Having a system that will force you to avoid fake work and achieve leveraged results

So, if you have read Paul Graham's essay on How to Lose Time and Money, you will know that these times, we unknowingly pretend to do meaningful work as our days are filled with a lot of prerequisite work rather than actual work.

So I will talk about what I am doing to avoid falling into this trap as I am the victim. And at this age of time having a good mental model and a system is far better than just having goals and grit, and you can always iterate and optimize them, and this is far better for those who don't have clear goals in their lives.

So what are the nonessential works? these types of work disguise themselves as meaningful and boring but lack any true measurement of impact. Things like reading an article, books, writing code, watching an educative series, documentaries a YouTube video, replying to emails, etc.

And some trivial work also takes the shape of prerequisite work. You tell yourself you won't do the main work and you will spend the whole day/week/month just to learn or do the prerequisites and this might be satisfying but you are actually avoiding the real and essential work.

"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." - Aristotle.

So for the above mentions, you can turn them into semi-meaningful work by just sharing what you learned either in writing or video or contributing to some work in that specific area.

But what I applied to even be more efficient is to automate some parts of acquiring knowledge, let's say surfing on the internet I use AI agents to collect information, and my task is to make judgments, something I rely less on videos but more on a mental framework to understand it by using GPTs.

I also make sure, I try to contribute to anything bigger whereby I can get feedback from seniors, this saves time as you supercharge the learning cycle.

The bar is higher than ever make sure you don't indulge in mimicking real work, each of your work try to set measurable metrics that affect other people and businesses, or advance the way of living.