81–90 of 202 posts
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FYI, the author is a woman. And her twitter account is very much worth a follow: https://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=https%3A%...
Thanks for pointing to her Twitter account. Also good to know that she agrees we are trash bros[1]. We can still learn from people who despise us. [1] https://twitter.com/AdrienneCohea/status/1000463172581580800...
The author references Cal Newport's Deep Work [1]. I recently read this book and I can't recommend it enough. It's not just a productivity fluff piece about the importance of focus. He brings an academic rigor to the debate and backs up his claims with legitimate evidence. Best of all, the book is not just theory, it's 100% actionable. I used Newport's recommendations to reclaim 4+ solid hours of deep focus and it's…
Except when the initial classification of a task as “shallow” is incorrect, and it actually should’ve been “deep” (although, this shouldn’t happen too often, except when it does happen).
One thing I cannot understand is why we have both: (a) a long history of research proving to us that principles like "High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)" are accurate and highly related to extracting the most economically valuable outputs from knowledge workers. (b) open plan offices. Maybe the tech industry is daunting for newcomers because we cram people into a sardine can, give them a…
Having a baby will really flip this on its head. I used to "geek out" like my wife would say for a few hours on the weekend, sometimes an entire day, uninterrupted. This is all over now. I barely get 3 hours block at best, once or twice a week (rarely). Thing is, there is hope, I can still get some really big things done. I realise now how much time was wasted in the past, clicking around the web, diverging. When you…
I am glad you found the upside but for those who do not have the life associated with children don’t forget you were happy at the time prior.
When you feel like geeking out on something, put the phone on airplane mode and put your IDE fullscreen. Focus should be a single goal 'e.g. rewrite that utility I did years ago in AIR and won't work on linux now because AIR is unsupported and I switched to linux because windows 10 screwed me with its forced updates while I was working' (real case ;)
Having a baby will really flip this on its head. I used to "geek out" like my wife would say for a few hours on the weekend, sometimes an entire day, uninterrupted. This is all over now. I barely get 3 hours block at best, once or twice a week (rarely). Thing is, there is hope, I can still get some really big things done. I realise now how much time was wasted in the past, clicking around the web, diverging. When you…
> focus goes up 300% I agree with everything you said, except perhaps this - every day is an early morning with young kids, and often I'm so tired that when I get the opportunity to work on side projects in the evenings, I just can't focus at all :(
Having a baby will really flip this on its head. I used to "geek out" like my wife would say for a few hours on the weekend, sometimes an entire day, uninterrupted. This is all over now. I barely get 3 hours block at best, once or twice a week (rarely). Thing is, there is hope, I can still get some really big things done. I realise now how much time was wasted in the past, clicking around the web, diverging. When you…
being adult you really perceive the world differently, and "productive patience" becomes an important skill
* I use email everyday. It's important that it is clean and not full of shit. I care about it.
* At my startup (Happy Scribe), we recently implemented a small feature where the tech team gets emailed/called/sms every 10m if there's any user with a problem, or for wired 5xx request (Stripe style [1]).
* With this simple conditioning, because no one wants to have a bloated inbox, we solved 95% of the issues our customers had in the past 3 months in just a week.
With this observation, we thought it had potential, and we abstracted the concept. It would be great to add to ourselves arbitrary recurrent tasks, where you're forced to do them. Much like if you were a computer doing CRON jobs.
So that's what we did. We built a super simple prototype at https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/ where:
* You can add tasks with recurrence (CRON style)
* It has an Email interface that integrates with our actual workflow.
* You get emailed once per task with a link to take action
* If you don't take action, 3h later you start to get emailed/sms/called every 10m.
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> Plus, it’s widely and popularly disputed that open plans are actually cheaper, e.g. even in pop articles like this: It is now , but when did that start? I vaguely recall when it was still actually controversial (perhaps due to lack of data), but that may have been as long as 10 years ago. I also recall when open plan wasn't even a thing and the discussion was merely cubicles vs. hard walls. > My only remaining surp…
Your reply made me chuckle and you are right. For me personally, I derive a lot of self-identity from my own productivity, and end up caring about my work and treating it like a craft. I wish I could turn this off and just accept better paying jobs that embed me in a distraction-filled room where nobody really cares about my productivity so long as I superficially appear to try hard and evangelize the company line. B…
We just have to hold out hope for the even rarer manager that recognizes such objective value and can transform it into subjective value to sell up the chain.
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>Block off each hour of the day and and fill it with one of the TODO items Generally agree with the points but I'd like to note that this point is the most likely failure point in the method. Organizing the day by hours doesn't work for a lot of people. Most productivity books in the old days (60's) recommended it. They generally don't anymore due to the low success rate. That was one of the first things I tried as a…
This is addressed in Cal's book. He acknowledges no plan will survive the day perfectly. Basically, you just re-prioritize your blocks throughout the day. The goal is not to break the day into hour long blocks as much as it is to always have a priority and to maintain focus on that priority. Things happen and no plan survives contact with reality. I have found this method to work well and fit with a modern knowledge…
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> Appeal to the times I've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of the times I did the same and produced nothing. Were you really focused then? Not having distractions but still staring blankly at a screen, is not the same as focusing. Worst case, even if you try 100 things and none of those works, you know that these 100 things are not the solutions to the problem -- something that you didn't before. And yo…
This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though. I have been plenty focused before and not accomplished anything of note. More, I've had plenty of brief diversions into a topic that produced more learning than some deliberate attempts I have made.
I think the "true Scotsman fallacy" is often used as a way to dismiss actual classification mistakes.
What one calls focused might not actually be focused -- humans are easy to deceive themselves.
Besides, I don't see what other possibility would there be. That being focused is not important? That people can just as well achieve the same (or even more) things when unfocused vs when focused? That we need special statistical studies to be able to tell that working focused on that work is better? None of these look plausible to me.
If what you're saying is that sometimes non-deliberate attempts can work too, that might be so, but by definition those are non-deliberate, happy accidents.
You can't program these. What you can program is actual work -- and that better be focused, than, "I'll fool around for weeks with other things until inspiration strikes".