productivity...

first I'd like to apologize to my fans for being neglectful. I've been on the road doing research for my holiday postings.

I recently had a discussion about 'productivity' with my friend Pete. Hi Pete. We were discussing how something could be deemed productive. We sort of came up with a similar strategy that he and the lawyer crowd uses to determine the meaning of a law (or legislation...or some word that I have since forgotten). First you ask if what you are doing is actually accomplishing anything...anything...you can make a sort of 'absolute' argument that the mere physical action of doing something could be productive. Next, you take a local context of this action...say we're in a kitchen and you're cleaning dishes...if I choose to smear feces on the clean dishes then in this context it is not productive...but if I were putting dishes in cupboards it would be 'seen' as productive in the context. Next you take the local actions and apply them to the greater task. Say we work in a kitchen that is on the front lines of the Allied forces in WWI...you could argue that this is also productive so as you go up the food-chain of globalism, each step is reinforcing the "yes it's productive" judgment. But perhaps you were in Hitler's kitchen. Smearing feces on the dishes, even though it is locally unproductive, gets overridden by the fact that you're being productive by slowing down Hitler's forces by giving them ecoli poisoning. Next in the moral hierarchy is the humanity argument. Perhaps if you're putting dishes away in the Allied kitchen you are enabling killing which is wrong...so it's unproductive. Anyway, you get the idea.

During the discussion I remembered that I had once written in my journal something about productivity. This is what I'll share and do my best to describe what hell I was thinking.

page 1. guilt.

have you ever had one of those massive sleep-in days and felt guilty for it? Well on January 28, 2006 exactly that happened. I got to thinking that I seemed to think more than I did and wondered if that was a weakness of character. I always admire those people who seem to have an engine that's stuck with the accelerator on the floor...mine seems to be generally on idle with brief spurts of acceleration now and then. I guess what I was trying do answer was 'can I be a productive person if I naturally tend to think more than I act?'...

page 2. graphs.

when trying to understand stuff, I tend to put stuff in a visual medium...with axes and curves and stuff. for the task at hand, action and thought are my axes and the idea is to analyze what it means when the location on the graph changes.

see enlargement of top of page 2. negative thought is undefined but negative action is deemed to be parasitic. Since I wasn't feeling like a parasite, I confined the analysis to the standard upper-right quadrant of positive thought and positive action. (positive meaning amount...I'm not referring to any morality here). also outlined on this page are the questions. The plot outlines some minimums for survival and shows a couple of examples...'the deadbeat' and 'lazy intellectual'. Also outlines the idea that each person has theoretical maximums for thought and action.

page 3. math

the introduction of the terms: 'Minimum Action Line' and 'Minimum Thought Line'. These differ from the minimum survival thresholds because of a resourcing dilemma...if you spend a lot of time thinking then you will have less time to act and vice versa...each person has their own characteristic MAL and MTL curves which bound them to an area on the thought-action plane. I made a note that this is vaguely reminiscent of a Minkowski plot in the field of Special Relativity Physics. See here for more. A key concept outlined here is moving from one point to another...which to do so requires effort which seems to be a linear combination of the change in T and the change in A. Effort can be relative or absolute, that's an important point too (the reason being left as an exercise for the reader).

page 4. profiles

a cursory discussion on the differing shapes culminating in a formula for absolute productivity. whether the calculation is absolute or relative and whether or not alpha and beta are parametric don't really matter at this point.

page 5. motivation and perseverance

if effort is essentially the cost of moving one's own point on their A/T plane, bound by their own natural limitations, then the willingness to do that or to come up with that effort can be called motivation. motivation can have many forms...energetic perseverance or stubborn bullheadedness, etc. This is also a trait that we are naturally endowed with...to a greater or lesser extent. Your natural bounds may fluctuate based on attitude, etc. but motivation doesn't cost anything...anyone can generate it...change your attitude and you can generate motivation which, in turn, will allow you to move yourself into a more productive position no matter your bounds.

page 6. conclusion.
ok, I guess it was ok for me to sleep in. I can still be a good person.

...hmmmm...I don't know what was in my eggs that morning but it must have been good!