Yep. Alternative phrasing: it's not about how much you work but how immersed you get. That's what you have to optimize for. If it was just about how much work y

Yep. Alternative phrasing: it's not about how much you work but how immersed you get. That's what you have to optimize for. If it was just about how much work you get done startups would get done in twice the time if you worked at half the pace. But the result qualitatively changes if you never get immersed enough to find the important insights. Hard work is just a means. If it takes real work to find immersion, don't mess with that. The danger of saying, "I don't need to work too hard," and scaling back on things that seem like dead ends is that they impact immersion. Dead ends are often useful in intangible ways. Trevor Blackwell calls this tinkering (http://tlb.org/busywork.html http://tlb.org/busywork.html)