"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

I think many of us have found ourselves in this position before: A paper is due at midnight but we spent the day on other activities. Now it’s 9PM and you’re in a state of anxiousness never before realized. Yet somehow, perhaps with the help of interesting drugs, you were able to muster through and finish the work just before the eleventh hour. Maybe it wasn’t your Ulysses, but it earned an honest grade and another world-ending crisis was adverted. This is what I call “output” work; using prescience and learned skills to exert your efforts into something external.

Here’s another ostensible but more painful scenario: The big test is coming up and you spent the week before binge watching 13 Reasons Why. Now it’s the night before and you attempt to cram 12 weeks of material into the ungodly hours between 10 PM and 3 AM. It’s nearly impossible, isn’t it? It is a terrible feeling, and if you’re like me, you never seemed to learn your lesson. This is “input” work; consuming materials and ideas not before explored or understood. It is far harder to compress this action because your mind does not have the time to evaluate, toy with, and sleep on these new ideas.

Why the difference is important

These two concepts are not hard to grasp: “input” work is a studying event that takes time to process and “output” work is displaying what is already learned, where the difference lies is the time they both take to achieve.

With input work, you must realize that time constraints are not to be pushed down to the wire. Learning is a nebulous process and we all learn a bit differently. We forget 50% of what we learn after only an hour (see Ebbinghaus forgetting curve) and thus I like to think of input work as a muscle that must be worked out frequently if one desires not to allow it to wane. Repetition and time are the keys to success for input work; cramming is rarely a good idea. When you are aware that you will be studying for a contingency, it is wise to review the relevant concepts frequently but to also give space between these sessions. If you need to learn multiple subjects or ideas, breaking them into smaller sections and spacing them apart by concept will reduce memory overload. The biggest reason compressing a studying session into the night before is disadvantageous to our task is the brain is inundated with new and foreign information which it has yet to come to terms with. Learning is like slowly getting used to the cold water in a pool, eventually you forget the arduous journey of feeling confused and lost, only after you’ve given yourself the time and exposure, or that the once arctic waters of the pool are now “room temperature.” Like a frog in an incrementally heated pot.

Output work is enjoying the fruits of your labor. After braving the storm, you are finally able to put the pain of learning into something outside of yourself; an original thing all your own. You are able to constrain yourself and allow a looming deadline to goad you into getting the work done. Eventually you will realize you can always output this work with artificial deadlines. You can force yourself to output for a certain amount of time, maybe the anxiety is not needed after all. Output work is freeing and rewarding because it dismisses us from the pain of trying to memorize and indulge abstract ideas from outside ourselves.

Personal Reflections

It was not until college that I realized the importance of separating these two concepts. Relying on natural intelligence for things that require input work is typically a bad idea and will lead to unnecessary suffering. When aware of an upcoming event that requires such work, it’s best to start that day while the iron is hot and begin the process of retention of the needed information. This makes it easier to break down the concept into smaller chunks and you can adapt the mentality of “Well I’ve already spent this amount of time on the subject already, might as well spend more.” Using the sunken cost fallacy to your advantage. This will not come naturally, as studying is not natural in itself; the primordial plains were not filled with amanuenses, but hunters and gatherers who had to quickly learn to survive. Driving was once an esoteric abstract, and now most of us zone out for 30 minutes on our way to work. Once you see that learning is a process you can trust, the method to the madness no longer seems remote.