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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

#501

Post by p5a0u9l »

hinkley wrote: post #235
mtberatwork wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Someone blew my mind describing why some artists are not appreciated until they are dead. The theory as it went is that most artists aren’t “ahead of their time”, it’s that they see Now in a way that nobody else will understand for years. Eventually, with the aid of the lens of nostalgia we see that they really “get us”, as we now understand ourselves. Being out in the world is how they “get” us. It’s material, not f…

This.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#502

Post by p5a0u9l »

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…

Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame has a nice new book on a strategy similar to this. Haven't read it, but looks pretty good. He talks about how everyone should try one artistic thing and be willing to fail. That gets the Jitters out the way, then they can focus and do something interesting.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#503

Post by karterk »

temporama1 wrote: post #399

Counterpoint to this: a lot of the programmers I admire all have an uncanny ability to just sit and work for long periods of time. Like, sit down and hardly move for 10 straight hours. They achieve a huge amount in that time - much more in a single 10 hour stretch than they would in 10x1 hour sessions. And that applies to other things they do: playing video games, reading a book...when they do something they go 'all…

I certainly agree. However, many people don't have that dedicated focused time. I wanted to give an alternative perspective on what one can do when you can't find such long stretches of time.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#504

Post by curiousllama »

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…

Agreed. The links between papers are arguably more important than the details of any given paper.

Knowing the shape and direction of research into big topics is just so critical to choosing the right topics yourself.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#505

Post by nmg »

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…

The site preferences allow you to enable tracking which is disabled by default.

This checkbox is the single coolest thing I've ever seen on the Internet.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#506

Post by Damogran6 »

Dangeranger wrote: post #244
Damogran6 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of domains of knowledge that are effectively infinite are compounding...this thought tends to make me hyperventilate if I think about it too much. It was very important to me to be smart so that people looked positively at me, now that I'm getting older, I'm having a hard time letting that go as I know more and more about less and less.

And yet, “smart” is less about how much you know and more about how quickly you can become competent in something new. You can feel confident in the knowledge that when you need to know something you can learn it, just-in-time.

Yeah, but at the same time, I'm getting tired of learning about Yet Another SIEM...or Web Server...or Message Queue

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#507

Post by zuhayeer »

achow wrote: post #486

Effectiveness of just showing up works wonderfully for fitness as well. How much ever unfit one is, just showing up for a long period of time changes oneself. All one has to do drag oneself to the class, day in and day out, and then universe takes over..

Also learning a new language

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#508

Post by chiefalchemist »

> Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well.

Apparently, software is similar to soft drinks :) That is, the soft drink market is massive. So massive that even a small slice - and you most often have to start looking to "corner" a small slice - can be fairly lucrative.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#509

Post by hallway_monitor »

p5a0u9l wrote: post #502
mtberatwork wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame has a nice new book on a strategy similar to this. Haven't read it, but looks pretty good. He talks about how everyone should try one artistic thing and be willing to fail. That gets the Jitters out the way, then they can focus and do something interesting.

A piece of trivia I loved learning was that in the context of "Roger Wilco", Wilco means "will comply".

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#510

Post by hallway_monitor »

dasil003 wrote: post #187
jnovek wrote: post #63

This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don't know how big the problem is, everything feels like progress. Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it's hard to just do a little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it's hard to peel off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success. Th…

On the other side of 40 here, I definitely know what you mean, but I also think you can cultivate a beginner's mind and openness to ambitious ideas while still leveraging your experience to see around corners and avoid dead ends. Two ideas: First, remind yourself that software is malleable. You don't need to build it perfectly the first time, and in fact you will always need to modify it as you go, so don't get stuck…

When starting to lead a team I was shocked at the amount of times I had to redirect from overcomplicated ideas and over optimization. Even more than that, I had to constantly remind the team that we needed to get something working before we got something perfect. Pragmatism came slowly for me but learning it early would, I think, serve anyone well.
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