Keep Important Things Moderately Important
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
A counterintuitive mental model from psychologist Robert Boyce's in-depth study of academic writers, cited by Oliver Burkeman. Boyce found that writers who made writing a moderately important part of their lives produced far more than those who made it very important. The mechanism is avoidance: when something is loaded with enormous personal significance it becomes intimidating and surrounded by angst, so you forget about it for weeks at a time because you don't dare re-enter the scary thing. The remedy is structural — a short daily session, ten minutes for amateurs and no more than three or four hours even for professionals, and a hard stop when the time is up. Pushing past the stop is giving in to an impatient urge to be done, which backfires into dread of returning.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Notice which project you've inflated
Identify the work that carries outsized personal significance — the book, the business, the meditation practice. Inflation shows up as weeks of avoidance rather than as visible stress.
Pro tip The tell is not anxiety while working; it's how long you go without touching it at all.
- 2
Define a short daily session
Set a session length deliberately below what you think you should do — around ten minutes a day for amateur writers, and never more than three or four hours even for professionals.
Watch out If the session length feels ambitious, it's wrong. The whole point is that it should feel almost trivially small.
- 3
Stop when the session is up
When the time or quota is done, stop and go and do something else — including on the days it is flowing and you could easily continue.
Watch out Continuing on a roll is giving in to an impatient urge to be done with the whole thing, which ultimately backfires and makes you dread returning to the project.
- 4
Aim dailyish rather than unbroken
Build fuzziness into the cadence, as Dan Harris does with meditation. You still know whether a week counted — twice isn't dailyish — but a missed day doesn't cascade.
Pro tip The fuzziness is what stops one break turning into three weeks of nothing.
- 5
Let the frequency, not the intensity, carry the project
Accept that output comes from returning often at low intensity rather than from rare heroic sessions. The moderate framing is what makes returning easy.
In the wild
Robert Boyce's study, published in a book so hard to find that Burkeman had to buy it print-on-demand, examined what made academic writers productive or unproductive. The headline finding inverts the usual assumption: those who treated writing as a moderately important part of their lives wrote considerably more than those who treated it as a very important part. For the second group, the significance made the work intimidating, generated angst, and produced weeks-long gaps where they didn't dare re-enter it. Boyce's prescription was a short daily session — ten minutes for amateurs, three or four hours maximum even for professionals — and a firm stop when it's up.
→ Lower stakes per session produced substantially higher total output.
Burkeman describes his own version, which he suspects is hard for both him and Ali. You commit to 500 words. They come out, things are going well, and another 500 are clearly available. The practice is to make yourself stop and walk away anyway — the enforced low-balling of the day's aims. He is candid that he isn't claiming to be any good at it, but names the difficulty precisely: the moment an opportunity for a bit more productivity arises, not taking it is what feels wrong, and taking it is what quietly inflates tomorrow's expectation.
→ Tomorrow's session stays small and approachable instead of inheriting today's high-water mark.
Common mistakes
Making the work very important to yourself
Elevating a project's significance is intuitively the way to take it seriously, but Boyce found it produces avoidance. The project becomes intimidating and scary to re-enter, so weeks pass without contact and total output falls far below the moderate group's.
Riding the roll past the quota
Continuing because it's flowing feels like free progress. It is actually an impatient urge to be done with the whole thing, and it backfires by raising the bar for the next session and seeding dread about returning.
Building the practice on an unbroken streak
Streak logic means one missed day can justify three weeks off. The dailyish framing keeps enough accountability to notice a bad week while removing the cliff edge that follows a break.
From the transcript
“the writers who made writing into a a moderately important part of their lives were did lots more than the ones who made it into…”
“for people sort of amateur writers that might be 10 minutes a day even for professional writers it probably should never be more than like…”
“it's also like not keeping going even if you're on a roll”
From the episode
6 Lessons That Improved My Life - Season 2 Round Up
Season 2 Round Up