"Intertial activities vs. self-termianting activities..."

<h1>Inertial Activities vs. Self-terminating Activities</h1>

<p>[There are] activities that have a certain kind of inertia. Being aware that whatever you are doing, it is often very hard to stop what you are doing. You sit down to watch a little bit of Netflix, and nobody watches a little bit of Netflix. ... One of these pieces of productivity advice (is there anyone on earth that can do this, because it's not me): why don't work for a little while, and then you give yourself a little break, a nice reward, and you spend ten minutes on social media, and then you go right back to work... it's a reward... Does anybody do that? ... Nobody does that.</p>

<p>Goldsmith talks about this idea of inertia and he doesn't talk about the flip side of that: there are a bunch of activities that aren't this way: things like exercise, or things like writing a script [for a YouTube video], or certain types of very intense work. I've come to recognize this category of things that I'm thinking of as self-terminating activities. There's an importance in recognizing that there are lot of things that are self-terminating activities, versus the stuff that Goldsmith is talking about, inertial activities. There's something here about gaining an understanding about the distinction between these two things, and that in general, self-terminating activities are things that you would rather spend your time on, than intertial activities, where you can just do them forever. ... Things worth doing are self-terminating and things that are enjoyable but maybe less worthy in a way have this inertial quality that Goldsmith talks about, that you just want to keep doing them for forever.</p>

<p>(As paraphrased by CGP Grey on Cortex podcast episode 66.)</p>