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

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

#221

Post by hyshai »

escapedmoose wrote: post #215
futureshock wrote: post #21

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…

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.…

Can you share this resource?

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

#222

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

escapedmoose wrote: post #215
futureshock wrote: post #21

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…

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.…

I'm also interested in what you learned and which class you took!

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

#223

Post by tpoacher »

escapedmoose wrote: post #215
futureshock wrote: post #21

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…

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.…

What course was this, may I ask?

I might watch it ... later :p

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

#225

Post by edelans »

futureshock wrote: post #21

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…

Amen. or as Peter Drucker puts it (he is dubbed as "the founder of modern management" on Wikipedia) :

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker

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

#226

Post by kalev »

dmos62 wrote: post #67

- Writing as form of (or tool for) thinking; Leslie Lamport said (maybe quoting someone) that if you're thinking, but not writing, you only think that you're thinking; - High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather i…

> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable;

I’d love to be more at ease on uncomfortable situations. Any tips?

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

#227

Post by monksy »

Fundamental Knowledge that are productivity multipliers:

This is go against the grain, but ignoring these kinds of generalized list. These things are very non-contextual and can be bad advice without the context they were meant for.

It's better to:

- Find people who are experts at things

- Find ways to talk to them on an informal level

- Learn how and why they are suggesting what they're suggesting

- Write and communicate what you learned/keeping a journal

Long term and deep learning will take you places. Quick trivia is a waste of time.

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

#228

Post by earth_walker »

Stepping back and balancing the numbers: e.g. Mass balance, energy balance, balancing the books, balancing your schedule, profit analysis, etc.

Usually this comes down to simple math and a bit of black boxing. It's amazing how often people miss the big picture and therefore don't see problems, losses, hidden costs or even opportunities because they're not looking at how the inputs and outputs balance.

A related skill is developing a feel for (or be able to quickly estimate) the appropriate order-of-magnitude of something.

Nothing saves time and effort like being able to scan some numbers and immediately identify a problem.

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

#229

Post by Bostonian »

The general concept of regression -- it can be linear or nonlinear and have one or more continuous or discrete outputs. It's good to understand that a multi-layer neural network and a simple linear regression are similar in some ways. Related to regression and gradient descent (which you mentioned) is maximum likelihood estimation.

Some knowledge of a command line, whether it's bash on Linux or even Windows CMD, can aid productivity.

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

#230

Post by SamReidHughes »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #202
SamReidHughes wrote: post #198

> * Regular expressions > * Parser combinators > * Parser generators I sometimes forget how I take regexes for granted, and how some people don't know them. I would replace the combinator/generator stuff with "how to cleanly make a hand-written parser." Developers frequently stumble through that quite badly.

I'm actually just about to run into making a somewhat complex parser and haven't done it since school. Any recommendations resources you'd recommend as a refresher?

By basics I really mean extreme basics. The level of instruction I'm thinking is: A parser is a function that looks something like "optional parse_foo(const std::string& data, size_t *pos)", which increases the value of *pos. It chews off objects from the front of the string and returns std::nullopt upon error. It's easy to recursively invoke smaller parsers this way.

Just that alone would really help people out and avoid problems I've seen encountered, where a dev needs to parse something, and just kind of spastically traipses around the string.

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