I absolutely agree with the article. I personally keep a daily journal and it helps me a great deal - relieve stress and everything. Kinda cool for productivity as well. You just vizualize things when you write and then have not so many problems actually doing them.
Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great link! I found it very possible to read; I read it at least 2.5 times across multiple physical and digital copies of two editions. Turning the words into actions is the hard part for me. Surely this is the format that's going to work :)
For me, turning the words into actions was the easy part. The hard part was sticking to the habit of doing weekly reviews. I always fail at this after few weeks, and if you don't do weekly reviews, suddenly the whole GTD methodology falls apart on you and you have to start over...
Same here. The only thing I apply from GTD is that if the task can be done under 5 minutes do it.
Making todo lists and sticking to them require too much discipline. In my professional life I keep todo lists, reminders etc. But in my personal life I'm a lazy lazy person.
I can't seem to find a solution to this.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, turning the words into actions was the easy part. The hard part was sticking to the habit of doing weekly reviews. I always fail at this after few weeks, and if you don't do weekly reviews, suddenly the whole GTD methodology falls apart on you and you have to start over...
Same here. The only thing I apply from GTD is that if the task can be done under 5 minutes do it. Making todo lists and sticking to them require too much discipline. In my professional life I keep todo lists, reminders etc. But in my personal life I'm a lazy lazy person. I can't seem to find a solution to this.
I write daily to-do lists either in the morning or the night before, on a small post-it note sized stack of paper. Throw it away at the end of the day, whether or not I finished everything. I try and be realistic and still usually end up with 1 or 2 tasks not done.
It's nice crossing things off, it also never gets out of control.
Of all the things I tried in my personal life to get more things done, this is the one that's generally worked. I still go through phases of not doing it but it's really easy to start doing it again as the stack is always on my desk.
The other thing that works very effectively for me, much like this article says, is occasionally when feeling overwhelmed I write down everything that's stressing me out in a temporary text editor (an unsaved notepad++ note, which remains between computer restarts). I include things like "I'm pissed off with Bob because he did X" or "I'm worried about client Y not being able to pay their bill" or "I feel like I'm not putting enough time into doing Z".
I almost immediately stop stressing about it, and generally end up closing the unsaved note after a week or two, usually without reading it again. When I do, most of the stuff I was worrying about turned out fine.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We used ( enforced ) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat pe…
> "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" The rest of the "features" of the GP workplace aside, this one is something I wish I've seen more often. Would you read a novel riddled with language errors? Where no sentence connects seamlessly to the next? Where there's an order of magnitude more implicit content to track than what is actually written? Where all the usual rules of orthography and punc…
I think we may be in danger violently agreeing, and perhaps I should have added a bit more nuance to my previous comment:
- I've worked with plenty of people over the years whose first language is not English, so I don't necessarily expect the most wonderfully written prose in comments and documentation (or anywhere else).
- I'd much rather somebody used expressive variable, method, type, or function names than wrote a ton of comments. Nowadays, with reliable auto-complete, and masses of storage there's really no need for terse naming. That being said, the odd comment to convey intent can be great. Reams of comments tends to be a smell because, even with the best intentioned teams, when the pressure's on they tend to rust, which in itself can obviously become a problem. Some might argue that incorrect documentation can be worse than none at all.
- I do like people to write descriptive commit and PR comments: "fixed a bug" or similar is obviously not acceptable.
But a lot of the above is about professionalism and taking pride in what you do, rather than being something that needs "enforcing". In other words it's something you want to deal with by hiring and promoting the right people, who are going to provide an example for others to follow.
In my experience people who work in tech are not on average known for their love of being told what to do (although to be fair that applies many people) so it's more about creating a culture that leads to the outcomes you need than trying to enforce behaviours.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We used ( enforced ) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat pe…
Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile clients. Liking it is not in your job description.
I think that's short-sighted because if smart, clever people don't enjoy working for you they can and will find work elsewhere. Net result: you have to spend a lot of money and time hiring yet more smart, clever people, and so on.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#46We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or requests permitted. The prose mattered and proj…
"We used ( enforced ) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat pe…
OK, replace "forced" with "mandatory", and "prose" with "issue tracker".
"We have mandated that every task be tracked in Jira, with a predefined set of fields filled in."
Does it still look unreasonably oppressive? Is this an example of treating engineers like children?
(To me, expecting a person to write concise, mindful, well-structured prose is expecting them to show qualities of a well-developed grown-up.)
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#47"If you can't explain what you're doing to a 6-year old, you don't know it yourself" (ascribed to several famous physicists).
This is pretty true, and thus the exercise of explaining things in plain prose is very useful to make you polish your understanding, and find any problems in it. When hand-waving is not acceptable, problems in understanding become very visible.
Even if nobody reads this, it's very useful if node honestly. Having other people to read it just keeps you from slacking off.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#48We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or requests permitted. The prose mattered and proj…
"We used ( enforced ) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat pe…
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I was playing with words. A method is a protocol defining a group for a project duration together. We call numerical recipes methods but they are more like refined tools we apply selectively. Methods are more than a point solution preferences. I have yelled at the BSOD and typed harder at the machine. But software engineering is a pure communicative discipline. The "enforced" was rhetoric. All methods are mutually enforced like a grammar.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" The rest of the "features" of the GP workplace aside, this one is something I wish I've seen more often. Would you read a novel riddled with language errors? Where no sentence connects seamlessly to the next? Where there's an order of magnitude more implicit content to track than what is actually written? Where all the usual rules of orthography and punc…
I think we may be in danger violently agreeing, and perhaps I should have added a bit more nuance to my previous comment: - I've worked with plenty of people over the years whose first language is not English, so I don't necessarily expect the most wonderfully written prose in comments and documentation (or anywhere else). - I'd much rather somebody used expressive variable, method, type, or function names than wrote…
We indeed are in general agreement, but the devil is in the details - and there are many details to discuss.
Are you a native English speaker? I'm not, and I could easily claim that your first point is condescending to the point of discrimination. I know it's not what you're trying to say, but treating non-native English speakers like dimwits who can't even properly learn the de facto language of their profession may be actually offensive to quite a lot of people. It's entirely possible to learn a language well enough to be able to write clearly and correctly (mostly! mistakes happen) in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation and, personally, I believe it's a programmers' duty to do so, natives and non-natives alike.
> I'd much rather somebody used expressive variable, method, type, or function names than wrote a ton of comments.
But of course! However, the sad truth is that people who can't write good (meaning understandable and mostly correct) prose also cannot write readable code. Searching for a good name for a variable, method, type, etc. is the same process as searching for a good word to put in a sentence, to structure the sentence correctly or to make sentences flow naturally in a paragraph. If someone cannot write readable English, then how is he going to write readable code, which is actually even harder, because the rules of the language are much stricter? Some people use comments as an escape hatch which allows them not to think about the readability of their code and they should probably be fired, because both their code and comments suck. I believe the brilliant coder who can't write clearly in a natural language is a myth: it may not be "wonderful", but writing at least clear and succinct prose is doable for most competent programmers.
I think the difference of opinion between you and me here is that I see readability of source code as a single whole, encompassing things from naming temporary variables, to naming methods, classes and modules, to writing comments, docstrings, tests and examples, to writing docs, readmes and issue descriptions, while you seem to consider these things separately.
To summarize: programming is, from lowest level of programming language syntax to highest level of cooperating with teammates and clients, about communication, with a heavy emphasis on written communication. People who can't write prose are worse programmers than those who can. Whether you want or can work with such programmers is of course up to you.
Re: Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we may be in danger violently agreeing, and perhaps I should have added a bit more nuance to my previous comment: - I've worked with plenty of people over the years whose first language is not English, so I don't necessarily expect the most wonderfully written prose in comments and documentation (or anywhere else). - I'd much rather somebody used expressive variable, method, type, or function names than wrote…
We indeed are in general agreement, but the devil is in the details - and there are many details to discuss. Are you a native English speaker? I'm not, and I could easily claim that your first point is condescending to the point of discrimination. I know it's not what you're trying to say, but treating non-native English speakers like dimwits who can't even properly learn the de facto language of their profession may…
You'd be surprised how many people have no idea about English and they are pursuing development career. Successfully even. There are companies where you can consider yourself lucky if half of your team speaks English.