All I have to offer is my personal story which is of course very little evidence (though I’ve seen similar stories play out among many of my friends and colleagues). I’ll first talk about my experience with stimulants and then about my experience with pushing myself to work more.
In my mid twenties I basically followed the same sort of logic and started taking amphetamines (very reasonable dosages, not more than twice a week). Every skeptic I told, among other things, the story of Paul Erdős who took amphetamines practically every day for decades and was perhaps the most productive mathematician ever. (In fact, Erdős was so productive that his friends created the widely used Erdős number which “describes a person’s degree of separation from Erdős himself, based on their collaboration with him, or with another who has their own Erdős number.”)
Well, for me personally this worked for a few months after which side effects started to slowly show up (low mood, fatigue, insomnia, etc.). It was so gradual that I needed another few months to attribute them to amphetamines. It was also very much unlike how I expected side effects and withdrawal to manifest. It’s (for many people) not this immediate thing that happens after the first time you take amphetamines. It’s usually more gradual than that. Several of my friends also experimented with amphetamine for productivity-enhancing effects, for none of them it turned out positively.
That being said, I’ve had somewhat better experiences with Ritalin (though I still often wonder whether it was net positive). And I made much better experiences yet with MAO inhibitors like tranylcypromine (which still have lots of side effects). (I might write more on this in the future.)
Regarding pushing yourself to work more: I think in my case this backfired extremely hard and caused me to burnout. In my twenties I always had this suspicion that talk about burnout is widely exacerbated, perhaps especially by lazy or selfish people who want to work less. (I was pretty stupid.) In my experience, especially if you are a researcher, pushing yourself hard doesn’t work that well, at least not in the long term. Your best ideas are probably two orders of magnitude more important than your average idea. If you start caring primarily about how many hours you work, you risk working on ideas that are easy to write about or execute. Coming up with good ideas often doesn’t look like work at all. You might just be reading for your own pleasure or out of curiosity. That’s at least how it worked for me. (As an example, I’ve had most of the core ideas for this article after I had reduced my working hours substantially.)
I guess if you have (very) short timeline, are generally quite young, healthy and robust, I’d be much more optimistic about such strategies. And as the case of e.g. Erdős shows, outliers do exist.
I’d be careful with this sort of advice.
All I have to offer is my personal story which is of course very little evidence (though I’ve seen similar stories play out among many of my friends and colleagues). I’ll first talk about my experience with stimulants and then about my experience with pushing myself to work more.
In my mid twenties I basically followed the same sort of logic and started taking amphetamines (very reasonable dosages, not more than twice a week). Every skeptic I told, among other things, the story of Paul Erdős who took amphetamines practically every day for decades and was perhaps the most productive mathematician ever. (In fact, Erdős was so productive that his friends created the widely used Erdős number which “describes a person’s degree of separation from Erdős himself, based on their collaboration with him, or with another who has their own Erdős number.”)
Well, for me personally this worked for a few months after which side effects started to slowly show up (low mood, fatigue, insomnia, etc.). It was so gradual that I needed another few months to attribute them to amphetamines. It was also very much unlike how I expected side effects and withdrawal to manifest. It’s (for many people) not this immediate thing that happens after the first time you take amphetamines. It’s usually more gradual than that. Several of my friends also experimented with amphetamine for productivity-enhancing effects, for none of them it turned out positively.
That being said, I’ve had somewhat better experiences with Ritalin (though I still often wonder whether it was net positive). And I made much better experiences yet with MAO inhibitors like tranylcypromine (which still have lots of side effects). (I might write more on this in the future.)
Regarding pushing yourself to work more: I think in my case this backfired extremely hard and caused me to burnout. In my twenties I always had this suspicion that talk about burnout is widely exacerbated, perhaps especially by lazy or selfish people who want to work less. (I was pretty stupid.) In my experience, especially if you are a researcher, pushing yourself hard doesn’t work that well, at least not in the long term. Your best ideas are probably two orders of magnitude more important than your average idea. If you start caring primarily about how many hours you work, you risk working on ideas that are easy to write about or execute. Coming up with good ideas often doesn’t look like work at all. You might just be reading for your own pleasure or out of curiosity. That’s at least how it worked for me. (As an example, I’ve had most of the core ideas for this article after I had reduced my working hours substantially.)
I guess if you have (very) short timeline, are generally quite young, healthy and robust, I’d be much more optimistic about such strategies. And as the case of e.g. Erdős shows, outliers do exist.
Would be interested in your experience with tranylcypromine; it sounds to me to be way more dangerous than amphetamines.