Being productive vs Feeling productive

Last week I spent a surprising amount of time working on the Yongle Dadian Collection, which is a collection of booklets that I am curating, on a wide range of topics I am interested in, from the evolution of spiderwebs to the development of greenhouses in Almeria. These are highly specific topics for which it is not easy to find a non-fiction book that could serve as a brief introduction.

The pipeline I am using is mostly automated, but still requires some manual curation and human supervision. It is not as easy as asking an LLM, “write about X”, so I found myself pouring an inordinate number of hours into it. Then after a while I realized I was not putting enough time into other activities that I enjoy such as playing piano or reading books; I think that generating these booklets felt very productive but the real value lies in actually reading them, and doing something with them! So far I have completed 50, and I will stop there for now. If I manage to generate about 100 a year, and read them (the most important part!), I should be more than satisfied.