therefore, that Tao’s large volume of posting implies he enjoys a large amount of down time in his professional life. Since the new year, he’s written nine long posts, full of mathematical equations and fun titles, like “Matrix identities as derivatives of determinant identities.” His most recent post is 3700 words long! And that’s a normal length.Īs a professor who also blogs, I know that posts are something you do only when you have down time. My evidence that Tao is not overwhelmed by such obligations is the time he spends on non-obligatory, non-time sensitive hobbies. ![]() By “busy,” I mean a schedule packed with non-optional professional responsibilities. Terence Tao is one of the world’s best mathematicians.
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