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Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#63

I don't actually remember the title but in the early 90s I was starting on my journey as a self-taught sysadmin, mainly by being the only person at a tech startup that would work for so little money. Before then I was simply a hobbyist. It eventually became necessary for me to start passing certification exams. As I was studying for the Windows NT 3.51 exam I bogged down in TCP-IP yet again. Except this time somethin…

Shot in the dark -- could it have been TCP/IP Illustrated? That's a pretty well-known book from that era. I actually read it in 2014 to nail down the fundamentals of networking and it paid off handsomely (despite its age).

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#65

Julius Sumner Miller - Physics demonstrations I had been exposed to many of these physics concepts in school. Some of the topics never really clicked for me. Revisiting these physics topics with demonstrations brought clarity to several foundational concepts. Lots of moments of realization getting to view demonstrations of concepts like Force, Mass, Acceleration, and more. Newton and Bernoulli. While included, the se…

Looks amazing thanks for the tip!

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#66
Honestly, just fiddling with a mix of documentation and videos are what help me learn. This is also incredibly ironic since I write books over iOS development, but everyone is different. Some love being able to go their own pace with books.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#67

I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life). Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done( https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ... ). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that mos…

What do you use for your getting things done workflow? I just started using neovim and found the neorg ( https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg ) package which has a GTD module.

Keep it simple. My inbox only contains mails that require an action at some time. If I have done this action, I immediately archive the mail. I often mail todo's to myself so I have only one place for todo's. If I have to do something on a specific time, I put it in my online agenda. I have a separate setup for work and private, that's it. This works great.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#68

I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life). Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done( https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ... ). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that mos…

I adopted GTD right before I left college, and I sometimes wonder how I ever would have managed to adapt to the explosion of tiny, attention-grabbing tasks that adult life supplies without it. Admittedly, it feels a little clunky and "enterprise-grade" in places, but the underlying principles are so rock-solid and obvious-in-hindsight it feels magical.

Plus, org-mode really helps to make the over-engineered parts more frictionless--I run my life off of org-agenda now, where creating a new project, capturing tasks for it, and refiling them as needed are only a few keystrokes away. Keeping with the theme of hyped productivity books, I also take inspiration from Deep Work to tag certain actions as being ":deep:", so that after clocking into those tasks, I can look at a clock report at the end of the day/week to understand how many hours I actually spent working on "important" stuff. It's very motivating to make that number go up!

I know not everyone feels the need to be so intentional about their productivity landscape--indeed, a lot of very naturally productive people I know explicitly /don't/. But for those of us who aren't one of those magicians, I highly recommend putting some thought into at least a bare-bones system.

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