I wonder if this is an argument in favor of the five-day workweek - at least from management's point of view.
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
151–160 of 591 posts
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#152Is it generally easy for people to get permission from their day job to code on the side, without assigning all rights to the employer?
Most employers couldn't care less whether you cease exist once you leave the company, let alone track what you're up to.
As long as you're not competing directly with them just leave your day job just as your side project ramps up commercially, and it'll likely never be an issue.
Most are only worried you'll leverage their IP, insider knowledge, steal employers, or somehow cause reputational damage to them - they don't actually want your IP.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#153This is great advice and has made me think how I can squeeze out 30-60 minutes every day to do something similar. I think one area might be just making my setup more portable - instead of having a fully built out development environment that is on my desktop tethered to my desk, it may make sense to move to a laptop that I can move around the house, take with me on trips, etc. so as to not break the streak. Or even u…
This is one of the reasons why investing in learning a terminal "IDE" / editor like vim / emacs can pay off. You can ssh from anywhere and have your development environment waiting for you.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#154I really am out of words to describe this article. The title should be made the first commandment in the laws of programming (or any field). It is so effective that you don’t need to read the article the title says it all. Most people fail at keeping this rule because their mind perceives it to be too simple to keep and falls prey to overconfidence.
I sometimes tell people this idea as a the good news and bad news of learning.
The good news is that you don't need to "try" to learn. Just do something, pretty much anything, for a while and the learning/remembering/synthesising happens automatically. The bad news is that there's no shortcut, it will take time no matter what you actually do.
Even quicker. Bad news, it takes time. Good news, it only takes time.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#155If you haven't read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1] 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 amazin…
You have to do it every day - creativity comes in bursts and you don't know when it's going to show up so you need to be the one showing up every day to work on it. Hemingway would write (sober) every morning and then be drunk by lunch and for the rest of the day and early evening. But he worked every day for a few hours. People like to focus on his appetite for drinking but he got his work done first.
“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.” — W. Somerset Maugham
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#156Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day. Since then I've tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I've got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my w…
What results do you find you get from using Duolingo every day for 959 days? Do you find that it's working for you, in terms of gaining better language proficiency?
I ask because I personally became disillusioned with Duolingo's streaks and leaderboards. I found that I was forcing myself to use it every day but I lost the love of learning the language. Ultimately, I stopped using it because I had a lot of extrinsic motivation to hit targets in the app but little intrinsic motivation to keep learning.
It sounds like your experiences were different from mine and I'm curious to learn what made them so.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you please explain to someone who is not from the US what is the justification behind this? It seems that it is not uncommon in the US that the employer has some rights to stuff you do in your free time - to me that seems as "reasonable" as "you sold me your house so your car is also mine now". What I do in my free time is none of my employer's business, why would they have any right to any of it?
It happens in Europe too. The rationale is that the employer gives you a lot of knowledge and tools which you could use to your own benefit... there are clear cases of abuse, some leading to litigation. I guess the employers want to defend themselves against IP theft basically. What I normally do is ask for an agreement that projects unrelated to my employer's business is ok for me to work on, which I have always bee…
> The rationale is that the employer gives you a lot of knowledge and tools which you could use to your own benefit
You also bring experience and knowledge to your employer that may benefit them while you're on holiday, or off sick, or even after you leave the company. Maybe we should send them a bill for these incidental benefits?
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#158I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Cons…
Put another way, people overestimate how much they can do in one day, but underestimate how much they can do in a year.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#159Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities. Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is establ…
A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to bed, so it's off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an offline feature, to look up standard library stuff.
I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect.
This is the most productive I've been in my life, by quite a wide margin.
Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
#160I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Cons…
> There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.
There is an amazing book called The Slight Edge which is based on this very principal and it can really change your life. Here is a small excerpt from it that really resonated with me:
It sure would be nice if, somehow, you could do something dramatic. If you just wake up tomorrow and have it all turned around—snap your fingers and change it. That might happen, in a movie.
But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you add one small, simple, positive action to the success side?
Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing you can see. What happens if you keep adding one more, and one more, and one more, and one more ... Before too long, you see the scales shift, ever so slightly. And then again. And eventually, that heavy - failure side starts to lift, and lift, and lift ... and the scales start swinging your way.
No matter how much negative weight from the past is on the other side, just by adding those little grams of success, one at a time (and by not adding more weight to the failure side), you will eventually and inevitably begin to shift the scales in your favor.
The Slight Edge is about your awareness. It is about you making the right choices, the choices that serve you and empower you, starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life, and learning to make them effortlessly.
It's not a question of your mood or your feelings. And it's not a question of will power. It's a question of simply knowing.
Simple things you do every day, in fact. Or, as the case may be, don't do every day. Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you. It's entirely up to you. If you're doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you. If you're doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right now.