How to Do Hard Tasks #

This goes hand-in-hand with motivation.

https://every.to/superorganizers/how-to-do-hard-things is somewhat related.

What Makes Tasks Hard? #

Tasks are hard when you don’t already have pathways in your brain that script them, or your existing pathways are incomplete. Doing hard tasks requires learning.

http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/01/12/why-research-blog/

One way to model a task is as a tree of possibilities, where each node is a decision with any number of possible outcomes. Here I’ll discuss tasks that are hand because this tree is complex (has many nodes). Tasks can be hard for other reasons (e.g. physically hard), but I wont discuss those here.

Task trees can have many nodes because:

There simply are many steps to take to complete the task,
Because some steps in the process are committing, making it so that you need to try to predict a lot of the future decisions that will come up in order to be confident in your decision (like playing a game of chess),

What Makes Tasks Easy? #

Tasks are easy when a pathway has already been constructed in your head to execute that task effectively (traverse the tree of decisions in a predetermined way).

It’s good to be cautious of tasks that you find to be easy. In my experience it’s a human tendency to strongly defend the solutions to the tasks that one holds (see a reddit post about political beliefs and Claire’s old lab’s observation that ideas/theories can become “precious” once created). This makes sense, since it takes effort/time/resources to create a task-solving pathway. See also David Eagleman’s neuroscience books, which talk about this. However, this strong defense can blind one to obvious flaws or much better pathways. It’s probably a good habit to occasionally re-learn from scratch originally hard tasks that are important to do well.

Hard Task Solving Strategies - How to Learn #

Learning requires active exploration of the real world task tree for the task you want to learn to do. Through this exploration, the tree is transcribed from the real world into mental pathways. So one way to think about learning hard tasks is learning how to most efficiently explore/transcribe the task tree.

Questions #

Some parts of the task tree may already exist in your brain from another task you’ve done - for example, most of the muscle movement mental pathways needed to run already exist in someone who knows how to walk. Other parts may be completely new, or even contradictory to existing mental pathways. A very efficient way to more quickly learn these alien pathways is to question them via:

Asking a task expert
Asking a reference (e.g. A book or Google search)
Tinkering with the task space (e.g. Attempting to run some computer code)

Environmental Influence #

The human brain constantly absorbs new information from its perspective on the environment where it is. For learning therefore, it can be helpful to place oneself in an environment conducive to learning what you want to learn. This usually makes it more obvious what questions to ask to further map out the task space.

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/what-work-looks-like/

Depth First Search of Task Tree #

Perhaps a preference of iNtuitive Myers-Briggs personalities, this can lead to fast good solutions, but also blindness to obvious other paths.

Breath First Search of Task Tree #

Perhaps a habit of Sensing Myers-Briggs personalities, this can lead to good scoping of the task space, but may exhaust energy to “go deep” on a specific task solution.

I think this is what Nassim Taleb advocates for doing more in complex task space. He writes that exposing oneself to many decision points and giving oneself the option to travel will long term find one the most success.

Mental Perspective #

The brain only understands the world as it perceives it through the senses. Although the senses can take in a high volume of information, there is still heavy processing that must be done for this information to be useful/actionable by the rest of the brain. There are many points along this chain of processing where learned perspective shapes what the rest of the brain sees. For instance, an image of an engine may just look like metal to an untrained brain, but tells a very different story to a mechanic.

In a way, learning or training is partially (or completely?) the process of acquiring new perspectives from which to see the world. This explains why learning can be such a “stop and go” process - it’s easy to be stuck on a concept for a while before it finally clicks.

Inversion by James Clear
- Imagining how to avoid failure is often more useful than imagining how to succeed.

Categories: Mind

Backlinks: Motivation,