Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why you’re not doing creative work

every.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#21

Post by jermaustin1 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14

I’ve found that my most productive time is in the early morning. I can bang out a lot of high-quality code, and find and fix very difficult bugs, before 10AM. I find I’m most creative , though, in the afternoon. I often start something in the afternoon, then get it working, the next morning. Also, I’m constantly in “ship” mode. I write all my code (even the experimental stuff) as if it is shipping code. That means a…

I am also most productive before 10AM, but that is usually because 6-10 is the only time I have to work, because at 10AM, meetings usually start, and they don't stop until around 3pm (sometimes as late as 6pm near releases), and by then my entire soul has been sucked from my body and I need 12-16 hours to slowly reel it back in.

I love WFH, but this is the one part that has seriously killed me. Before WFH, management was rarely in the office before 10AM or between 12PM-2PM and I would sneak out at 4PM every day. Now that everyone is WFH, the concept of work hours has died. I still have a hard stop at 4pm, but doesn't stop me from getting calls or texts even as late as midnight - I just refused to answer anything after I'm done working and put my phone on silence.

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#22

Post by ghaff »

bregma wrote: post #17
danielfoster wrote: post #6

Nice read, but am I only one annoyed by titles like this one? “Why you’re not creative” subtly implies that you should be doing creative work and that if you aren’t, you’re doing something wrong. So many self-help articles on HN in particular seem designed to inspire this sort of guilt trip. Do creative work if you want to. Or don’t. Not everyone has to do everything. The answer to “why you’re not doing creative work…

The only thing that irks me more than articles (or headlines) written in the second person is articles written in the first person plural.

It depends on the context. If you're writing in the persona of speaking for your company, first person plural may make more sense than singular. Depending on the circumstances one or the other can feel more appropriate.

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#23

Post by all2 »

zauguin wrote: post #8

That's probably different for everyone, but > In the exploration phase, you don’t know what the thing is going to be, you don’t have all of the information or ideas you want to have, you don’t even know if what you’re thinking about is important, and any little breeze in the wrong direction might blow you off course. In the execution phase, you are inspired, you know what the thing is, you know how to make it, it fee…

Very much this.

When a game idea occurs to me, the exciting part is discovering the mechanics, the story, the gotchas. As soon as the idea is even semi-formed on paper or in my mind I lose interest.

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#24

Post by rambambram »

This article hits home for me. Especially the description of the exploration phase. In a world run by clocks, it's easy to overlook how important this phase is. The tip to value the exploration phase, regardless of the outcome, is an important one.

To be honest, by judging the title, first I thought this was 'yet another journalist' writing a nice fluffy article. Glad I clicked and read though. The author has experience, that's very clear from the text. Thanks for submitting!

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#25

Post by ultrahotneptune »

bambax wrote: post #12

> If all you had to do was the execution phase of creative work, you’d be able to do it between meetings no problem. But the truly hard, terrible, nasty truth is that you need to do the exploration phase in order to get to the execution phase. This matches my experience. I finished writing a novel a few months ago. It took me ~2 years, of which very little time was spent actually writing. Gathering information, think…

I've thought recently that the worst thing that can happen to an author's quality is massive success - it seems like there are a lot of authors who get to the tail end of a series or who get a large body of work behind them who decide that they don't need anyone's input on their work, and their editors know it will sell and refuse to fight them on it. It's not universal, but "full creative control" seems like it doesn't work for a lot of writers.

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#26

Post by pc86 »

danielfoster wrote: post #6

Nice read, but am I only one annoyed by titles like this one? “Why you’re not creative” subtly implies that you should be doing creative work and that if you aren’t, you’re doing something wrong. So many self-help articles on HN in particular seem designed to inspire this sort of guilt trip. Do creative work if you want to. Or don’t. Not everyone has to do everything. The answer to “why you’re not doing creative work…

"Why you're not creative" isn't the title, and means something completely different than the title.

If you see the title and it inspires guilt, then that's a personal problem. Either you should be doing creative work, and you aren't, in which case the article might be helpful. Or you shouldn't/don't need to do creative work, and if you still feel guilty nothing in the article - or truthfully, any article - is going to help.

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#27

Post by pc86 »

coldtea wrote: post #9
capn_duck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that you aren't necessarily the audience for this link. It was just posted on a link aggregator site.

Perhaps the parent's point is that nobody should be the "audience for this link"?

The audience is pretty clearly people who should be or want to be doing creative work, but aren't.

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#28

Post by layer8 »

danielfoster wrote: post #6

Nice read, but am I only one annoyed by titles like this one? “Why you’re not creative” subtly implies that you should be doing creative work and that if you aren’t, you’re doing something wrong. So many self-help articles on HN in particular seem designed to inspire this sort of guilt trip. Do creative work if you want to. Or don’t. Not everyone has to do everything. The answer to “why you’re not doing creative work…

I was actually expecting the title to mean "why what you think is you doing creative work really isn’t".

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#29

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

fddhjjj wrote: post #19
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14

I’ve found that my most productive time is in the early morning. I can bang out a lot of high-quality code, and find and fix very difficult bugs, before 10AM. I find I’m most creative , though, in the afternoon. I often start something in the afternoon, then get it working, the next morning. Also, I’m constantly in “ship” mode. I write all my code (even the experimental stuff) as if it is shipping code. That means a…

A lot of wisdom here. Allow me to just restate and expand on some of your thoughts. 1. If it goes from experimental to ship, you aren’t going to go back and make it shipshape. 2. Sanding time is meditation on the product. As I rework, I’m revisiting the code and design at multiple levels. 3. Before 10am is the old programmers 2am. It’s quiet. The hustle and interruptions of the day haven’t begun.

> 1. If it goes from experimental to ship, you aren’t going to go back and make it shipshape.

Also, I'm constantly mining my codebase for snippets, so I would like them to be quality.

The other main reason, is that I like to establish good habits. If I do all my code that way, I don't have to worry about taking extra care for the shipping stuff.

I write about my approach, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

Re: Why you’re not doing creative work

#30

Post by pschuegr »

carlsborg wrote: post #5

> Execution is Elton John writing Your Song in 20 minutes Nitpick: he means Bernie Taupin, a prolific song writer who wrote many of Sir Eltons songs. Credit where it is due: According to Bernie "I scribbled the lyric down on a lined notepad at the kitchen table of Elton's mother's apartment in the London suburb of Northwood Hills, breakfast time sometime in 1969. That’s it. Plain and simple." [1] [1] https://en.wikip…

Are you proposing that the music for Your Song (written by Elton John) was not part of the songwriting? Or should we just say that he chose a poor example and would have been better off with a example where the lyrics and music were written by the same person.
Post reply on HN