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Stop trying to make hard work easy

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Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#21

Post by galoisgirl »

Someone1234 wrote: post #2

Long but the meat is missing. The most important subsection is "Most moments of distraction are caused by internal triggers." But that section lacks anything approaching concrete advice. It just repeats already written ideas then offers this: > So if you want to deal with distraction the first thing you have to do is deal with the negative emotional triggers that lead to it. The next section, regardless of the title,…

I wish there was more about dealing with those triggers, but maybe this kind of advice should come from therapists rather than writers.

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#22

Post by emptysongglass »

I don't buy any of his arguments other than pointing out the obvious: distractions are caused by internal triggers. We've known that attention deficit disorders have been caused by emotional disregulation for a long time and you don't even need to look at the studies to figure it out: just sit your butt down and look at the chaos of your own self bloom, AKA meditate.

I also don't buy into the title's command to stop trying to make hard work easy. Apart from reproduction, that's literally what organisms are wired to do: make biologically demanding processes less demanding so we can free up more energy so we can have more babies.

This is a new person reiterating old ideas in a broken way.

Work becomes hard when you allow yourself to become an agent of your own negative internal triggers. It's not hard if you possess the techniques to judo it to the ground (see meditation).

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#23

Post by kd5bjo »

cseleborg wrote: post #8
runawaybottle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes one of the triggers is that it’s hard, and if it’s a hard thing you have to regularly do, you should be looking to find a way to do it easier. Otherwise it becomes a suck-it-up-and-just-do-it strategy, which is a fine when used reasonably, but it too can be exhausted as a strategy. But anyway, all of our tools and progress flys in the face of the author’s suggestion. We are at this point in society because…

I think it's worth distinguishing between hard work (working long hours), rote work (doing lots of menial work) and challenging work (important work that requires attention/concentration). I agree with you that rote work should be minimized with better tools and processes. I can delegate the bookkeeping for example. Hard work seems like a matter of culture. There might be the expectation from your organisation, famil…

Sometimes completely eliminating rote work is a mistake. If there’s a lot of challenging work to be done, doing some rote work can be used to rest some while still staying basically on-task and minimizing context-switching costs.

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#24

Post by csours »

Distractions are definitely caused by internal triggers and sometimes there is no perfect way to deal with them.

I'm adding features to an existing service, and it causes me emotional distress, because there are 3 layers of legacy code next to the stuff I'm adding. I so want to go hog wild and rip up the old stuff. The only problem being, we're short on time and devs right now, so I have to add these strategic features.

Here's how I deal with it: Chunk up the work, and think of the next small piece I can accomplish. Get started on something, and leave the last easy piece sitting there while I take a break. When I come back and finish that chunk I have a positive reward feeling for finishing a chunk of code. Then I feel more like starting the next piece.

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#25

Post by marcosdumay »

gitgud wrote: post #17

The title "Stop trying to make hard work easy" resonates with me. And is closely related to [1] Yak Shaving and [2] Premature Optimisation. What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has diminishing returns. For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing? Of course it depends, but usually it's important to wor…

It's way more complicated than that.

Now that deploying a website is 1 click, what kinds of mistakes go away, what other processes you can integrate with that deploy, and what is the gain of deploying more often?

For the specific case of deployment, just by the chance of error, I would say it's already above break-even on the first deployment.

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#27

Post by TeMPOraL »

gitgud wrote: post #17

The title "Stop trying to make hard work easy" resonates with me. And is closely related to [1] Yak Shaving and [2] Premature Optimisation. What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has diminishing returns. For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing? Of course it depends, but usually it's important to wor…

> For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing?

How many times do you need to deploy a website? At certain stages of development, probably many times a day. Automating it would not only pay for itself in few days, it also enables CI/CD and a whole new category of tests to be run.

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#28

Post by thom »

gitgud wrote: post #17

The title "Stop trying to make hard work easy" resonates with me. And is closely related to [1] Yak Shaving and [2] Premature Optimisation. What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has diminishing returns. For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing? Of course it depends, but usually it's important to wor…

There's actually a nice treatment of this elsewhere on wiki:

https://wiki.c2.com/?SharpenTheSaw

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#29

Post by granshaw »

austincheney wrote: post #10

I wish technical people would stop using the words hard and easy . In general use when developers use the word easy is it supposed to mean simple, convenient, done by somebody else, low timeframe, fewer steps, less research, faster learning, something else, or all of the above?

Even more, the words “bad” and “good”. Yes we should be using the words “simpler”, “more maintainable”, “more approachable for newcomers” etc and their opposites.

Engineering is all tradeoffs- let’s be precise on our adjectives unless we’re talking about things that are like 95% of the time a bad idea (eg goto statements?)

Re: Stop trying to make hard work easy

#30

Post by pmiller2 »

fastball wrote: post #15
pmiller2 wrote: post #9

This has already been posted 5 other times in the past week: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Reposting is not against the HN guidelines. The is the first time I have seen it.

Never said it was. But, I'm not interested in seeing the same thing 6 times, either.
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