# Do One Neat Thing vs. Get Work Done

Often when I have work that needs to be done, my first instinct is to approach it with the completely wrong attitude.

The wrong attitude is something like: let me sit down and Get Work Done.

This mindset is very outcome-focused:

*   I should Sit Down And Write A Blog Post
*   I should Get My Apartment Cleaned
*   I should Do My Accounting Records For This Month

If my mindset is that I should Get Work Done, then I’ll tend to think about everything that’s necessary for completing the task and realize how much time and effort it will take. And then the whole thing starts feeling unpleasant.

An alternative mindset is what you might call Just Do One Neat Thing:

*   Let me just write down these two thoughts for a blog post.
*   I’ll just put that thing over there into the trash.
*   How about I just do this little bit of paperwork (that’s not all of it).

If I do that, then it might often be that I end up doing the whole task all at once, because writing down the first thoughts for a blog post gets me to do the next ones, or putting one thing into the trash leads to the next thing being put to the trash too, et cetera.

Now you might be thinking that this is a version of popular productivity advice like “break things into smaller tasks”. And certainly it involves starting with a smaller task. But it’s not quite the same.

Because when I decide to Get Work Done, I might still break down the work into smaller tasks. Then I look at all the smaller tasks involved, realize that there are a *lot* of them, and feel demotivated.

One of the pieces of my writing that I’m the most proud of - and which some people have said they found literally life-changing - is my “[Multiagent Models of Mind](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip)” sequence. Part of my motivation in writing it came from thinking that there are concepts that neuroscience, psychotherapy and some theories of meditation all seem to touch upon, so maybe I could discuss some of those connections.

Early on I thought something like “well, maybe I cover each one in a separate post, so that would be roughly three posts to get the basics down?”

What I consider the original core part of the series ended up being 17 articles long. In writing the each post, I kept realizing that actually I need to explain this thing in more detail, and hmm I don’t understand that thing so well and need to look into it a bit more, and so on.

If I had sat down and decided to Get Work Done, then tried breaking down the task of writing into all the individual subtasks and realized how much work it involved... I would simply never have written a single word.

Likewise, on occasion I’ve had the thought that I want to Write A Novel. Some very reasonable advice has been to plan it out well beforehand, so I’ve tried doing that, realized how much work there would be, and given up. Or I might have started doing it a little bit, found the writing dreadfully boring, and given up.

In contrast, sometimes when I started writing stories such that I literally [only have one mental image to go off from](https://kajsotala.substack.com/p/diy-narrative-therapy) and no particular expectation of where I want it to lead, I’ve ended up with a small novel’s worth of text[^uatxiz5dav].

Other common pieces of advice that this resembles are “make starting as easy as possible” and “set the criteria for success as low as possible”. For example, instead of making your goal “I will do all of these exercises at the gym”, your goal is just “I will take two steps out of the front door”. The idea being that this is so easy to succeed at that you’ll have the energy for it, but that once you’re out of the front door, you might find yourself going to the gym while you’re at it. (But if you don’t, you’ll count getting out of the door as a success anyway.)

This is significantly closer to what I’m talking about. However, it’s not quite the same either.

When I wrote my multi-agent series, I didn’t set a goal of “just open a word processor” and figure that I’d have succeeded if I managed to write something. My goal was much more explicit than that. I *was* always intending to write *at least* three posts.

Instead, the core of Just Do One Neat Thing is what the name says:

*   I set out to just do One thing
*   And that thing is Neat

By Neat, I mean intrinsically fun or enjoyable in some way. It doesn’t need to be *massively* fun or amazing, it just needs to be fun enough to do. And then when it happens to be fun, there’s a natural momentum where I want to continue doing the fun thing, so I keep at it until the task is finished. Note the difference to the “take two steps out of the front door” thing, where there’s no expectation that the two steps would be any *fun*.

This is also related to the way that some people may it difficult to Write An Essay, but have no problem writing an extended social media post that’s practically an essay by itself. The essay feels like they should put in Serious Work, while the social media post is just Fun To Write.

When I orient around Getting Work Done, my goal is not to do a neat or fun thing. My goal is to get the work *done with*. This means that every moment when I look at the state of the project and see that it’s not done yet, it feels like failure.

The context where I noticed this most viscerally was cleaning. My default experience cleaning is that I’ll clean a little bit, and then see how there is still a lot of mess and clutter that needs to cleaned. That makes me feel demotivated - no matter how much I get done, I only keep seeing everything that hasn’t been touched yet.

But sometimes I’m able to ignore the big picture, and focus only on the spots that I *did* just get clean, or how the *process* of tidying up feels. In those cases I’m able to enjoy it. Instead of constantly looking at what’s still left and feeling like I’m being punished all the time, I can look at what I’ve accomplished and feel like I’m doing something fun all the time.

With purely physical tasks, this probably doesn’t make that big of a difference in the quality of the end result. Clean is clean, regardless of whether it felt enjoyable or tedious to do. But with creative tasks, it feels like the whole flavor of the resulting thing is different.

If I’m just Getting Work Done, it has two effects on me:

*   On the one hand, I’m motivated to finish the thing as quickly as possible. So I’m less likely to explore novel directions or double-check things, because then I would need to spend extra time on it.
*   On the other hand, there’s a curious effect where I feel less connected with my intuitions of what a valuable direction would be. I didn’t *start* from pursuing something valuable, so what I produce also tends to *continue feeling* not-valuable. And then my mind keeps [waiting for a sense of](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/NQwnXc3xuoqtw5DQv#Behavior_by_feeling_regulation) “this is good enough now”, failing to get it, and doing something more in the hopes that it’d feel good enough *now*.

The article that you are reading now is being written in a Just Do One Neat Thing mode. I had a rough idea for how I wanted to start this essay, started writing it, and now we’ve gotten to this point. I feel like there’s a relatively smooth flow from one point to another.

In contrast, “[Different configurations of mind](https://kajsotala.substack.com/p/different-configurations-of-mind)” that I wrote a few weeks ago was predominantly written in Getting Work Done mode. Now that doesn’t necessarily make it bad - several people liked it! But the different sections don’t feel very tight. It’s kind of jumping around. Not elegantly jumping around a core point either, but more erratically. Writing it, I kept having the feeling that there was something missing - that I kept failing to communicate something but wasn’t sure what. So then I kept adding on new sections in the hopes of figuring it out, until I called myself out in the beginning of the last section:

> There’s a lot more that I could say about this, but one might wonder where I’m going with all this is, and what the ultimate takeaway is.

I said that because I myself wasn’t quite sure of that, either. Also, notice how I feel the need to point out that this isn’t *all* that I could say about the topic? That’s again because I wasn’t contact with a feeling of *this writing is actually good*, which made me generally more insecure. And feeling generally insecure made me want to put in that caveat as a subtle way of saying something like “if you are feeling unconvinced by this post, don’t judge me for that yet, because I still have more arguments and maybe one of the ones that I *didn’t* write would convince you”. While if I’d felt like everything in my post was Neat, I would have trusted my readers to be able to recognize the post as Neat without such caveats.

Getting Work Done also makes me want to finish things in one go, with as few breaks as possible - if I work at something a whole day and still have to face it on *another* day, that also feels like a failure. That can also make the end result worse, because often the right thing to do with creative projects is to let them rest for a couple of days and then come back and look at them with fresh eyes and ideas.

So far I’ve focused on why it’s better to Do One Neat Thing than it is to Get Some Work Done. So why *did* I write that earlier post in Get Work Done mode and didn’t switch to Do One Neat Thing?

One reason was that I didn’t understand the exact difference so crisply then - I only worked out the specifics today, while in the process of writing this post. (Writing is thinking!)

But it’s not trivial to get into the Do One Neat Thing mindset. If you just *hate* doing something, then you’re unlikely to find anything about it Neat. You might also be short on time and feel like you just need to get something done *now*. Or you might be feeling perfectionistic or insecure and be unable to focus on the process. I mentioned that being in Getting Work Done mode can be the cause of insecurity - you’re not connecting with your sense of doing something Neat, so you feel bad about what you’re doing - but it can also be an effect of it.

This connects with what I was talking about in my earlier article on [The Wisdom of Creative Resistance](https://kajsotala.substack.com/p/the-wisdom-of-creative-resistance), where I tried to force myself to write about something even though the topic felt boring. That was a very Getting Work Done type of move - “I don’t care if this thing I’m doing has zero Neatness, let me just be done with it”.

As I discussed in that article, school tends to teach people to relate to things with a Getting Work Done attitude by default - if you have an essay due for your class, it doesn’t matter how unmotivated you are or how boring the result might be, you get down to work and write it. On the one hand, this means that you might teach yourself to write in ways that you hate; on the other, this means that you *can* push through the feeling of boredom and write something even when you feel zero motivation.

So in practice, sometimes just remembering that Doing One Neat Thing is even an option helps get into it. At other times, you can’t get into that state of mind, but you still need to Get Work Done[^kzkdysusxmb].

*This article was first published as a paid piece* [*on my Substack*](https://kajsotala.substack.com/) *one week ago. Most of my content becomes free eventually, but if you'd like me to write more often and to see my writing earlier, consider getting a subscription!*

[^uatxiz5dav]: To be clear, I did try just writing out individual scenes before too, but it was only with (LLM) co-authors that they turned into anything much longer than just individual scenes. Just doing a Neat thing doesn’t always lead to another Neat thing. 

[^kzkdysusxmb]: Or you might theoretically be able to get into Doing One Neat Thing mode if you really wanted to, while usually considering it a low priority. My apartment is still a mess most of the time.