Deciding what to work on is a luxury, but one I try to take seriously. It implies that a) you have the ability to choose what to do and b) you have a skill set that is not so specifically tailored to one type of work, but rather a skill set that allows you to work on a variety of tasks.

With those as a given, I often think about Aaron Swartz's framing of this decision: "What is the most important thing you could be working on in the world right now? And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?" I love this heuristic (hereon referred to as "most important"), I aspire to always keep it in mind when I choose what to work on, and it has led me to start dozens of projects, each with a first-order goal of positively affecting as many people as I can as one individual contributor.

On the other hand, the "most important" heuristic has also led to some of the most painful and drawn out bouts of procrastination I've experienced. It is a high bar to set for onself, and it is almost always easier to do nothing than to do something that meets this standard. If I feel a potential project can't live up to it, I won't do it at all. Instead, I'll do something else (exercise, sleep, tv, etc.) that produces no value to the world whatsoever. But there is another way. The intermediate choice would be to work on something that doesn't meet this rigorous standard but that would at least produce SOME value, however small. And all else equal (e.g. how I value my "leisure" time) some positive output is always better than none.

So, maybe I need to recalibrate. Maybe I'm asking myself the wrong question, or in the wrong circumstances, or I'm framing its answer too absolutely. Not everything I work on will help a lot of people. There is some work you need to do to earn a living, or to get better at something, or to help someone else out, or because you can't think of the "most important" thing. I should allow myself to work on something that could help even just one person, or no one at all, but that still has the effect of challenging me and pushing my abilities. Working on one idea will beget other ideas to work on, and those ideas may in turn live up to this "most important" ideal. And even if not, working on these intermediate tasks will at the very least develop skills, teach me something, and fill some of the necessary time of deliberate practice to truly master something.

It stands to reason then that if the decision in front of me is to either a) work on something of little to no impact (but still use my skills) or b) dawdle and procrastinate on the "most important" work I could be doing and ultimately go watch Black Mirror instead, I should choose a. As a recent example, when I was learning Javascript one of my first projects was to code a Javascript browser game, a task I was not excited about doing because I didn't see it as useful to anyone else, ever. Under the old "most important" framework, I simply would not have done the project. Under the new framework, working on the browser game is better than aiming to do something amazing but ultimately not doing it at all.

To do important and meaningful work is an ideal, but for me it is not possible to always meet this "most important" expectation AND simultaneously be prolific and productive. There are times when you need to work on the trivial in order to get to the meaningful. And there are times when people just want to play a browser game, and you(!) could be the person delivering them that experience.