Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

What I mean is you can be flat out busy every waking hour and not produce anything of value. Everyone on HN knows at least one coworker that is negatively productive.

if you look at businesses instead of individuals, there are a great many businesses that are full of hustlers which end up with a value <= 0 (i.e. bankrupt).

As others have said, "productivity multipliers" can be "waste generators", so meet the (business?/user?) need, etc.

What the question might be after is how to develop insight. As others have mentioned, transferring patterns across domains, using the right tool (i.e., the right mental model), etc. And be patient with difficulty: interesting problems are usually hard.

To see these aspects in an integrated context, read Plato and Aristotle sympathetically. The divided line and syllogism underlie law, medicine, mathematics, etc. Focus on how the text goes from confusion via contention/elenchus to clarity by understanding how others think. It's a good model for the social and personal aspects of "knowing thyself" being the virtue of virtues.

So, yeah, if you really want to change your life and those around you, work up through a 10-day silent meditation retreat. After all, if everyone is always living in their head, so you might as well learn how to see what your head is doing.

Absolutely this. I was a chronic procrastinator prone to intense anxiety and breakdowns just before deadlines. Then I took a really good ~3 hour course on time management, and it seriously changed my life. I can’t even describe how much more productive I am. It’s changed how I approach every task, professional and personal. I can’t even remember the last time I felt any sort of stress or anxiety about my to-do list. A big part of it is figuring out what doesn’t have to be done right now (“positive procrastination”).

Edit to add that the course was “Time Management Fundamentals (2016)” by Dave Crenshaw. I completed it on LinkedIn learning. For those of you who’d like to give it a try, my advice is: do all the exercises. You won’t get the full value out of the course unless you actively incorporate the whole routine into your workflow. There’s a learning curve, but it’s absolutely worth it. Also be warned that the presenter’s personality is a little off-putting (to me, anyway), but he absolutely knows what he’s talking about, so listen to him.

> * Calculus for solving all sorts of problems.

I'm not sure if I've ever used calculus thinking for anything as a full stack developer. Never done much with calculating the rate of change of a rate of change or determining the area of an N dimensional shape. I've used many different packages and tools that are inspired by the basic ideas of calculus. But I've never had to consult a calculus text to write a given method.

In my experience, calculus and most forms of advanced mathematics are more "mental tools that might come in handy one day" than a 10x force multiplier.

A lot of those are pretty domain specific. Calculus is 10x only because it lets you get into fields where calculus is 10x. I have no idea what a general everyday coder would do with it.

I could list tons of design patterns, like separate mutable and atomic readonly copies of the same data, but they wouldn't be universal, although patterns are wonderful.

The closest thing to a real 10x I know is laziness and respect for best practices, and what I call "decustomization", the art of removing any unusual technology from actual production systems.

Riced desktops? Gone. Custom made productivity apps? Gone. Simple bash scripts to move files around and do backups? Gone. Distro hopping? Extra gone. New JS frameworks? Gone but with napalm. Making your own programming language? Not gone because it never even started.

Any one of these things might not be a big time drain. But the general mindset of DIYing and building "just right" systems all together takes a lot of time.

Learning how to work "inside the box" with standard issue tools, and how to guess ahead of time how much maintenance work anything new will require, and to think in terms of how things fit ecosystems, rather than evaluating things separately, has probably been the most important thing I've learned in tech.

Every time I've done something "unusual" I've been convinced that the core design was better than what's out there. And almost every time, I've regretted it, because a great idea doesn't always make up for a lack of polish and compatibility.

The challenge of course is actually finding anything else you want to be doing with the saved time.