Some Ideas On Approaching Work Differently

As someone who is graced with the opportunity to be self-employed, I’ve been thinking about how I might get more out of myself without succumbing to the all to familiar “running on e” problem. To the end of addressing this problem, I’ve been playing around with tying in some ideas that I’ve gotten from the strength and conditioning world (which I’ll abbreviate as S&C for the rest of this article) with how I think about mental work. Though I’ve already touched on the issue with applying a dualistic mentality when setting productivity expectations to some extent in my piece on connecting inputs with outputs, I’d like to bring in some S&C concepts as well as a few terms I’ve come up with myself to try and upgrade how I interact with work and share that with you.

Now that I’ve set the stage a little bit for this, let’s get into what some of these concepts and terms are that I’m referring to. I’ll initialize all the terms here at the top and then explain the applications as I go through my thought process. The lingo I’ll be playing will be: HIIT, cluster training, “save a rep or two”, and two terms I came up with myself dubbed ISI and OSI. Now for some quick definitions. HITT stands for high-intensity, interval-training, cluster training is a concept of using rest inbetween reps to allow for more volume at higher levels of intensity, “save a rep or two” is self-explanatory, but is basically and idea that suggests longevity and consistency bank on not going to failure or burnout in every work session, such that you can accomplish more across time than otherwise possible. Finally my terms ISI and OSI are fancy sounding terms that borrow an understanding of the above concepts, ultimately to create a model that allows us to maximize productivity by allowing for high-intensity and high volume to coexist in mental work. They stand for in-session interval and out-session interval. ISI wants to capture “on” period & “off” period within a session, while OSI looks at the space between sessions. For instance, maybe in a workout plan you do 3 sets of 10 pushups twice per day. The ISI may refer to rest between reps, &/or between sets, while OSI cares about time between sessions. Maybe one does a workout at 10am and one at 6pm, leaving the OSI at 8 hours. I apologize in advance that these aren’t the best terms, please feel free to come up with better ones, these are just what I made up to think about this stuff.

Now that all of the terms have been defined, my goal is to use the lessons from these concepts to apply the ideas of ISI and OSI, which are just derivatives of the other concepts, to my work. So for example I might decide to have an ISI where I have a parameter for rest between reps and another for rest between sets. Perhaps while coding maybe I work for an hour than take a 10 minute break to avoid strain and premature exhaustion. For the second part of ISI maybe I work in a stretch of 2 hours and maybe take a longer break and then come back and do another “set”. For the OSI maybe the frequency is two sessions a day one in the morning and one in the late afternoon or early evening. The point of this article is not to pretend that I have a perfect formula for this since I’m just theorycrafting, but rather I wanna bring attention to how we can apply models from various contexts to how we think about work, to explore new possibilities, and attempt to upgrade our productivity. Another way of thinking about ISI and OSI for the computer science inclined, at least directionally, might be: ISI(restBetweenReps, restBetweenSets) & OSI{sessionOneTime – sessionTwoTime}.

Obviously these ideas have many applications and as always there is probably way more that can be said on this topic, but I think I’ll leave it here for now. I hope you found this useful in some way and I hope you will be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEyeBlog author