This is a polemic against an already disliked adjective. No one likes repetitive mundane toil. Drudgery is evil
Then why write this piece? Mostly, it's a personal rant digging into this sad part of life. This is a declaration of my principle, which I will follow till the day I die. This mission will be my guiding north star:
Automate or delegate all mundane work in life
My definition of drudgery is any work that isn't interesting by itself and must be routinely done to achieve a desirable end-state.
Avoiding drudgery ≠ not doing the dishes. Clean dishes daily is a desired outcome - but the means to achieve this is not interesting and must be repeatedly performed. Hence, automate it with a dishwasher.
Avoiding all boring work will never get you to a good end-state (clean house, regular meals). It is part of life and must be acknowledged. It makes for a better quality of life. The challenging part is to know which banal tasks need to be performed and whether they can be automated. My principle is not an excuse for laziness.
I believe that at the start, drudgery needs to be embraced - if the work is required to reach an improvement in your life or business. After all, nothing of value is created without pain. This process should be repeated till you eliminate and automate all of the trivial, rote steps. That is when you achieve the ideal duration required for work - freeing you up for exploration, caretaking and creativity. The absolute peak of living the human condition.
Mundane tasks steal from creative Flow state
Creative output is built over bouts of uninterrupted flow-state periods. Writing this blog requires me to be in flow for at-least the time it takes to write a sentence. If I were to get up and take care of something else - there goes my train of thought.
Preserving this is vital for finishing things - whether it be creative endeavors or work at your office. Flow state directly contributes to your net worth if you think about it. Flow-state needs to be protected the same way you protect your bank account.
Building anything beautiful requires living in the zone. Tinkering with the notes of that composition. Editing the words of that screenplay. Once you are fully engrossed in the project it is then that you make the golden connections and build the vital pieces that constitute the remarkable finished work. Automating every other task will help achieve maximum flow. Lock - in
Drudgery steals time from family
Nothing is more draining than a late night call that could have been an e-mail. If it's an announcement or just a huddle where I am not the DRI it feels painful to spend the minutes of undivided attention which would have been better spent with my wife or connecting with my parents and sister. I skip majority town hall meetings for they are 1-to-many sermons that do not require my input and can be summarized.
Boring work zaps the energy and willpower out for the day
You come back tired from work, hoping to relax and unwind with some telly and tea with your spouse. But alas - you have to spend hours more on the screen reading through intricate laws to fill your tax return! Even though a lot of the process is simplified with pre-filled data, you still need to spend your willpower points to carefully check everything. Now you have used up all your brain cells for the day and you won't be able to even think about working on any side-project. Conserve brain cells!
Humans are not made to from one chore to the next
A: Making art, building systems, teaching things, writing treatises
B: Notification emails, transferring data, house maintenance, repairing appliances
It's clear that we are not made to just to tasks in B. We have folks targeting to reach Mars, cure diseases, create materials, stimulate thoughts through art. Should we be stick in the rut of mundane tasks? Drudgery is anti-human.
How to manage?
One will keep encountering mundane tasks throughout life. What are the best ways to tackle these speed bumps?
Eliminate and simplify workflows
Elon is the ideal case to look up to here. Every required step - be it an email, a command terminal, or waiting for any process must be questioned first. Then consider whether it can be completely removed or simplified. Finally if it must stay, see if it can be recorded as a script that automatically runs. Every process and requirement can be questioned which is how you'll find the gaps in efficiencies.
I had a workflow where i had to boot up docker. I found out several commands that had to be run and wait for a certain phase of the program to happen. I recorded all of the statements in multiple scripts to be run at start and found a way to speed up the boot process so that I can get to the parts I want to test way quicker. This increased my iteration speed and quickened my testing loop. An amazing amount of progress gets made this way.
Embrace Async handoff
Coding Agents can go off to work on a task. Deep research can browse 100s of sources for minutes. Hiring folks and services for tasks not in your core helps you focus your time on the most important issues. Evaluate often that whether the next task can be given off async - where all you have to do is wait for a notification while you spend time at the more creative side of work.
Speed up everything
Treat time as the most precious asset, make every thing as fast as possible.
As mentioned earlier, just increasing the speed of certain phases of my system increased my iteration speed. You should aim to have the fastest iteration speed on the item you are building. Be it isolating the code and running unit tests continuously, or parameterizing phases in order to run them as modular components independently. Seeing the cause and effect increases your learning rate, which ultimately gets a lot of work done.
Do not fear the schlep (a word of caution)
If you avoid every hard or mundane task, you’ll end up skipping the essential steps and always taking the path of least resistance. That path just leads you to a very mainstream, uninteresting outcome.
Schlep blindness causes you to ignore important problems that need to be addressed. To automate and increase speed in a system, you have to embrace the drudgery initially. Go through it, understand it and only then can it be optimized.
Again, do not be a sloth. Optimizing is hard and often painful work. Embrace it!