I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.

Does this do anything to change your mental model?

In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.

It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.

I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:

> Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.

In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.

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OP emphatically agrees. Overplanning is arrogance in a world with so many unknown unknowns.

> Most people think that accomplishments like [those of geniuses] require "talents" or "gifts" that cannot be explained… [but] I suspect that genius needs… unusually effective ways to learn. It’s not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of “higher-order” expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657...

I have to say that physiological randomness of this kind is one of the main "use cases" for structured routines.

Before I lived such a structured life, I also felt like I would enter various activities with a roulette wheel of emotions. Which I found to be a big problem! But these days, and due to my structure, a) my mood is highly stable and predictable and b) on the rare occasions when my mood deviates, I usually have a very good idea of why, e.g. deviations in sleep.

Keeping it simple is probably a good policy for most people most of the time. But for those who want to break through the plateaus that simple solutions will inevitably lead to, they can look to posts like this one.

I wasn't being hyperbolic in my use of the term "80/20." The aim, fire, scan article truly only represents about 20% of the tools/techniques I swear by.

Literally considering writing a book on extended mind theoretic ideas. Highly recommend Andy Clark's "Supersizing the Mind" (2010).

> do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?

Both. At first (~10 years ago) it was about managing deficiencies, but before long I was performing far above the average neurotypical knowledge worker.

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