A common type of time sink

A common failure mode in which people sink large amounts of time and effort into distractions.

There is a detrimental attractor state which is extremely common for people to fall in.

At Conjecture, where I work, we use the word “Nexus” to refer to this state.¹

Briefly put, a Nexus is a situation in which you get distracted from your overarching or stated goals and you waste a lot of time, resources and effort working on the distraction or respecting unnecessary constraints.

Similar concepts are “being tunnel visioned” or “losing the big picture”, but a Nexus is a particularly nasty version of this.

A Nexus is a type of tunnel vision in which you not only miss obvious solutions to your problem, but you mostly forget what your original goal was.

In a Nexus, not only you lose the big picture, but the small part of the picture you are focusing on defends itself, gives you reasons to think it’s important and you should keep focusing on it.²

Examples of Nexi

First, let’s look at some examples of relatively naive Nexi.

Ebeneezer Scrooge

The protagonist of the novel “A Christmas Carol”, Ebeneezer Scrooge, is a miserable man who spends all his time trying to make more money.

He is stingy, overworks to the point that he isolates himself, has no friends and essentially no contact with his family.

Crucially, even though his business is successful, he is still miserable, and by the end of the story he ends up regretting having spent so much of his life this way.

Scrooge’s fixation with money is a comically simple example of a Nexus.

His relentless pursuit of money is essentially a distraction from what he would want in life, but it wouldn’t cross his mind to question if what he’s doing is a good use of his time.³

If prompted to reflect about this, his gut reaction would be to think that it’s obvious that he should be working late rather than accepting Fred⁴’s invitation to spend Christmas with his family…

But that’s not the most important part of the analogy. The most important part is that until he is prompted to reflect by an outright supernatural intervention, he just doesn’t.

Let’s move away from fiction now.

Productivity hacking

There are some people⁵ who, encountering struggles with focus, react by consuming “productivity hacking” books, blogs, and podcasts, spending a lot of time learning about minor productivity hacks which, at best, have a barely measurable effect and, at worst, are bullshit. They buy 30 supplements and try to optimise their “nootropic stack”.

And they do all this before picking the lowest hanging fruits⁶, such as exercising regularly, which are widely known to have big effects. They do this despite being warned not to make this exact mistake, as it’s hard to not come across this warning in those circles.

This is a crystal clear example of a very common type of Nexus: spending a long time working on a complicated, speculative approach that would have a minor effect, before you successfully execute a simple, well-demonstrated and widely executed approach which would have a major effect.

Language learning

When I was 19, I wanted to learn to speak Japanese. My goal had been to be able to speak fluently to Japanese people.⁷

I spent a lot of effort studying Japanese grammar, memorising vocabulary and ideograms, and even studying and practicing phonology so that I could practice having as little of an accent as possible.

However, I ended up spending little time conversing in written form (in various chats or discords), and almost no time speaking.

It’s no coincidence that I spent more time studying and practicing the parts of the language I felt comfortable with. It was also something I could do by myself on commutes, without having to find partners for conversation, who I would have to pay back by helping them with a language I knew (which I had no particular interest in doing).⁸

Nexi can be quite hard to diagnose. It’s a lot easier to notice when you are not putting a lot of effort into something. So, by default, people will be more aware of the latter, and that’s more often the lever they will pull.

At this point of my life, I put a lot of time and sweat into things I cared about, and I was convinced that as long as I did that, I would probably succeed.

However, when you’re in a Nexus, putting more effort into it will only make things worse. You feel like you are working hard, maybe you’re even making progress on the fake goal and feeling good about it. Meanwhile, time goes on, while you’re making little or no progress on your real goal.

Aspects of Nexi

These are the aspects that usually comprise a Nexus.

Conflation of goals and tunnel vision

A form of tunnel vision in which you conflate a specific approach to solving a problem or achieving a goal with the entire problem or goal.⁹

Let’s say that during the language learning Nexus from the Examples section, a friend asked me how I was doing at learning Japanese.

My brain would might automatically¹⁰ translate the generic “learn Japanese” into the specific “knowing a lot about Japanese grammar and having a large passive vocabulary”. Then I would tell my friend that I was making super fast progress.

Feeling of importance, unavoidability or even compulsion

The object of the Nexus feels like it’s important, like you should give it attention. If asked about whether you really need to carry out this Nexus in order to achieve the overarching goal, one’s gut reaction will be to strongly feel that the Nexus is an unavoidable prerequisite to the goal.

Sometimes, even after the Nexus has become an obvious time-sink and even the person in the Nexus recognised they are in one at a rational level, there can be compulsion to stay there, against the person’s best judgement.

This can seem extreme, but it’s actually quite common in self-directed, high-skill professions¹¹ for people who know they are in a Nexus and delay getting out of it, or describe the process of doing so as “painful” or “stressful”.

Here’s an example which is so common I consider it to be anonymized: perfectionism loops. Take, for example, a writer who spend too much time rewriting the same paragraph over and over again because they feel like it’s not good enough yet.

Regression to things you are comfortable with

When you conflate a fake goal with a real goal, the fake goal will nearly always be something you feel more comfortable with. What this means is different from person to person and is not necessarily about laziness; if you are prone to overworking, your fake goals might tend to be ones that keep you more busy for longer.

Obviously, there is a constant semi-conscious pressure from your brain to do more of the things you like and less of the things you dislike, but this is not the full reason.

You should also expect that the approaches you like are more salient to you and that you have better intuitions about them, because you spend more time thinking about them. And if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Nexussing is the default

In ideal conditions, at any point in time, you can ask yourself if what you’re doing is the best strategy to achieve your goals, and if the answer is no, change what you’re doing.

Unfortunately, your brain does not provide “ideal conditions”.

1. If you don’t spend time¹² reflecting on your course of action, you won’t be able to tell if you are executing a good strategy.¹³

2. Your judgement is warped by what you have been thinking about recently. If you recently spent a lot of time thinking about a specific field of Mathematics, you will be quick to overestimate the usefulness of that field for the problem you are trying to solve.

3. Properly reflecting on the best way to achieve your goal is often unpleasant. For example, sometimes you’ll have to give up on a failed approach, which can be painful.

As a result, it’s harder to exit a Nexus than it is to enter it. The more time you spend on a single approach, the less time you want to spend reflecting, and your reflection is less effective. The less you reflect, the less you notice you are not reflecting much…

As a result, Nexi are strong defaults. If your strategies are not built to be resilient to Nexi, it’s very likely you will waste a lot of energy there.

Nexi in technical fields

Nexi are extremely common in technical fields.

Here is a story that every professional programmer has seen unfold many times:

When trying to solve a specific problem, an engineer starts by building a framework which supposedly will solve a general class of problems which contains the problem at hand. This is done before writing a solution to the specific problem, which means that at this point, the engineer has at best a vague guess about the shape of the solution to the specific problem, let alone the general one. This usually absorbs a lot of time. In the best case this endeavour is a complete failure, in the worst case it ends up in the codebase.

I can guess a few of reasons why this is the case:

• Technical people often have interests that are both extreme and narrow, and would be really glad to apply them to any problem they find. This is a Nexus hazard.

• Technical people are more likely to suffer from perfectionism, which is another Nexus hazard.

• The work is highly complex, which makes it a lot easier to find ways to delude yourself and others that distractions you pick up along the project are unavoidable requirements.

  • Complexity offers more degrees of freedom, which means there are more opportunities for you to get distracted (eg. more patterns that look like you can generalise with a framework, if that’s your flavor of Nexus).

  • It’s quite expensive to think about whether the Nexus is really unavoidable, and how you might achieve the main goal in a simpler way.

  • It’s even more expensive for others to think about whether you are in a Nexus.

  • Even if individuals see through it, it’s very difficult to discuss and get actionable consensus on it.

Finally, it’s hard to coordinate about Nexi in technical fields.

This is because it’s hard to draw a rigid distinction between someone who is in a Nexus, and someone who is doing a big but necessary chunk of work. In complex fields, it would be unreasonable to expect someone to always guess the best and cleanest approach to a problem on the first try.

However, it’s harder to coordinate around fuzzy guardrails and definitions. You are less accountable for “minor slips” of judgement.

Since it is expected that you get in a Nexus once in a while, it’s easier to justify yourself when you do it too much.

Understanding of Nexi in programmer culture

Programmers make use of various concepts and mantras which capture intuitions about Nexi. For example:

• XY problem

• KISS

• YAGNI

• Premature Optimisation

For that matter, here are 5 comics, by xkcd alone, which capture intuitions about Nexi in one way or another:

• The general problem.

• Optimization

• Efficiency

• Automation

• Nerd sniping

I suspect that there is a unique combination of factors which makes it more likely for programmers (or at least the seniors and managers) to understand Nexi.¹⁴

• Programmers, like other technical professions, are quite susceptible to getting stuck in Nexi often.

• Programmers benefit from very fast iteration speeds. For example, in most parts of our job, we don’t have to wait for experiments to run.

• Programmers are subject to tighter constraints about getting tangible results quickly¹⁵ than say, academic researchers.¹⁶

• Programmers work closely in teams, which gives them some redundancy. People sometimes get each other out of Nexi.

It’s common to get in and out of Nexi on a daily or weekly basis. It would be hard to not get an intuition about them, even if just by brute force.

I have found it useful to try to use anti-Nexus concepts from programmer culture outside of the context of programming. There might be more on this in another post.

1. For example “bruv, you are in a Nexus, drop it”, “You’ve been Nexussing for 3 hours”, “I went through like 5 Nexi today”.

2. It even co-opts your defenses to other undesirable things to defend itself. For example, in the “Language learning” story, it co-opts 19-year-old me’s perfectionism and defenses against laziness.

In the case of the engineers who fall in the generic framework trap described in the “Nexi in technical fields” section, it co-opts their sense of elegance and the DRY heuristic.

3. In the novel he ends up having a transformative experience and changing his mind, but in the real world there wouldn’t have been supernatural intervention.

4. Scrooge’s nephew.

5. Including me, some time in the past.

6. In case you are currently in this nexus and need me to remind you what those low-hanging fruits are, here you go:

• Regular sleep

• Regular exercise

• Separate the spaces in which you perform work and from those for leisure

7. As evident from how the story unfolds, this was not my goal in the POSIWID sense.

Indeed, in the moment, I found it more fun and interesting to speedrun how quickly I can get a good grasp for a new grammar, which I am quite good at. On the other hand, when it came to conversing in real time, stumbling when I didn’t know a word or an expression and having to pause the conversation to look it up or ask my interlocutor in English… the prospect did not sound fun.

It was, however, my goal in the sense that talking to people was what I was looking forward to. If I went back in time and told my past self that he would learn some grammar quickly but would not get good at conversation, he would be quite disappointed.

8. When people around me asked me why I didn’t practice speaking more, I said that i didn’t know enough grammar and vocabulary to start speaking, but that was obviously not true and an excuse I was making.

9. Sometimes, a specific approach is even conflated with the entirety of one’s personal preferences. As is the case for Ebeneezer Scrooge, who dedicates his life only to making money, or whoever acts analogously in real life.

10. This automatic translation can take you quite far away without you noticing, which can cause some frictions in communication.

For example, let’s say that you have a colleague who is prone to Nexi.

When they report that they are making good progress on a task (or that they are stuck, or that it’s complicated and it’s going to take a long time…), you can’t trust them and take their assessment at face value.

This means that every time you want to make sure the thing is done, you have to get involved, spend your own time understanding the details of the problem, checking if you can see an obvious, quicker solution… just in case they are in a Nexus.

11. For example, software engineers, researchers, artists.

12. Appropriate chunks of time and effort, not a half-formed mental visualisation which lasts 500 milliseconds.

13. When they don’t pay attention, it’s easy for people to confabulate that they have reflected about prioritisation even though they haven’t. In general, it’s automatically assumed by your brain that any System 1 decision you take was the result of deliberate thinking, even though it wasn’t. If you took the same person and asked them to write down the lowest bar definition for “having reflected and prioritised”, and then asked them “Do you remember doing this?”, the answer would be a resounding “No”.

14. If you can make whatever you do more similar to programming in these ways, you might get more resilient to Nexi.

15. Often referred to as “shipping”.

16. Part of this is unavoidable given the nature of academic research, which is more open-ended, and expected to bear fruits in the longer term.

I still wish that academia didn’t so openly embrace Nexussing in its culture. Researchers are not expected to prioritise based on what’s likely to produce impact. In fact, they are not expected to prioritise at all. If we use the POSIWID heuristic, we get that academics are essentially paid to get nerd-sniped in the hopes that this accidentally advances the state of science.