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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

#411

Post by TeMPOraL »

munificent wrote: post #329
dreamer7 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on the activity. It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. But you can make a lot of progress by practising every day for very little time. For example, I've improved on my tucked planche progression by just leaning forward while holding a plank for 5 seconds every day.

> It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. Both of the books I wrote, one of which includes two complete implementations of a programming language, were mostly written in sessions of less than an hour. Occassionally I get longer ones and very often they are much shorter. Learning to task switch and suspend efficiently is also a really valuable skill that impro…

Do you count only writing time, or also the time you spent constructing the book and associated programs in your head?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#412

Post by pilsetnieks »

grp000 wrote: post #341
pkghost wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the great thing about threaded comments — everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of conversation can do so without derailing the others (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX). Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their tangent. Normalize polite pedantry!

I don't think it's pedantic though. If what makes your argument powerful is tying it back to a natural phenomenon, then it should be right, otherwise you're using a bad example.

Using bad logic is building a house on sand. One might get lucky and the house might stand their lifetime but they're also likely to get swallowed by a sinkhole.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#413

Post by munchbunny »

laurieg wrote: post #30

I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me. I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I struggle to do 500m a day. Same with programming. I'll start with a few good days but then it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line then closing it straight after.

I found that I tend to get backlash if I start with too ambitious of a goal. Instead, I'll aim for something stupidly easy and just focus on getting started at all. I've found that works much better.

At first I aimed for 1 hour of exercise a day. That failed within a week. So then I aimed for 10 minutes a day, which barely felt like exercise, but it got me to the starting line consistently! The trick for me was treating anything past 10 minutes as beating expectations, rather than treating anything under 1 hour as falling short. In practice it means I'm able to get about 20 minutes per day consistently, which is still much better than 1 hour never.

The key for me was making it so I could consistently feel good about a reasonable goal instead of constantly feeling like I was falling short of my own expectations.

Now if only I could apply that to flossing.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#414

Post by querez »

chejazi wrote: post #246
superasn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Like smoking pot. I love smoking pot, but wow can it cascade errors in judgment (only realized upon looking back)

I'm curious, because I sometimes worry of stepping into this trap, as well: what kind of error cascades?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#415

Post by bob1029 »

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 started doing this with side projects a little while ago. The revelation for me was to create a monorepo out on GitHub and actually keep my hackaround projects under some reasonable form of source control and all in the same bucket.

What I started doing was rewriting my projects over and over trying to chase down the core first principles. I would take my previous iteration - MyProject12 - and create a fresh one - MyProject13. The idea would be to use the prior copy as a reference point for the new one, and to only use it for the little nuggets of value I think I still want to carry forward. I have VS solutions with every iteration of that project in it so I can quickly do a sln-wide search for something I discovered previously.

I repeated this process about 40-50 times for an application framework. Fast forward 3-4 years and we are now talking about setting up a license agreement between myself and my employer for purposes of using this IP in next generation products. It is incredibly nice to have permissive employment contracts so that I can freely explore my interests without fear of reproach. Seems this has very powerful win-win mechanics.

It may sound strange that this is what someone would do in their free time after work, but I actually do derive pleasure from indulging the fantasy of being allowed to rewrite code piles. If I were to take this tendency into my professional work, everyone would have quit by now. It seems to be a good outlet for me.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#416

Post by effingwewt »

tra3 wrote: post #283
rjh29 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way, people overestimate how much they can do in one day, but underestimate how much they can do in a year.

"The days are long but the years are short". Having the wisdom and patience to see something through to the completion is difficult.

Wow, never heard that one, but I love it.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#417

Post by xwdv »

arnold_palmur wrote: post #262
telchar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probab…

This is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News comment.

I’d much rather see pedantic comments that are technically correct than people just nodding along and perpetuating meme-like garbage facts. Too often when I scroll through social media I read quotes and posts that make me roll my eyes at how people will avoid critical thinking and reasoning as long as the words sound good and tell a good stereotypical story in their minds. In this case, the idea that vast canyons are formed by little drops of rain over time.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#418

Post by galaxyLogic »

I agree this is the way to do something, keep at it consistently. But at the same time the story tells me it took a long time, many YEARS, from 2015 to 2020.

It takes a long time and but it also helps that you don't use the whole day for it every day. That means you have time to think about what you're doing while riding on a bus or doing something else.

The end-produce is beautiful and simple, but it took a lot of effort to make it simple, to know what exactly it should be.

Now had there been a clear spec to start with I assume it could have been done much faster. But then again creating the spec takes its own time.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#419

Post by norrius »

tharkun__ wrote: post #410
shoemakersteve wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of great content on YouTube to learn the basics. There's a channel called "Pro Home Cooks" that's definitely more focused on teaching you the basics as well as techniques, tips and tricks, etc. That's what I watched to get me started. They have a couple of "Basic tips & tricks everyone should know" type videos and I definitely recommend those. It's stuff like, "pat down your chicken before cooking it or…

Some of this might be great advice and the reasoning sound. Some of it I can't tell but the thing about water and salt makes me suspicious. I suppose you mean to add salt after the water boils instead of at the start? Why would the water boil faster without salt with any significance to cooking? I looked it up again and apparently The temperature needed to boil will increase about 0.5 C for every 58 grams of dissolve…

I suspect this is more about giving that almost-boiling water more points where it can break tension and start forming bubbles. So it doesn't make the water reach 100° faster but makes it more visible.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#420

Post by galaxyLogic »

bob1029 wrote: post #415
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 started doing this with side projects a little while ago. The revelation for me was to create a monorepo out on GitHub and actually keep my hackaround projects under some reasonable form of source control and all in the same bucket. What I started doing was rewriting my projects over and over trying to chase down the core first principles. I would take my previous iteration - MyProject12 - and create a fresh one -…

I wish more employers realized this. If the contract says they own every piece of code you write, you are not likely to put your best ideas forward.
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