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

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

#221

Post by redwards510 » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

Elte wrote: post #107

I like to keep "writing walls" of whatever problem I need to solve, either in work or outside of it. These are basically Google Docs without rules about structuring of content, it's mostly me type-talking with myself about what the problem is, what some possible approaches are for solving it, or even "arghs" and the occasional profanity if things don't work out. Also I paste in URLs for whatever useful resources I fi…

I like to do this but I find it difficult to go completely "free form" on a work computer that might be monitored. It's silly but but I don't like the idea of someone being able to see my inner thought processes like that because a lot of times you are stating the obvious just to put that on paper, but to an observer it looks like "man this guy has trouble grasping even the most basic concepts!"

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

#222

Post by ergothus » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

cm11 wrote: post #212

cdicelico wrote: post #78

My top 3, in order of how I try to apply them (i.e., if 1 doesn't help, move on to 2, etc.). I learned these all from reading various philosophy works, by the way, so perhaps cognitive hack #1 should be "read books". 1) Suspension of judgement (from Sextus Empiricus, Zhuang Zi, Ecclesiastes): avoid forming an opinion at all about things that are not evident. The way I do this is by thinking through an opposing argume…

These are forms of adjusting for bias and one should be cautious when they (or anyone) think they're good at accounting for them. That said, there are times we do feel justified in our decision because we feel we have adequately looked at "all sides." At times the process of taking a neutral approach and/or vocalizing that neutrality demonstrates weakness. "Plan X makes sense because of A and B, but it does have this…

Agreed. I use qualifiers far too often. It's good to be open to being wrong, good to not convey over-confidence, but when you are the one operating outside the social norm it dilutes whatever point you were making.

I am trying to get in the habit of providing an overarching qualifier so that I'm not deceiving my audience and then making the rest of my statements without any qualifiers that would be covered by the overarching one. It is definitely a hard habit to change, however.

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

#223

Post by pmarreck » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #210

doubleorseven wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like the difference between the J and P traits in the MBTI system. J-types (judgers) like me (and probably you) tend to plan ahead a lot and like to have matters settled, whereas P-types (perceptors) prefer to keep decisions open and decide how to do stuff when the time comes to act. I would guess that pmarreck is a P-type, or would at least lean towards P. Wikipedia has more details on MBTI, and there ar…

Heh, you're right: I believe last time I took the MBTI, I was either INTP or ENTP, definitely not J though! Interesting!

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

#224

Post by halis » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

Do what's right for the company, not what's right for you. It will make it easier to win people over to your side and combat those who are only thinking about their own politics.

If a user tells you the data is wrong then follow the data. Trust but verify. The data may lead you to other data and the solution.

If there's no indicator of bad data then follow the code. There's always a reason. You'll be amazed at what you find.

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

#225

Post by pmarreck » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

doubleorseven wrote: post #156

pmarreck wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What majewsky said (which was interesting!)

Basically I am able to (mentally and physically) walk away from work and let go of it and go home and game or work out or whatever. Then, the next day when I sit down again, I get my bearings and see where I'm at and then proceed!

There are a few exceptions to this, of course, but it's always with hard problems I become absolutely OBSESSED about. For example I couldn't find an XML parser in Elixir a couple weeks ago that I liked, so I was faced with writing my own... which I did... and then released as open source https://github.com/pmarreck/mega_xml but I was literally up until 4:30AM one night figuring out how to turn an event-based XML parser callback mechanism into an Elixir Map datastructure (something I had never had to do before, but which I somehow knew I was barely capable of figuring out, lol). It was extra tricky (for me) due to the lack of mutability

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

#226

Post by chess44 » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #117

My hacks: * Productivity: every day do at least one measurable thing that puts forward your project, even if very small. * Expectations: don't care about the outcome of your work, as long as you tried to put a lot of good efforts into it. Focus on trying to do the thing instead of focusing on the result it will have, or what people will think. * Stress: instead of being preoccupied about things, try to take care of t…

What if I don't want to be who I am and I want to change myself?

Apparently I am a very feminine man and I don't want to be like this at all. I can't stand how people treat me. When I am being myself I'd much rather not socialize at all than try to meet people.

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

#227

Post by eldavido » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

dctoedt wrote: post #165

pmarreck wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of substituting books with URL's... Do you have any to any of these concepts? For example I just tried googling "eikasia, pistis, dianoia, episteme, techne, phronesis, noesis" and I didn't, eh, come up with something precise enough to read. EDIT: Someone down in the thread did the kindness already!

> At the risk of substituting books with URL's It's substituting URLs for books — either that or replacing books with URLs . [0] This might seem pedantic, and I know that language evolves, but: 1. We risk confusing, and therefore we disserve, non-native speakers if we use the language in ways opposite the accepted standard meanings. (One could think of language as an API, and no matter what the API, precision and acc…

This is one of the few cases where the words are very useful precisely because they're the originals.

Many of these (e.g. techne) are verbatim latin/greek terms and are probably used just as they are, in other languages.

You're talking about an intellectual endeavor (philosophy) which is VERY old.

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

#228

Post by eldavido » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

halis wrote: post #224

Do what's right for the company, not what's right for you. It will make it easier to win people over to your side and combat those who are only thinking about their own politics. If a user tells you the data is wrong then follow the data. Trust but verify. The data may lead you to other data and the solution. If there's no indicator of bad data then follow the code. There's always a reason. You'll be amazed at what y…

Corollary: work at/for people/places that reward this.

You will do yourself no good if you optimize for the company but in ways that management doesn't care about. For better or worse, companies are little command economies and the things management cares about don't necessarily correspond to what's actually good for "the company" (the shareholders?).

Been there, done that.

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

#229

Post by EdSharkey » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

I had trouble dependably taking vitamins and meds, a low self worth thing.

I started saying "I love you" to myself each time I took them to reinforce to myself that I am worth taking the time to do the needful. Saying that loving thing to myself on a regular basis dramatically improved things.

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

#230

Post by zackmorris » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

My main 2:

* Start with the low-hanging fruit. I learned this from my old job moving furniture: some days I simply didn't have the energy to step up into the truck or climb stairs (maybe I had worked overtime the day before, etc). Just grab a box or anything at all, and walk as far as you can to the house or up to the truck you have to unload. Too often we focus on loading up both arms and tucking something under our armpit to maximize our efficiency, when doing 3 small tasks can be done stress-free individually but lead to the same result.

* Let your subconscious do the work. To stay in zen, it's as much about building the practices and habits that let you work as it is about doing the tasks themselves. Try loading a problem into your mind and then taking a break or sleeping on it without solving it (I almost always preload a problem this way before bed). Most of the time, my brain solves the problem for me and in a better way than if I had tackled it the "hands on" way. I'd say the majority of my work is subconscious now, so I effectively have a partial I've spun up to assist me - similar to pair programming but my partner is the universe.