The two-step problem

We identify a major block to productivity.

In reviewing his Master List of Things to Do recently, one of our consultants noticed something about the long-resident tasks.  It was that many of them required something else to be done first; and a two-step process for some reason seems much more difficult than a single task.

Consider something that was actually accomplished some time ago: the cast-iron pot.  One consultant found that he was regularly having canned soup for lunch, which is no doubt more healthy than (say) a Big Mac, but he felt he should be able to make his own.  Not only would be be able to control what went into it, it should also be a bit cheaper, especially if made in bulk.  And he had a wonderful piece of technology, which in some ways has never been surpassed: a big cast-iron pot.  But the pot was thoroughly rusted inside.  He had to derust the pot before making soup.  So that project was laid aside for years.

Perhaps less technical is the matter of another consultant’s floor space.  Like all of us, he has too many books and papers, and they tend to take up any horizontal surface.  And like all of us, he is getting older, and needs a thorough stretching routine regularly in order to be reasonably spry.  But for some time he didn’t have the clear floor space necessary.  He finally did shift piles and cleared enough space, and feels all the better for it.

Our astronomer has two potential papers on the back burner.  One is an extension of his last one on variable stars, exploring more ideas and maybe coming to some conclusions about the data.  But before he works with more data he needs to make the pipeline more efficient and automated; the patched-together method he finally used for the previous paper simply takes too much time and attention.  And that in turn probably means he’ll have to learn another whole software language, not a small undertaking.

The other paper also requires learning software, in this case to process spectra.  He has the data at hand, but has never done serious spectra before, and doesn’t know how long or difficult the learning curve might be.

Perhaps an extreme case is our physicist.  While in grad school he stumbled into a class given by the pure-math department, something called “stochastic equations.”  He grasped only a part of it, but wondered if some of the methods could be applied to quantum mechanics in the context of gravity.  He estimated, though, that even to get to the point where he could ask the question properly would take a full year of courses at the graduate level.  He has made a little progress since, but is still far from finishing the first step.

We’re convinced that two-step tasks are more intimidating and more likely to be deferred even if, viewed objectively, they require no more total time or effort than one-step tasks.  It takes a certain courage to attack the rust in a cast-iron pot.