Work hard, at a sustainable pace, where you remember as much as possible, and what it means

I have worked alone every day for the last 26+ years. Most of that time looking closely at how individuals and organizations use the Internet, solve problems, build new organizations, try to innovate, solve or deal with “impossible” tasks. I only burned out one time, but it took a few years of changed schedules to even out. I work 18/7 mostly. But try never to work more than 72 hours non-stop. Humans can do a lot more than they ever try.

I orient by task and topic and question. Most of my problems are difficult systemic ones, or emerging, or where there is conflict, or simply hundreds of millions of humans involved. But time management is important.

I know my limit is about 20 hours a day. I can work 20 hours most days for about 2 weeks, then I get tired and will have days with as little as 12 hours to make up. I still work 18 hours, but I choose easier problems and spend time exploring and gathering data, that does not require intense and continued integration. When I am fresh my working memory is about 3 million entities. But when I am tired I can only hold a few dozen. I try to stay where there the few dozen main themes, but keep maximum context and all memories in mind. I can do much of it by computer, but as I get older, most things do not matter.

There is a kind of zen state I use where I fill my mind with all the main factors and questions, then hold that context for days or months on end. With the important boundary conditions and constraints literally constantly in mind and in view, evaluating specifics, even ones that take hundreds of hours to work through, is not hard, just tedious.

Many people won’t spend an hour on a problem that can take days to set up in mind. So they give up, never really starting. I usually keep three main “themes” running, each taking about 40 hours a week. But I do not put arbitrary boundaries. If someone asks for help and it takes me 200 hours, I do not regret the time. If I find groups who are stuck on things they cannot see because their framework is too small, I try to insert very specific clues, and hope they get the hint. I am not responsible for what others do.

I do not try to change people or groups, however much I hate to see wasted decades by groups that can be in the tens of millions. I do not like seeing millions of human dying, but it happens all the time, and the people who are working on those do the best they can. I am not too keen on the young ones who only work for fame and money and egos. But they are no different than people who wear certain kinds of cloths or have favorite movies.

Not sure if this is useful. How to approach problems with only a human mind, the Internet, my memories and computers takes balance, practice and a lot of effort to discover priorities and personal motives.

I do know that if you have another 50 or 60 years in your life, you would be wise to invest time thinking and working on plans for your later years. I could commit 26 years every day as an experiment. I am happy I did it, and I seem to have had some impact on things that are important to me, and I think important to the human and related species, the emerging true AIs as well.

18*7 is 126 hours a week. I do not take vacations and my family obligations are not many. So roughly I worked 100 hours a week for 50 weeks a year for 26 years. And I tried to keep it all in mind for that entire time. That is 130,000 hours of fairly decent quality effort. It is sustainable and often rather enjoyable. A few problems individually would require sustained effort for months at a time. When I measured the speed of gravity that took two years, but only 10 of 18 hours a day. And much of that time was spent finding what groups would need to change and how. Not just slogging through masses of data and writing programs.

Filed as (Work hard, at a sustainable pace, where you remember as much as possible, and what it means)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation