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The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#201

Post by OJFord »

simonw wrote: post #192
OJFord wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably help…

Did you complete the first level of the three, or have you got to purple status on every lesson? I find that getting all the way it purple on every lesson has been massively more effective for me than just doing the lower level lessons.

The three? Purple? Maybe it's different for different languages. Each lesson (as in topic badge type button) done through 5/5 crowns (1-7 stages per crown iirc), I just go through fixing the broken ones or practicing ones I know I'm rusty on now.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#202

Post by bgroat »

andai wrote: post #159
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77

Adding 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 wi…

I found devdocs years ago but lost the link. THANK YOU for bringing it back to me

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#203

Post by jmilloy »

mtberatwork wrote: post #164
mattjaynes wrote: post #89

If 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…

> 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. Artists don't have stand ups, team meetings, planning sessions, one-on-ones, commutes and whatever other office distractions to deal with though. I suppose fig…

Do you know this to be true? Most artists that I know, which is most people I know, struggle with as many work-related distractions as I do. My sanctioned office distractions at least "count" to my employer (I get paid for that time).

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#204

Post by dalbasal »

deeviant wrote: post #79

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the…

A lot of things work like this. Call it "the lucky chancer game." The winner is likely to be a fortunate risk taker, with a side effect of survivorship bias... the "wrong lesson."

Two thoughts...

First, it's not necessarily the wrong lesson. It teaches a real reality, and results could be interesting... especially if real money was involved. I can see why an accelerated game of "play the market" isn't what a schoolteacher wants to teach. But... if you did want to teach it, I would make the game high repetition. High risk-reward strategies and games are a real thing in the world. I don't think it's bad to learn how to play them.

From the POV of playing such strategies/games, it's a short path to internalizing that "secret sauce" is generally an ingredient in a sequence, and therefore not really one thing.

Second thought... One relevant way to teach kids about compound interest & saving is via "subsidized" interest rates. You might start with 10% per week with very young kids and recalibrate before financial meltdowns happen. This might be the way of getting your teacher friend's "right lesson" across.

Anyway... That "just showing up" is surprisingly often the missing ingredient is also often true, and worth remembering. It just often isn't the ingredient for regular work/school life. We do "show up" for our school and work careers. That's the baseline. The reason, IMO, "just show up" is effective, where it is effective, is that most people don't show up. Everyone is showing up for work, for class. We do have something to show for it, it's not something that's an outlier.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#205

Post by Tyr42 »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #81
kabdib wrote: post #58

Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there's your "Oh wait, I've seen a solution to this problem before..." superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that's easy to acquire.

Based on my experience reading academic papers, I would suggest that you would often be better off skimming 3 papers in a week than reading one closely. 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 i…

Honestly I don't think I could keep up one paper a day. I had a reading course which as 3 per week (in detail) and that was enough work for me. It could take 45 minutes to read a paper

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#206

Post by handrous »

aidenn0 wrote: post #59
munificent wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think often it takes longer than a few weeks for it to really become automatic.

I've gone 6-8 weeks without missing a day. People have said "don't beat yourself up if you miss one day here or there" and I've gone up to 6 months without missing 2 days in a row. It has never become automatic.

The only thing that works for me, at all, is putting things directly in my way so they're practically unavoidable, and physically removing distractions in advance. Modifying my environment to make the things I want to do extremely easy to do, and the things I don't want to impossible or difficult, is the only thing that works.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#207

Post by OJFord »

presentation wrote: post #117
OJFord wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably help…

Depends what your goals are - but if you wanna be very capable at talking you’d be better off listening to a lot of native content intended for natives (as well as talking with live people). I recommend Language Learning with Netflix, or the more heavy duty/Anki driven Migaku family of tools (can use with Netflix, YouTube or any video with subtitle files), for studying in that form; plus language teachers through som…

Absolutely agree it's a beginner tool, and through studying a textbook/Wiktionary, films, talking to a bilingual speaker I've surpassed it. But just as you say the barrier to entry is low, so is the barrier to practice.

Thanks for the tips though, I will give them a go. Especially the Netflix one I keep meaning to; I watch a fair bit in target language (Hindi) but always with (only) English subtitles. Keep meaning to give it a go. (I do sometimes go back and put Hindi subtitles on if there was something I was particularly interested in / wanted to check, but it's a pain to do often.)

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#209

Post by _wldu »

munificent wrote: post #40

I'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…

I find writing to be like this. Write something, go away for awhile and do other things. Come back and refine what you wrote. Once you do that several times, you'll have something worth reading. But it takes time.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#210

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pcbro141 wrote: post #93

See "Turning Pro" and "War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. Good books on this topic.

I really disliked the War of Art. I found nothing actionable in it. I only made it to the end because so many people recommend it and I expected some enlightenment. Unfortunately there was none.
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