On Productivity

"As I have less work, I take longer to do it"

This is a conversation / insight that has come up a surprising number of times in the last few weeks. Basically the idea is that the level of work that has to be done directly influences how long it takes you to do it. It's a little counter-intuitive, especially since you'd imagine that work X (make two slides) takes 30 minutes, regardless of whether there are 2 or 15 other things to do after X. The length of X should be as constant as gravity or the speed of light, but observation says otherwise.

A Special Theory on Work Length Relativity would then be in order. Observation and anecdotal (and thus highly scientific) data suggests that having very little to do in a given day significantly increases the time it takes you to complete those small, menial tasks. The opposite is true: waking up to a fully-loaded day of work increases your productivity substantially. I think it is because the philosophical 'fire under your ass' has been proverbially lit, thus making a given person work faster than what was thought possible. This conclusion may shed some light into achieving faster-than-light space travel as well, so I'll keep you posted on any future developments.