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

If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

calnewport.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

#41

Post by rodolphoarruda »

Intelligence is perceived on someone's outcomes to society. Playing the violin extremely well is an individual outcome, which denotes individual intelligence. On the other hand, the majority of us work for organizations, groups, teams etc, where the quality of the outcome comes from the group's collective intelligence. I wish I could find a different version of this article named instead: "If your team is busy, it's doing something "; because then it would apply to a more significant share of our societies.

I believe that someone being busy working on social interactions (of any type, real or virtual) generates great outcomes both personally and collectively. I don't believe in meditation, reclusion, cocooning anymore. A complex world requires sophisticated groups of talented people working together to solve problems. The busy they are, the better.

Maybe this slides off the topic. But I just wanted to express my view from a different angle.

Re: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

#42

Post by GreenNight »

mmaunder wrote: post #24
scottdw2 wrote: post #13

I like the hypothesis the article presents: focusing on working intently hard, followed by relaxation and you will perform better. It's something I would want to beleive. But, I find his analysis a little suspect. It appears to confuse corellation and causation. It notices a difference in behavior between the "great" and the "average" and assumes those differences to cause the difference in ability. It completely ign…

"It completely ignores the possibility that the behavioral difference might be caused by a difference in ability, rather than the behavior changing the ability." Exactly why I clicked the comment link. The differences in behavior could also be caused by a difference in psychology between students. e.g. the elite group love what they do and the other group don't. Which could indicate why the other group spread their p…

No, I don't think so.

I love what I do (my hobby - swing dancing). I do it for 3-5 hours a day (after work). I would improve much faster if I danced less, spent most of the time doing hard work (cleaning my moves, learning more moves, more cardio, ...) and rested more.

Right now I'm always on a tired state, and improving quite well, but finding myself lacking in a lot of ways. When I take a break my improvement is greatly enhanced.

Re: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

#43

Post by scottdw2 »

zzzeek wrote: post #29
scottdw2 wrote: post #13

I like the hypothesis the article presents: focusing on working intently hard, followed by relaxation and you will perform better. It's something I would want to beleive. But, I find his analysis a little suspect. It appears to confuse corellation and causation. It notices a difference in behavior between the "great" and the "average" and assumes those differences to cause the difference in ability. It completely ign…

how do you measure musical ability other than by expert assessment ? don't say "can play X notes per second".

All assessment of music ability is subjective. However, you can make it double blind. The students don't know they are being evaluated, and the evaluators don't know who is playing when they make their evaluations.

That would measure "subjective music ability".

Re: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

#44

Post by araneae »

scottdw2 wrote: post #13

I like the hypothesis the article presents: focusing on working intently hard, followed by relaxation and you will perform better. It's something I would want to beleive. But, I find his analysis a little suspect. It appears to confuse corellation and causation. It notices a difference in behavior between the "great" and the "average" and assumes those differences to cause the difference in ability. It completely ign…

>Also, another problem is that student classification is based on faculty opinion.

This is not strictly true. The elite group were taken from students who were violin performance majors. The non-elite group were taken from students who were education majors but played the violin.

There may be bias from teachers built in, but there's the added component of their assessment of their own abilities as well.

I would hope that those excelling as violin performance majors would actually be better performers than education majors that the instructors thought were poor players, bias or no bias.

Re: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

#46

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mattlong wrote: post #8
vacri wrote: post #4

The author has never worked on a farm; there is always something to do.

I don't think he is addressing people who do physical labor.

Farmers do Some physical labor, but their real job is management. Separates the successful (very few) from those that putter around painting fences and tinkering with the equipment, but who never study commodities futures or write a schedule.

Re: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong

#47

Post by dpark »

Xylakant wrote: post #40
dpark wrote: post #11

I wrote up a long critical response and then deleted it. The bottom line is that this is a valid point for studying , which is what the blog is about. Studying 10 hours a day is not productive. Shorter bursts of intense study is indeed very useful. However, it's important to note that this doesn't extrapolate to the general world. A lot of jobs simply involve doing a lot of stuff. Efficient study of storage technolog…

I think the issue revolves around the notion of "busy". The article notes that spreading your work in small chunks distributed around the day decreases your efficiency - something quite obvious if you step back a little from what you do. Still, most people (with myself being guilty) tend do get disrupted and spend time on hackernews, ... interrupting their workflow. So the argument boils down to "being elite is a mat…

The thing is, being successful in most things doesn't require being "elite". Instead it requires a ton of traditional work.

Certainly, being focused can be a good thing, and can definitely mean you get more done in the same amount of time. Most of the truly successful people I know, though, are both focused and busy. If you work twice as fast as the average person, but also spend only half the time, them you aren't more productive.

Post reply on HN