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Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#151

Post by preordained »

You can only split your energy so many ways before you become ineffective or only marginally effective at your goals. You're only human, you only have so much in the tank. As a husband/father I can only put about 2-3 things on my plate outside work/family. Working out, one side project/practice, maybe something else small. It took me a long time to stop fighting myself on this, but I feel like the reduction in stress has already paid off whatever I feel I've lost by missing out on this, that, or the other thing. If I want to fit something else in, I deliberately drop something else cold for a while--I don't balance them all.

Agree with what others have said about deadlines, I use that in tandem with the recognition about limited energy above. If I have tough hill to climb...nasty bug, difficult thing to write...I'll deliberately lay back and do really light work for the first part of the day, but I'll tell myself from 2 til quitting time or whatever I feel I can muster, I'm going to go all out. And then at quitting time, I quit. I find that I operate way more effectively this way than making myself "live" with a pain in the ass task from the beginning of the day to the end (or the end of it). Sometimes it won't take long in reality, but I could end up fighting it all day, and I find being motivated for a brief "charge" puts me in a much more effective frame of mind.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#152

Post by leroy_masochist »

bsaul wrote: post #9

1/ Whenever you can’t motivate yourself to start working on something, think about the smallest thing you can perform and make it your only goal for the day. It can be something as simple as « open the ide and compile the project once ». The trick is that after that first step you will naturally begin to do some real work, because the movement started. 2/ when learning a new skill or trying to improve , focus on one…

The "smallest possible thing" hack is a great one. It also works great for exercise. If your goal for example is to work out every morning before work, instead of setting ambitious goals for what's going to happen tomorrow morning when the alarm rings at 6am, promise yourself the following: "I will physically get out of bed. I will put on my workout clothes. I will do five pushups. If I don't feel like doing anything else after that, I will go back to bed."

When you've gotten up, gotten changed and begun to move, the prospect of going on to do an actual workout becomes like 90% less unpleasant of an idea, compared to how you perceived it from the comfort of your warm soft bed.

It works, try it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#153

Post by photon-torpedo »

Insanity wrote: post #12

Write down what I'm going to do. It happens that I can't really 'start' with work due to having too many things to choose from, or by not knowing how to really get started with it. What always helps is writing down on a piece of paper a step by step guide of what I will do. this can be very general. But just having the steps written down helps me get started. Kind of like a "todo list" except that I don't update it w…

This helps me a lot as well, as I have a large variety of tasks which often run in parallel, and having essential info written down reduces time for context switches and allows me to keep my working memory clear.

My technical solution for this is using a personal Trello board. Each task is a Trello card, and for a new task I write a rough outline of what needs to be done. I keep these cards in separate stacks: To-do (not started), In-progress, On-hold (waiting for external activity), Done (for archival purposes). For longer running tasks I do update the cards with additional information and progress status. And I can put high-priority tasks to the top of the stack. Creating, updating, and moving cards is all low-friction in Trello, so I find it to be well suited for me.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#154

Post by yboris »

n00bdude wrote: post #59

I use earplugs when doing work in any environment that is not quiet. What's nice about earplugs is (1) it seems to cut off only some 'existentential layer' of sound that I find inhibits focus and (2) your hearing adjusts; you can still hear virtually everything happening around you. Being in the city, I find myself actually sporting ear plugs virtually everywhere I go .. There's just too much noise.

I've not researched but read that prolonged in-ear headphone wearing (and in your case ear plugs) can increase in-ear bacterial growth. Unsure how problematic it is, but something to be aware of.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#155

Post by enkiv2 »

Debugging by abductive reasoning: imagine possible classes of mistake that might explain the behavior, then invent experiments designed to eliminate each entire class as an explanation. If a class of explanation cannot be eliminated, drill down. Often a bug is actually multiple unrelated bugs that manifest in the same way, because the universe is a shitshow.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#156

Post by doubleorseven »

pmarreck wrote: post #141
cozuya wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add to write done where you are when you are done for the day or switch to something else. I have an incredibly hard time picking up where I left off without something like this as apparently I'm able to compartmentalize more easily than some of my peers.

Some mornings it's just hard to get started. A trick I use is to start something "easy" towards the end of the day, but not finish it . That makes it easier to get the ball rolling the next morning.

How do you manage not to keep thinking about how you gonna finish it? Sometimes even the easiest tasks can make me daydream about the final outcome.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#157

Post by mturmon »

joaomacp wrote: post #45
Raidion wrote: post #8

If I'm working on a project I don't have external motivation for, like a personal project, etc. I'll make sure I stop working only when I reach parts that are fun or at least clear. Next time I sit down, I want to either look forward to jumping back in, or not have to sit down and deal with a super weird edge case that had me hating life earlier. This also applies to lots of things, you can quit, just do it after you…

I do this. Some colleagues don't leave work until they've finished the feature/bug they're working on. If it's 6pm and I'm stuck solving a bug, I call it quits and go home. Often the next day I have a new perspective and check that other place where the bug actually comes from, and solve it faster than if I had just banged my head until late.

With respect, your comment and the GP comment seem to be two different things.

(1) Stop work when the immediate path forward is clear, so there is less friction to restarting.

(2) Stop work when encountering a puzzling obstacle, with the expectation that ambient thinking will suggest a path forward.

I try to do both of these things. I'm more successful with the second.

I first read about (1) in a book on writing technical papers, where the advice was to NOT write until you've become confused about the way forward. Rather, leave off so you know how to begin on the next writing session.

The right strategy could depend on the application!

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#158

Post by Diederich »

all2 wrote: post #46
sanj wrote: post #11

Utilize laziness: It works like this: 1. Realize that most of the world is out to distract you. 2. Realize that part of the way to do this is to make distraction, and access to distraction, as easy as possible. 3. Actively set up "friction" to reduce that ease. In practice: I don't install FB on my phone; I have to use the crappier web version. I block reddit on my laptop, so I have to use my phone. Just by making st…

I don't display the bookmarks bar in my browser. Suddenly I'm not visiting 6 different websites for 30 minutes every day. Adding friction is an awesome hack. One can also 'grease the rails' (the opposite of friction) for difficult to get-to tasks. Set out gym clothes and bag the night before, or meal prep on the weekends (so that during the week, the easiest thing to eat is what you want it to be). This is front-load…

> Adding friction is an awesome hack.

Somewhat related: that's the only way I've been able to get myself to exercise with any consistency. I set things up so that the only way I could get to work is by riding my bicycle.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#160

Post by AtHeartEngineer »

I know this sounds a bit odd, but I yell at myself in my head, and not being degrading. If, for example, I am on a run and I want to stop, I'll tell myself "Fuck you atheartengineer, you are doing this". Most of the times it works, sometimes I just end up annoying myself, but I've had decent luck with it.
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