The Concept of the "Little"
the Little: a deceptively insignificant amount of time, effort, mindfulness, or action that sums to a non-insignificant amount over a longer time horizon.
Knowing that the Little exists was the hardest part for me. Once my understanding of it became concrete, I could care for the Little, which positively changed my internal state and identity.
The Little can be the:
- effort to reach out to friends first
- time before bed
- action to brush your teeth in the morning
- mindfulness of being happy in the moment
- action to take off your shoes when walking into the house
- time on a bus ride to classes
- effort to ask the name of someone you are adjacently meeting through a friend
- effort to eat healthy for one meal
- action of wiping and organizing your desk
Caring for the Little is about understanding that a big task can be completed by many bouts of insignificant effort. It seems almost obvious when stated that to read a 200 page book, you can read 6 pages a day and it will be done in about a month.
Caring for the Little seems easy and obvious, but in our day-to-day, we often rationalize that a big project needs a solid chunk of time to context switch to and start working on, otherwise it's not worth starting yet. However, we often do not have enough long blocks of time for the number of big projects we have. So we avoid starting the project until it becomes dire, and we force a long block of time for it. Think of studying for an exam or building a relationship with a friend, we often only feel it's worth starting when we find that long time, which ends up being forced out if it's like an exam, or completely ignored if it's something you deem non-mandatory in life, like a friendship. That's not caring for the Little.
Instead, you care for the Little by knowing that you don't need a long uninterrupted chunk of time to get started, and so you can start earlier and with less effort. You only need to review 5 concepts on the bus, or only need to text one message to that friend. That is caring for the Little.
How I saw the Little
I'm a Junior studying computer science, statistics, and neuroscience at Harvard. This past semester and summer, I was a Founding Engineer at Design Arena (intelligence.ai). This is a young startup, and I joined when they were 6 months old as the 6th member of the founding team. As startup life typically goes, the hours were a deep rabbit hole of later and later nights with more and more time pressure. My life was consumed by this one thing, I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the office with our team of 10. I never got a moment to myself to think, as I was either working or sleeping. As the work started becoming the default, the rest of my life was completely composed of the Little. Between prompts, walking to work, walking home, the one day of the week we were off, these were all part of the Little. It was painfully obvious how much of the Little there was, and if my time was really worth a lot, then each individual Little seemed insignificant, but within a day, there was enough Little to change my life.
What does caring for the Little take form as?
For me, caring for the Little doesn't just create more time, it creates more happiness. If I can make positive use of every moment of my life with the people I care about and striving for the goals I set, my semester was worth more at Harvard then at Design Arena. The added bonus is that not only does caring for the Little feel like it has minimal friction, but it becomes obvious when the insignificant time, effort, or action makes a significant impact. When I get on the bus and read a single page of my class textbook, the next time I open the textbook, I'm already one page ahead.
Caring for the Little takes form in my life as many things, but the most significant can be boiled down to the following:
- Sleep habits
There was always a lingering internal dissonance where I both knew and understood the requirements for good sleep hygiene and restfulness, but also avoided implementing any of them. The idea of reading before bed and not scrolling, not drinking caffeine in the evening, going outside early in the morning to boost alertness, having a regular sleep and wake time, and the many more keys to good sleep all felt individually insignificant. I did not believe the little effort in any of them could truly make me feel better.
I woke up always right before I needed to, for class, a meeting, an assignment, and always felt extremely exhausted.
However, the little effort in each of these although individually insignificant, compound into what I was looking for, alertness and restfulness throughout the day.
It came down to my incorrect assumption that since each individual habit seems insignificant, I believed the impact would then also be insignificant. I started caring for the Little in my sleep, and it changed the energy I have in a day, the pride I feel for myself, the amount of time I have in a day, and most importantly the happiness I feel in my day.
- Cleaning, organization, and maintenance
I have tried dozens of organizational systems for my life, from notebooks, Notion, Todoist, bullet journals, time blocking, and more, yet they all suffered a similar fate of neglect. The maintenance to keep them running always fell to the side, long enough that they became dysfunctional when I really needed them. I thought that finding a system that would need zero maintenance would be the key, but that defeats the purpose of knowing my life management system. Just like how when an LLM spits out a plan for me to follow, I seldom follow it, because I don't know it, it was done for me, not by me.
The action of putting an event in my calendar, or putting a task in the right location, or spending 10 minutes every Sunday night to organize my week all felt insignificant. Once again however, the Little compounds to a lot, and so with the absence of these insignificant actions, any planning system I had dreams of maintaining fell away.
The care I now put into the maintenance of my organizational life system feels insignificant, but it's quite literally keeping my entire life afloat.
- Friendships and Relationships
When times get busy, friendships may fall to the side. Even when times are not busy, it feels almost insurmountable to try and build a friendship and close connection. There are friends you naturally gain through physical, temporal, or cognitive proximity, but there are friends you want to make where you need to create the proximity. This insurmountable idea always felt like I needed to have enough time to invest into these relationships. However, this idea of "enough time" is an illusion, because a lot of little times creates a significant amount of time, and that significant amount of time becomes significant moments and friendships.
Being able to care for the Little by using the little time I consistently find to have meals with people I value and enjoy being around changes my life. When I do find that longer amount of time--as a result of caring for the Little enough that a lot gets cleared up--then I can put that time into my relationships even more.
Caring about the little meal times I have everyday and who I have them with is the highlight of my day.
- Class Work
In lecture, the notes for a single day was always so annoying to create. I dream before every exam that I have a library of notes I can refer to and study with, but that's a significant amount of effort needed to create a whole semester's worth of class content in notes. During lecture, each individual lesson seemed possible to grasp in my head at the moment, and a single note seemed so insignificant that the action of even pulling up a document seemed useless. Caring for that little action and the little effort each lecture to just write some notes and follow along ends up creating a significant amount of notes over the course of a semester.
The class I disliked the most in my college career was also the class that forced us to take notes in a booklet. They were simple fill-in the blanks, and the insignificant effort compounded into a significant booklet. It was a tough class. It required a significant amount of effort. A little effort each class to fill-in the blanks resulted in that significant amount of effort I ultimately needed to get an 'A'.
I still dislike that class, but clearly writing the Little words in the Little blanks, made a lot of difference.
The Artificial Little
The one trap that I have faced with the Little is using it as an excuse to artificially create more of it.
Artificial Little: a deceptively insignificant amount of time, effort, mindfulness, or action that is unnecessarily created and interrupts deeper and longer work.
In the past, I would often find reasons to ride the bus back and forth between campus and my dorm which created more moments of Little, but they were inefficient and artificial. I would complete one task on campus, then bus back to my dorm to do another task, then bus back to campus to do another task (and do this multiple times a day). It was a procrastination mechanism to avoid doing deeper and longer work. However, the inefficiencies were masked because I used the little time on the bus ride to read a book or catch up with friends. Although I cared for that little time, it was artificial, cheap, and significantly unnecessary.
There could be more traps with the Little, and I will note them down and make updates in the future about them, but the artificial Little is the first one I have come across.
Why I had to learn about caring for the Little, and why you should too
In the world I live, everyone is always doing so much. We are always teetering on the idea of biting off more than we can chew. However, that is because deep work for every task--a big bite--is not always possible in our lives if we want to do a lot in our life. You can nibble a little every day, and every so often take a big bite, and you'll probably end up eating it all up, and maybe even still not feel full.
You can reduce the work in your life but accomplish more by making every task require deep work with long blocks of time, or you can do more in your life and accomplish lots by both finding those long blocks of time, but also caring for the Little.
I had to learn about caring for the Little, because I want to do a lot.