What problem should you be working on now?

“Two men by the sea,” Caspar David Friedrich, 1817

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Katariina asks: “How to filter problems worth solving from problems worth quitting?”

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At 25, when Johanna and I bought a house and had to pick an internet provider, we decided to go with the smallest data plan, 5 GB a month. I can recommend it. When we ran out of data, as we did after two weeks each month, I would make a to-do list where I wrote down everything I wanted to do on the internet. After 3-4 days, I’d walk down to the library, open my notebook, and read:

1. Look up Justin Bieber’s net worth

What? Why did I think that was a good problem to spend three minutes of my life on?

2. Check who is ahead in the US primaries

Why??

There were so many things like this, things that had felt imperative to me in the moment, but that, with just a day’s distance, revealed themselves as absurd. It made me wonder how much of my life I waste on nonsense.

I discussed this with Torbjörn, my Rammstein-loving and intellectually hyper-attuned friend, and he had an idea for an app. It would work like this: whenever you clicked something on your computer or your phone, instead of opening, it would be appended to the bottom of your to-do list. You’d click on a YouTube video of Alan Watts talking about what reality is, and your to-do list would open. To proceed to the video, you’d have to manually upvote watching the video past hanging with your girlfriend and paying your bills to confirm that the video was a higher priority for you than anything else you knew of.

We never built this torture machine, but what I’m saying, Katariina, is that we often already know which problems matter if we just stop to think about it.

There is something like a value structure inside of us—a web of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, goals, ethical principles, and so on—that we can tap into. It will rank order our options for us and tell us what matters, if we want. In moments of clarity, we can make contact with that value structure, and it will tell us, in no uncertain terms, that almost everything we do is irrelevant. Perhaps your grandmother dies and grief bursts you open and you remember what really matters in your life. But the problem is that you forget. Or I do, at least. Most of the time, I am only loosely connected with my deeper values and so can’t assign things their proper place. I lose myself in whatever comes my way.

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Johanna often asks me a question that helps when I’m lost like this. She says, quite simply, “What is the problem you should be working on now?”

It sounds too simple to work. But when I’m in my office and ask myself the question, I nearly always realize I’m working on the wrong thing. And if I ask it again half an hour later, guess if I haven’t drifted and am working on the wrong thing again. So, ideally, I should ask myself twice an hour.

Asking what problem I should be working on now does two things. First, it lifts my eyes from the mess of the present, so I can orient myself. But second, it also points back down at the present, because of that now at the end of the sentence. This now reminds me that what I’m looking for is not the truth about my soul; I’m just looking for the next iteration of the experiment that is my life.

And so, having (1) grounded myself and (2) rank ordered my options,¹ I go back into another 30-minute session, focusing on the most aligned thing I can perceive. Until I drift again.

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I’m not saying that reconnecting with your values like this will automatically reveal which problems are worth solving and which are worth quitting, Katariina. Figuring that out requires being deeply attuned to the nuances of your values, and it requires the practical knowhow necessary to evaluate different options. It takes long practice.

What I’m saying is that the habit of taking a step back to articulate my value hierarchy and then prioritize my options—that habit has been useful, for me, in building the necessary self-awareness and know-how. Each time I’ve interrupted my automatic decisions by looking at the larger picture and prioritizing, I’ve had another chance to see my value structure more clearly; it has gradually come into view.

When Johanna and I bought the house, in 2015, I was much more confused than I am today, and I didn’t know what to focus on. But I wasn’t so confused that I couldn’t articulate what seemed like the highest value next step. So I did that (in fits and starts) and every time I did, I could test my prediction by acting on it and getting feedback. Usually, my guess was wrong in some way. But when that happened, I could step back again, usually probed by Johanna, and look at what my decision had led to, and how I felt about that. I could reflect on what that implied about my values, and how to better act them out in the world going forward. And then I tried that.

In another essay, I referred to this loop as “running a million small experiments trying to figure out the composition of this object that is [you]”—introspection by doing. It can be punishing. But if you do it for ten years, it is hard not to reach some clarity about your priorities. What matters will rise up from the mess.

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Here are some recommended readings:

1. “Seeing more whole”, Joe Carlsmith

2. “Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on”

3. “Rationality is an underrated way to be authentic”

4. “The throughput of learning”, Ribbonfarm

5. “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process”

Acknowledgements

Thank you, Katariina, for the question. Thank you, Esha and J for comments and help editing the piece.

1. Johanna has a second question, which she asks after she knows what the priorities are and what problem should be the focus. The followup question is, “What alternatives do I have?” That is, she breaks out of the automaticity by which our minds tend to serve up a cached solution by forcing herself to consider multiple paths to her goal. But that question deserves its own essay.