TLDR

Exploration – trying new things, even when there are safe, familiar things within reach – is hard. Risky. Stressful. It’s also essential to a rich and vibrant life well lived. Like most other hard, stressful, important things, it’s better done together than apart. With our unique mixtures of shared and unshared experiences, we can use our gifts to help each other explore the world.

I

Let’s say you recently finished reading a novel, and are looking for a new book. You have many thousands of choices: classic fiction, science fiction, poetry, true crime, history, popular science, self-help, wisdom literature, politics…the list goes on and on. Authors you know, authors your friends read, authors you’ve never heard of that popped up while idly browsing Amazon. An impossible profusion of words, which you could dive through forever without seeing the bottom.

But you have to pick something, so let’s artificially constrain your options. Your long-time favourite novelist has a new book out, which you’re very excited about reading; you expect it to be much, much better than any random book you pick. At the same time, your friends have been raving about some obscure author you’ve never heard of, who wrote a lot of books in the 1960s, and you’ve been thinking of trying her out. Or you could try some poetry – you’ve never really gotten on with poetry, but you’ve also never read it much since you left high school. Maybe you’ll like it more now you’re a little older.

Which should you pick?

The simple approach is to pick the book that you expect to most enjoy. That’s clearly the one from your favourite novelist: you’ve yet to read a book from him that you’d give less than 8/10, and you’re confident this one will be another humdinger. Why gamble your precious time away on something new when you have a guaranteed win waiting on your bookshelf? Under this approach, you stick with what you know is good, unless you get a very strong recommendation from someone you trust.

Yet, this approach is clearly missing something. Most of us have had the experience of opening a book and discovering a whole new world inside: a kind of writing and a flavour of ideas you didn’t really imagine could exist until you experienced them. There was a time when you didn’t know your favourite author existed, yet now you’ve discovered him you can hardly imagine life without his books. Who knows how many other such authors are waiting out there for you to find?

What the stick-with-your-favourites approach is missing is all the other books you have ahead of you – a whole lifetime of reading, which could go very differently depending on what you discover in the meantime. Even if you expect to like the other books on your list less than your favourite author, you might be wrong – and if you are wrong, you can then read all of their other books too! The potential upside of a new discovery is huge, while the cost of being proven right is very limited – one disappointing book, or even less if you abandon it partway through.

What holds for authors holds even more strongly for genres. If you discover that you enjoy good history writing after all – or epic verse, or true crime – that unlocks a vast trove of books that had previously passed you by.

This asymmetry means that, paradoxically, the best decision can be to try an author or type of book you expect to be worse than your current favourite, if it has some realistic change of being better. How big the chance has to be before you take that bet varies based on circumstance, but the basic lesson is clear: when the cost of failure is one dull read, but the benefits of success can be reaped for the rest of your life, take risks.

Perhaps you should try that poetry collection after all.

II

Now imagine it’s Christmas time, and you’re looking for a gift for a friend. Let’s assume your primary goal is to benefit your friend – to make her happy, to enrich her life – not just signal that you care or fulfil a social obligation.

Again, there are countless options – but this time, your task is much harder, because you almost certainly know your friend far less well than you know yourself. As a result, for any given class of things you know she likes (wine, say, or cinema) you’ll very likely do a worse job of getting her something good than she would herself: some value will be lost in the gap between your mind and hers. The safe option is to get her something you both like, where you both trust your taste and are confident in her appreciation. Perhaps a really nice bottle of red, or a great board game you know she wants, or (in years other than 2020) a standing offer to take her out for dinner at a restaurant you both like. You’re almost certainly locking in some deadweight loss that way, but if you know your friend well it will hopefully be small, and perhaps made up for by the pleasure of companionship or the satisfaction of feeling valued.

Is there some way you can buy your friend a gift that is more valuable to her than what she would spend the money on herself? On the timescale of a single gift, that’s a tall order – you’re never going to know her preferences as well as she does. But on the timescale of a life? That might be a different story.

The principle is the same as before: the best choice on the scale of a single decision is often not the best choice on the scale of all future decisions, because choices that are risky now might open up whole new vistas of better choices in the future. What goes for choosing for yourself also goes for choosing for others. Except now you have a crucial advantage: a lifetime of unshared choices, of things-in-the-world that you have sampled and considered and judged about which your friend knows little or nothing.

You can use that unshared experience to help your friend explore, to pick out promising pieces of the Universe for her attention that she would otherwise have rejected on sight, or not considered at all. By distilling your experience, you can pick a gift with the potential to widen your friend’s horizons, to unlock years of potential choices she could not otherwise have made.

Let’s make this concrete. Suppose you and your friend are both avid readers. There are some genres you both read a lot of – say, historical fiction – and there are genres you read that she does not – say, science fiction. You recently finished both a Booker-winning historical novel, and a Nebula-winning sci-fi novel, and loved them both. You’re pretty confident your friend hasn’t read (or bought) either. Which should you get her?

The Booker winner is the safe choice. You’re confident she’ll love it, it’s very much in her wheelhouse. But you’re also confident she’s heard of it, and will get around to reading it sooner or later without you. Maybe she’ll love reading it even more if it comes from you, and that’s not nothing. But this isn’t a gift that will expand her horizons.

The Nebula winner, though – that’s a different story. That’s a risky gift. There might well be a good reason she doesn’t read sci-fi – maybe she tried several of the classics as a teenager and hated them all. There’s a much higher chance that your gift falls completely flat than if you bought her the Booker winner, or a fancy bottle of gin. But if it doesn’t fall flat, if she tries it and loves it against her own expectations, you might just unlock a whole new world of art and literature that had previously passed her by.

If you’re thinking only about which gift will most benefit your friend in itself, you should probably get her the Booker. But if you’re thinking about what gift might most benefit your friend over a lifetime, you might want to get her the sci-fi.

III

Exploration is hard. Striking out into new territory is risky, stressful and often unrewarding – it’s so much easier to retread familiar ground. But without exploring, we are doomed to miss out on countless opportunities to live richer, happier lives.

Luckily, we are surrounded by people who have lived different lives from ours, who have explored parts of the world we have never seen. If we can access even a fraction more of that unshared experience, our own exploration becomes easier, more rewarding – and more fun. Like most difficult things, exploration is better done together than apart.

Treating gifts as an opportunity for free exploration has several benefits. Firstly, it can be an essential prompt to explore at all, when our habits and routines and the demands of everyday life act to pull us ever deeper into placid, unvarying orbits. Secondly, it makes that exploration easier, more effective, and more enjoyable: how much better to start your exploration of some new place with a thoughtful guide, than to dive sightless into an unknown sea? Finally, it might just help us make better gifts: gifts that are more alive, more interesting, that communicate more about ourselves and our hopes for each other.

Treating gifts as exploration can, admittedly, be dangerous: good exploration must be risky, and risky things often fail. A pile of gifts-as-exploration will contain many interesting things, but also many things that their recipients definitely do not want. Failed exploration, especially when imposed by others, often does not feel like a noble venture sadly thwarted, but like a slap in the face: how could you possibly think I would like…?

On the other hand, it’s not as though our existing gifting habits don’t frequently lead to abject failure: we’re all well-trained from childhood when it comes to graciously receiving gifts we dislike. This can actually frustrate attempts to treat gifts as exploration: you can’t get someone a better explore-gift next time if you don’t know how flat your last one fell. But it does mean that we give each other some degree of cover to take more risks.

Exploration might not always be the right theme in one’s gifts for others: that depends on the tenor of your relationship with your giftee, your mutual tolerance for risk, your pre-existing norms of giving and getting. But even if you don’t feel comfortable getting your friends and loved ones really out-there exploration gifts (“Here, grandma, try this Deadpool comic”), you can probably push the envelope a little, shift the locus of your giving a little more in that direction. You can raise the topic in advance, suggest moving your mutual giving in a more exploratory direction. See what they say.

Above all, you can tell your friends and loved ones that what you would most like for Christmas this year is the chance to share some part of their life that you haven’t seen before.

Crossposted from LessWrong.

TLDR

• Final Version Perfected (FVP) is a highly effective algorithm for deciding which tasks from your To-Do lists to do in what order.
• The design of the algorithm makes it far more efficient than exhaustive ranking, while (in my experience) far more effective than just reading through the tasks and picking one out.
• FVP is most useful when you have a large number of tasks to choose from, don’t have time to do all of them, and are initially unsure about which is best.
• I find FVP very effective at overcoming psychological issues like indecision, procrastination, or psychological aversion to particular tasks.
• Currently there are limited online tools available, and I mostly use FVP with paper lists. Ideas (or tools) for better online execution of FVP would be very valuable to me.

Introduction

Execution is the Last Mile Problem of productivity infrastructure. You can put as much effort as you like into organising your goals, organising your To-Do lists, organising your calendar, but sooner or later you will be presented with more than one thing you could reasonably be doing with your time. When that happens, you will need some sort of method for choosing what that thing will be, and actually getting started.

Most people, I think, face this problem by either just doing the thing that is top-of-mind or looking through their To-Do list and picking something out. This works fine when the next thing to do is obvious, and you have no problems getting started on it. But when you have many potential things to do and aren’t sure which is best, or when you kind of know what the best next thing is but are avoiding it for one reason or another, you need a better system.

That system needs to be quick to execute, easy to remember, and effective at actually having you do the best next task. It needs to be robust to your psychological weaknesses, minimising procrastination, indecision, and ugh fields. It needs to be efficient, requiring as little work as possible to identify the most valuable task.

Enter Final Version Perfected.

The FVP Algorithm

The algorithm for executing tasks under FVP is pretty simple. You can find a description of it by the designer here, but here’s my version:

1. Put all the tasks you have to choose from into one big unsorted list.
2. Mark the first item on the list. Don’t do it yet.
3. For each subsequent item on the list, ask yourself, “Do I want to do this task more than the last task I marked?” If yes, mark it. If no, don’t mark it. Move on to the next item.
4. When you reach the end of the list, trace back up to find the bottom-most marked task. Do it, then cross it off the list.
5. Beginning with the next unmarked task after the task you just crossed off, repeat step 3, comparing each task to the bottom-most uncrossed marked task (i.e. the one prior to the one you just crossed out).
6. Go to step 4. Repeat until you run out of time or list items.

In FVP, then, you perform a series of pairwise comparisons between tasks, in each case asking whether the new task is something you want to do more than the old task. The “want to do more than” comparison is deliberately vague: Depending on context, it might be the thing that would best move your project forward, the thing that would have the worst consequences if you didn’t do it, or the thing you would most enjoy doing. The key thing is that at each stage, you’re only comparing each task to the most recent task you marked, ignoring all previous tasks.

I’ll talk more in a moment about why I think this algorithm is a good one, but first, let’s work through an example. (If you’re sure you already understand the algorithm, click here to go straight to the pros and cons.)

A long-ish example

Let’s say this is my to-do list for today:

• Buy milk
• Finish term paper
• Play video games
• Work out
• Save the world
• Walk the dog

I start by marking the first item:

• × Buy milk
• Finish term paper
• Play video games
• Work out
• Save the world
• Walk the dog

Then I compare it to the next item on the list. Which do I want to do more, finish the term paper or buy milk? Well, the term paper is due today, and I don’t need milk until tomorrow, so I decide to do the term paper first.

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper
• Play video games
• Work out
• Save the world
• Walk the dog

Moving on to item 3. I already decided I want to finish the term paper before buying milk, so I can ignore the milk for now. Do I want to play video games or finish my term paper? Well, in some sense I want to play video games more, but my all-things-considered endorsement is to finish the term paper first, so I leave item 3 unmarked.

Next, item 4: do I want to finish the term paper or work out? Well, in some sense I’d rather not do either, and in another sense the term paper is more urgent, but working out is important, I’ve heard it has cognitive benefits, and I know from experience that if I don’t do it first thing I won’t do it, so it takes precedence:

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper
• Play video games
• × Work out
• Save the world
• Walk the dog

Item 5: oh yeah, I forgot, I need to save the world today. Damn. Well, I can’t work out if there’s no world to work out in, so I guess I’ll do that first.

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper
• Play video games
• × Work out
• × Save the world
• Walk the dog

Ditto for walking the dog: much though I love him, I won’t have anywhere to walk him if I don’t save the world first, so that takes precedence again.

I’ve finished the list now, so it’s time to do the last item on the list. Looks like that’s saving the world. Luckily, it doesn’t take long:

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper
• Play video games
• × Work out
• × Save the world ✓
• Walk the dog

Now that I’ve done the highest priority task on the list, I go back to FVP to determine the next one. There’s actually only one comparison I need to make: work out or walk the dog? Walking the dog can wait until the evening, so it’s time to head to the gym.

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper
• Play video games
• × Work out ✓
• × Save the world ✓
• Walk the dog

Again, there’s only one more comparison I need to do to determine my next top task: do I want to finish my term paper, or walk the dog? And again, walking the dog isn’t that urgent, so I spend a few hours on the term paper.

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper ✓
• Play video games
• × Work out ✓
• × Save the world ✓
• Walk the dog

Now I’m all the way back to the top of the list! But now there are two more comparisons to make to decide on the next task. First, do I want to buy milk, or play video games? I’ve worked pretty hard so far today, and buying milk isn’t that important, so let’s play games first:

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper ✓
• × Play video games
• × Work out ✓
• × Save the world ✓
• Walk the dog

Finally, do I want to walk the dog or play video games? The dog has been waiting for hours for a walk now, and I could do with some fresh air, and I’d feel guilty just gaming without taking him out, so let’s do that first:

• × Buy milk
• × Finish term paper ✓
• × Play video games
• × Work out ✓
• × Save the world ✓
• × Walk the dog

There’s no unmarked tasks in the list now, so to finish I just work up the list in order: first walking the dog, then playing games, then, finally, buying milk.

FVP: Why and why not

The usefulness of FVP depends on a few key assumptions.

• Firstly, the algorithm assumes your preferences are transitive, and that you can accurately assess the value of each task according to your preferences. These are pretty fundamental assumptions that will be integral to almost any list-based execution system. In reality, your preferences probably aren’t quite transitive, but hopefully they are close enough that pretending they are is reasonable. As for accurately assessing each task, well, no execution algorithm can prevent you from making any mistakes, but FVP is more effective than most at eliciting your best guesses.
• Secondly, FVP assumes that your preferences are stable over the timeframe you’re using it. If your preferences shift substantially over that period, such that you need to re-prioritise among the existing tasks on your list, you’ll need to throw out your previous FVP and start again. This places some constraints on the timescale you can organise using a single FVP iteration: I seldom stick with the same iteration for longer than a day. (Note, though, that FVP can handle the addition of new tasks quite easily, as long as they don’t alter the existing order.)
• Thirdly, the value of FVP is greatest when you are unsure about which task you should do next, and especially when you don’t have time to do every task you might want to do that day. I find FVP most useful when I have a lot of different tasks competing for my time; it is much less useful when my time is pre-allocated to a single, well-planned-out task.

When these conditions are met, FVP is a very effective method for guiding action. It is both efficient and exhaustive: guaranteed to identify the top-priority task while avoiding most of the work involved in producing a complete ranking. It is a simple algorithm, easy to remember and quick to perform. After doing it for a while, I find it scarcely requires conscious thought – but still reliably identifies the most valuable task for me to work on.

The biggest benefit I get from FVP, though, is how much easier it makes it to do important things I’d rather avoid. There is something about a bald, pairwise comparison between two tasks that is highly effective at overcoming my aversion to difficult things. If an important but unpleasant task is nestled within a long to-do list of minor-but-rewarding busywork, it is easy for my eye to skip over the difficult task, defer it till tomorrow, and work on something more pleasant instead. It’s much harder to do that when comparing the important task to each minor task in isolation.

FVP is also good at minimising time lost due to indecision. When presented with a menu of tasks to choose from, it can be quite hard to select a single task to work on first. When that choice process is reduced to a series of simple pairwise comparisons, the choosing process as a whole becomes much easier. And, once I’ve finished with FVP and selected a single winning task, there’s an impetus towards starting that makes me much less prone to procrastination.

One last brief note on infrastructure: due to its relative obscurity, I haven’t found great online tools for FVP. Complice’s starred-task system can be passably adapted to the algorithm, but in general I’ve found physical paper lists to work best. When I was at work I would print off my Todoist task lists and use those; now I’m working from home I mostly write them out by hand. This is kind of time-consuming and redundant, so if you dislike paper notes and don’t have access to a printer it might be a significant mark against FVP.

I’d really love it if someone created a great online tool for FVP or integrated it more formally into an existing productivity application, but I don’t expect that to happen any time soon. In the meantime, if you have ideas for existing ways to execute FVP online, I’d love to hear about them!