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Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#61

Post by ZeroGravitas »

huijzer wrote: post #54
Donald wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously as I said it's not practical to fly around the world to get work done A friend of mine finished her novel through repeated long-haul flights from JFK. The on-going expense alone is motivating.

I just would like to say that requiring a flight to be able to focus is absolutely ridiculous. I think the question already starts off in the wrong direction. There are no tricks which solve the problems completely. It would be like asking for a trick to gain muscles or a trick to learn Spanish. The trick for both is: do the work. I'd argue that it is the same for focus. For example, Einstein was able to work through…

That Einstien anecdote sounds more like ADHD. Despite the general impression being that it causes lack of focus, its sometimes better thought of as an inability to choose what to focus on. Getting absorbed into something they are passionateky interested in is sometimes described as a positive aspect of ADHD.

I just googled and a bunch of people think he may have had ADHD, but I'd guess thats true of basically any combination of famous person and mental health issue.

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#62

Post by bot41 »

huijzer wrote: post #54
Donald wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously as I said it's not practical to fly around the world to get work done A friend of mine finished her novel through repeated long-haul flights from JFK. The on-going expense alone is motivating.

I just would like to say that requiring a flight to be able to focus is absolutely ridiculous. I think the question already starts off in the wrong direction. There are no tricks which solve the problems completely. It would be like asking for a trick to gain muscles or a trick to learn Spanish. The trick for both is: do the work. I'd argue that it is the same for focus. For example, Einstein was able to work through…

Your [2] (Jocko) is essentially "don't focus on things that don't matter"

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#63

Post by sytelus »

One of the biggest thing is to just start. Sometime the project is so long and problems so hard that you tend to procrastinate. One trick I learned was to add reward just for the start. For example, I have a huge watch later list on YouTube that I never get around to watch. So I star that on one screen and on other screen actual work. More often that not, I then turn of YouTube and go along with my work.

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#64

Post by Jugurtha »

I wrote a bit about it in another reply[0].

- Disconnect from the internet

- Unplug your laptop from the charger, or go somewhere else

See how much work you can get done on a single laptop charge, without internet. No commute these days? Leave your charger in another room and start working. Once you get in the zone, you'll find it hard to leave to get your charger, similar to how you delay going to the bathroom when watching a movie, even though you could just hit pause.

You'll be surprised. By the time your laptop's battery is at 6% or 5% you'll be slaying dragons.

This is extremely useful when you want to implement a feature or fix a bug and you've been dragging your feet. The code doesn't need to be great, but you'll often have a prototype/proof of concept with the rightish abstraction, which you've been dragging your feet on.

Some of my most effective work was done on a bus: "Come what may, I have 40 minutes to solve this issue". When I did it twice a day, that's a lot of issues taken off the backlog.

It also works with learning something you've been delaying. "I have 40 minutes to go through this tutorial on Kubernetes/Docker". I won't learn all the subtleties, but it does work.

Call it Bus/car Driven Development, or Battery Driven Development. Basically introducing a hard, physical, constraint that is a bit more real than a pomodoro timer. You actually have to get off the bus/car, or the laptop actually dies. It's more exciting than an alarm going off.

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547259

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#65

Post by antman »

Set up objectives and time lines for everything, paper only. Half day, weekly, monthly with quantifyable active outcomes. Active means producing something. For example read philosophy becomes create outline for a philosopher plus connections with other philosophers each half day. Create an app becomes create module and decide on interfaces. End of week is for putting stuff together.

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#67

Post by solarkraft »

nlh wrote: post #9

Here's a trick that works for me that's totally impractical, but is a hint/roadmap to finding a repeatable system: I've been doing a lot of travel to Europe lately, and the return flight has become my greatest deep work experience ever. I enjoy it so much that I actually look forward to it now and wish I could do it more than ~4 times a year. I fly either Zurich or Frankfurt to SFO on United and get an economy bulkhe…

I think a good part of the focus I too experience on flights is the nice vibration/noise profile.

I recently replicated the noise I remember from my last flight (quite a while ago) on mynoise and dubbed it "Airplane vibes":

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteRainNoiseGenerator.ph...

It manages to drown out people talking outside your headphones while comfortably allowing you to listen to something playing on the inside.

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#68

Post by codewritinfool »

dorkwood wrote: post #35

One weird trick I use is to listen to a particular kind of music. The genre isn't important. Neither is the content. What's important is that I've listened to that same music while experiencing a flow state in the past. Just as music attached to a time and place can make us remember how we felt back then, music attached to memories of deep work can make us feel more focused. I don't have any sources to back this up.…

Ozric Tentacles for me. With the exception of two songs that I can think of in their 30-album catalog, there are no vocalizations. Just trippy psychedelic space rock. It may not work for everyone, but it puts me in the zone and I can code without lyrical distraction.

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#69

Post by jcwarkentien »

Deep Work was a great book but the summary found linked on HN is SO much better.

The way to do deep work is to not do shallow work ever.

Hire people to do shallow work for you.

If you can't sell the product of your 'deep work' yet, try, say, flipping burgers or Shopify.

Hope this helps.

Re: Ask HN: What is your trick to do deep work or study?

#70

Post by nlh »

solarkraft wrote: post #67
nlh wrote: post #9

Here's a trick that works for me that's totally impractical, but is a hint/roadmap to finding a repeatable system: I've been doing a lot of travel to Europe lately, and the return flight has become my greatest deep work experience ever. I enjoy it so much that I actually look forward to it now and wish I could do it more than ~4 times a year. I fly either Zurich or Frankfurt to SFO on United and get an economy bulkhe…

I think a good part of the focus I too experience on flights is the nice vibration/noise profile. I recently replicated the noise I remember from my last flight (quite a while ago) on mynoise and dubbed it "Airplane vibes": https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteRainNoiseGenerator.ph... It manages to drown out people talking outside your headphones while comfortably allowing you to listen to something playing on the…

That’s great! Thanks for the link. I’ll give it a shot at home today :)
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