Neal Stephenson and Ganesha

Neal Stephenson doesn't answer emails or accept speaking requests because if he were to do so, "Ganesha would happen".

This morning, completely unprompted, my wife sent me this essay by Neal Stephenson on why he is a “bad correspondent”. In this, he details out why he doesn’t respond to emails or speaking invitations, and instead spends as much of his time possible writing novels.

Given how little fiction I read (primarily because I have a fairly short attention span), the fact that I’ve read three (or five, or ten, depending on how you count) books by Stephenson, and loved all of them, he should rank as my favourite author. And so when he says something I’m inclined to listen.

The part in the essay that caught my attention was the part about focussed attention:

Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words.

This is like the Ganesha Principle that I’ve been espousing for a few decades now. Like how Ganesha threatened Vyasa that “if he stops dictating, the rest of the Mahabharata will remain unwritten”, sometimes if you are disturbed whatever you were disturbed from can “remain undone forever”.

And this is more true for the more stud tasks that need more creativity and thinking (though it happens to me for fighter tasks as well - there was an unpleasant task I’d willed myself into doing yesterday (filling up a form), and got disturbed twice in five minutes, and it is not done yet). You cannot be creative if you have a deadline.

Sometimes you might spend the entirety of the four hour block of time doing nothing. Sometimes you might achieve great things in the same window. However, if you have some looming deadline or interruption coming up, the knowledge that you can’t go on for a long time prevents you from starting. And nothing gets done in the process.

The last month and a half have been unproductive for me. A lot of the time has been spent in meeting venture capital firms as we look to raise a seed round for Babbage Insight. I classify the time spent in the meetings itself, and preparing for them, as time well spent.

The problem has been my calendar. As founders looking to raise seed funding, we have been “schedule takers” rather than “schedule makers”, and that has left us with pockmarked calendars.

There will be one meeting on a day, and that renders the rest of the day unproductive. The “four hour block” that Stephenson talks about (which IMHO is necessary for all creative tasks, not just writing novels) almost never happens. And work doesn’t get done.

And when you aren’t doing too much “real work” (talking to customers, and writing code and documentation), the quality with which you can talk about what you are building dips. I think that has hurt us in some conversations.

Back to Neal Stephenson, long ago I had compared him to “Amibah the Formless One”. Now I think we can compare him to Ganesha as well!

PS: In case you are interested more in the company we are building, I’m sort of live blogging the process here: