Collaboration is the key to my productivity

“Peer Pressure” was the original phrase I used when writing this post, but that has too much negativity surrounding it. “Collaboration”, or maybe even “Accountability”, better represents the (healthy) desire to perform well for the sake of the people around you. I’ve found that working with other passionate people on something is incredibly engaging and generally the environment in which I find myself doing my best work.

Like many engineers, I start solo projects and then abandon them halfway through or never even make it past the design phase. There are thousands of guides on the internet that offer productivity techniques like Pomodoro timers, Eating the Frog, and Getting Things Done. I’m sure that those work for a good amount of people, and I’m very happy they found a method that works for them. However, while I haven’t exhausted all of these techniques, none of them seem to bring me to the constant level of engagement I’ve had in the past with other projects.

I did an exercise where I wrote down all the projects I was a part of where I considered myself engaged and looked for some kind of commonality between them. Working through the list, it became increasingly apparent that none of these were solo endeavors. Quite the opposite in fact. I was typically surrounded by highly qualified and passionate individuals, all of them contributing their own time and effort to the same objective. To give an example, I’ll go through the “project” I’ve had the most experience with: swimming at a high level.

I really enjoy swimming. And when I say that, I mean the physical action of moving through the water, as opposed to enjoying it for the competitive aspect. Jumping in a pool, the dynamic movements, being in a different medium than what you spend 95% of your life in. There’s just nothing else like it. While racing fast it’s own form of enjoyment, the point that I’m making is that I enjoy the individual experience of swimming very much.

Despite this, I know from experience that swimming alone, and more specifically, training alone, is very much not fun. Anyone who claimed they could train at a high level on their own, without coaches, teammates, or any other trainers, I would think of as delusional. I’m not even talking about the task of constructing your own training regime. That part is pretty easy when you’ve been doing it long enough, and probably even better to do yourself (in some cases) to optimize for personal preferences. Rather, the consistency required to push yourself during every single practice is multiple orders of magnitude harder going solo than even with one or two more people. I would never think of a swimmer as lazy if they couldn’t train on their own, by themselves.

Why should I treat other projects I work on any differently? It would be unreasonable for me to expect myself to train full time alone. Surely it would also be unreasonable to expect myself to pursue that Pokémon ROM hack alone, or finally get around to solo building that satellite ground station. Having even just one other person - a “training partner” - immensely reduces the activation energy needed to get to a flow state of work, and also helps with distributing tasks when the true scope of the project finally reveals itself (since humans are notoriously bad at estimating the complexity of a project).

Of course, this leads to an unfortunate prisoner’s dilemma for self proclaimed introverts like myself. We recognize that collaboration is necessary to succeed, but the task of asking someone if they’re interested seems incredibly daunting - mainly due to fear of rejection. As a result, we end up in this defection death spiral where nobody is willing to ask anyone for collaboration on a project. This can lead to a romanticized view of solo projects where rejection is not possible. Similarly, if the project doesn’t go anywhere, then the cost was only your own time and not someone else’s - which (incorrectly) implies that your time is worth less than other people’s.

I took me a long time get out of this line of thinking. My best advice would be that the loss incurred by someone defecting is a lot smaller than you think. Trust me, they’re still going to be your friend, even if they’re not interested in learning ancient Greek-art deco fusion pottery with you. On the other hand, if the task generally covers topics that a potential partner is interested in, the odds they accept are higher than you think. And neither of you need to be at Olympic level equivalence in your craft to create something amazing.