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The Meatiness of an Activity

2016 February 02. Tuesday.

Originally written 2016-01-31

How to crochet a scarf:

• Buy a crochet hook and some yarn
• Learn to crochet (30 minutes)
• Make a starter row (5 minutes)
• Add rows until your scarf is long enough (15 hours)

Crochet is a meaty activity because most of your time is spent on the end goal productively. Crocheting weird patterns is less meaty than a scarf because you are interrupting yourself by googling things and getting confused and backtracking.

Some meaty activities:

• Running
  • Fast set up time, you rarely backtrack, there are no shortcuts (any time spent going forward is clearly spent in the best possible way, no questioning that you should have taken a different approach)
• Binge watching Breaking Bad on Netflix
• Being a component in a factory
• Practicing a Language on Duolingo

Some less meaty activites:

• Writing
  • Stop to think of ideas, rewrite old stuff, read form advice, check definitions
• Programming
  • Same as writing :)
• Learning to dance on your own time
  • Feels awkward, constant breaks and quitting, skills can seem to revert
• Building circuits
  • Nothing works!!
• Going camping
  • Most time is spent on getting there and take down and set up and getting back, hardly any meat.

The meatiness of an activity is subjective and meatiness doesn’t correlate with usefulness. Programming is extremely useful but low meat and binge watching is worthless but high meat. Instead, I think meatiness shows stickability. The more you feel like you are making steady progress with the best method available (it is frustrating to look back and see that you could have done something in one hour instead of ten), the easier it is to do day after day.

Email me your thoughts on this!

Update 2016-02-02

Max William’s emailed what he thought:

What you want changes the meatval considerably. I’ll use oxgangs as units, oxgang is sigmoid of percent. For instance, backpacking can be a very high oxgang if you enjoy walking and preparing food in the woods, but if the only thing you enjoy is taking stunning pictures, a backpacking trip could have an oxgang like -70. Or math, if you like learning math, its all meat, but if you like finding interesting things, you’ll be quite hungry.

Public Domain Dedication.