The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

I would often do this in grad school:

* Go search for papers that broadly had to do with some structure or other mathematical gadget I was interested in at the time,

* Read the abstracts of those papers to find the ones that looked most interesting,

* Take the most interesting papers, and read the statements of the theorems,

* Finally, devote a little more attention to those papers that had interesting theorems that seemed to fall within the domain of what I was working on.

I did this with math papers, but there's no particular reason you can't generalize this to other fields. CS in particular can use almost the exact same methods. For less mathematical fields, you'd need to make some substitutions, such as "section headers and key topic sentences" for "statements of theorems," but you can make it work there, too.

Doing this, in a decade, you end up reading 1560 abstracts, which is probably more useful in terms of "Oh, wait, I've seen this before" type insights than reading 520 entire papers.

In just three months I’m on my third time through and have discovered probably 100 songs I just love to play that I’d never heard before (Ellington is a genius songwriter. “Cottontail” is one that I get excited to see when I flip to it, and I just have to play at least three times).

Not actually a big jazz fan. I like simple consonant sounds and cute melodies, so I skip the bop, Mingus etc. My absolute favorite is when the whole song is cute and tidy except for one accentuated bit of dissonance that comes smashing in when you’re not expecting it, then waltzes right back out, transitioning perfectly into the next section and leaving you shaking your head in awe. The Beatles were masters at this.

My sight chording/inverting and rhythm reading has gone through the roof. It’s like an endless jigsaw puzzle.

1.01 ^ 365 = 37.78

0.99 ^ 365 = 0.03

Does it really? I am from Europe and I have lived and worked in 3 EU countries, many of my friends have experience from other countries and I have never heard anyone mention this is. Obviously, my personal experience is limited. In what country do you live if I might ask?

It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time.

This reminds me of another great book about beating procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2]

In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping graduate students complete their dissertations. I can't cover all the great points here, but when working with these students he has them create an "unschedule" where they have to schedule guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but as I've applied this to different projects, it's amazing how much more I'm able to accomplish.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15799151-daily-rituals

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95708.The_Now_Habit