There were many subjects in Ukrainian schools, like history, biology, and geography, where homework mostly involved memorizing textbook chapters. And I absolutely hated it. I couldn’t sit still for even ten minutes to read the chapter once, let alone memorize it. And I remember thinking as a kid: why can I play videogames for 6 hours straight without a break but can’t study for even ten minutes? Another thought that crossed my adolescent mind was: What would happen if I studied just as long as I could play videogames?

Well, after university, I found something I could do just as long as playing videogames: drawing rectangles in Adobe Illustrator and arranging them into layouts. And the best part about it was that I could get paid for it, and so far nobody paid me for playing League of Legends.

Since then, I started to dedicate more time and attention to work and noticed some patterns that might help to get a better idea of how to spend your productive time.

I define work as putting something from the head out into the world. It might be a tweet, it might be a product release. The important part is that it should have the potential to get a response from the world. Creating a project plan does qualify as putting something out there, but nothing will follow until you start to chip away at it. But if you message a lead, there’s a chance of getting a new client to work with.

A common mistake is to think that ruminating or taking a walk to come up with an idea on how to move a project forward is “work.” It’s not, as we’re not putting anything out there, and getting no response from the world. Sketching the first iteration of the website and sharing it with colleagues — is work. And exactly during sketching those ideas that we wanted to catch on a walk would come to light. Inspiration comes after the action and not the other way around.

That’s why I prefer to ship stuff out fast, as it gets a response from the real world. Let’s do a thought experiment: for the same amount of time spent, what approach will yield you a better result — launching a really thought-out and user-tested V1, or shipping V0 and iterating on it multiple times? I bet on the latter, as testing will never fully take into account all the factors that influence a product in real life.

Shipping fast doesn’t mean that you need to sacrifice quality. You can still ship quality stuff but do it in smaller increments. If I am to choose between speed, quality, and scope, I’d prefer to reduce the scope to keep speed and quality at a high level.

The same approach of shipping fast works during the design phase: get the happy path on the canvas as effectively as possible and start collecting feedback on it. Preferably, from customers. Even better — in production.

One way to categorize work is to divide it into “production” type (eg “building”) and “operational” type. “Production” work creates a lasting asset, which benefits from the effect of compound interest, like this essay that anyone could read years after its publication. “Operational” work bears outcomes only as long as you continue doing it, like going to the design conferences and doing the talks. When you stop — you get no traction anymore.

Lots of products are created with the goal of automating operational work (think customer support), so the conveyor belt never stops and requires no human input. But don’t get the impression that “operational” work is sub-par, and you must strive to do only “production” work. Both types are equally important, and there’s no way to grow a product and ignore the operational part. Moreover, such work allows you to accumulate skills and knowledge while doing it. There’s a clear difference between a sales rep who’s done a hundred calls and the one who’s done 10.

These two types can also be encountered not only in relation to work but in people’s personalities, too. Some people gravitate more towards having an experience, say a trip to Paris, and some prefer to buy an Apple Studio Display instead. There are people who get more satisfaction from completing the jigsaw puzzle and seeing the result of their work rather than the process of putting it together. And the choice of their careers is also influenced by such preferences.

Another categorization of work is optimization vs creating something new, and it can be applied both to production and operations. For the “producing” type, it’s building from scratch, like solving a new customer use case with your software product. For operations, it can be building an automation of a routine task.

The pitfall here is that we’re often reluctant to make big bets and build something of substantial scope and fall back to optimizing the existing product, making tiny tweaks, or continuing to do manual work. This hesitation to start a big project, which is very similar to planning rumination, is like standing on the beach and not being able to bring yourself into the water. By hesitating, we’re losing time and momentum, which is a tailwind that help us to move forward. If we stand too long, the project might never materialize, leaving its rewards on the table for more brave to grab.

Such projects seem big and scary and we’re delaying the first step as far into the future as possible, only savoring the idea in the head and dreaming about results. That’s the first obstacle: to start, to get the idea out of the head. The second obstacle comes when we finally build something, put it out in the world in hopes of worldwide media coverage, and get nothing. Two likes under an announcement tweet and an encouraging comment from your partner. After a couple of months of no response, we get discouraged, disappointed, and abandon the project altogether. What we forget is that the exponential curve always starts flat and continues running flat for quite a long time. The real challenge here is to persevere through the initial mild response and stick to it until the curve takes onto the vertical trajectory.

The third set of categories is a more personal one: it’s the kinds of work you enjoy doing and those you don’t. By all means, try to maximize the enjoyable kind, as it will give you not only satisfaction but also a competitive edge because you’ll be able to do it way more and better than somebody who’s less driven by this kind of work. But we can’t avoid the tiresome kind altogether, and there’s always a measure of it in any project. The best way to extract value from such an activity is to deliberately try to automate it. In doing so, you also develop a sense for problems and learn how to solve them.

If you really care about the project and its result, you will make peace with the tiresome kind automatically. Imagine always swimming downstream, that’s how it will feel: effortless and pleasurable hours spent doing what you love. I wrote about caring in my previous article, and if you’re looking for a shortcut to do great work, this is the one: find something you care about, lean into it, and start shipping.

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   How to work hard by Paul Graham