Skills

Some activities have many more times more impact than others. For example, if you’re learning a new skill you’ll improve very quickly at the start as you learn the fundamental skills and then your progress will slow. For example, in language-learning the first hundred words you learn are by far the most useful, often gainig you ~80% coverage. Someone who makes sure they learn the most common words can thus reach conversational fluency several times faster than someone who picks more randomly from the most common couple of thousand words.

Many of us at 80,000 Hours have found that having a good task management system – a list of tasks with a process for maintaining it – is important for being productive. The most popular sysetm is called Getting Things Done and you can read a summary of it here.

Commitment devices have boosted my productivity from spending hours or even days procrastinating to consistently achieving my aims. The idea is that you make it costly to fail to do what you say you’ll do. For example, you tell a friend that you have to do 8 hours work a day or you pay them £50. Or maybe you have to shave one side of your body if you fail (I know someone who had to do this!)

To have impact you need to choose the right career. But that’s not all. If you can build your knowledge and productivity faster than everyone else in your career then you’ll rise from average in your field to the top and have much more impact. So how can you do this?

Learn more effectively using a spaced repetition system

If you can accelerate your learning then you’ll be able to learn more information useful for your job. You also get compound benefits from knowledge. The more you know, the more easily you can learn related topics and make links between different areas of knowledge to come up with novel solutions. There are lots of useful things you could learn: if you’re a student you could study your subject more efficiently. If your job involves a lot of networking you could use spaced repetition to learn names and information about people that you need to remember. Every time you come across something useful you didn’t know, you can make a new flashcard in seconds.

When people say that time is money, they mostly mean that you can earn money with your time. But it works both ways. In a previous post I discussed how we can spend money on a virtual assistant to save time. Here I will discuss some ways that you can spend money on goods or services to save you time.

James Taylor once said, “Time will take your money, but money won’t buy time.” I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. Yes, no matter how much you are willing to pay, you won’t be able to get more than 24 hours in a day. However, most of us can pay money to free up more time for the things we like doing–whether that is pursuing an effective career that makes a difference, or going for long wild swims.

In a series of posts, I will offer a perspective on the “quantum quest” – the evolving attempt to make tomorrow better than today. Changing the world is certainly a quest. And while the evolution may appear to be smooth and continuous, it happens in discrete steps – hence the “quantum”.