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A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

census.dev

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Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#41

Post by yonaguska »

sublinear wrote: post #31
yuuuuyu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk with this is that you keep procrastinating away before getting going again. It's the anticipated pain of frustration that prevents you from starting. Not so much if your idle time generated a solution to the problem. But if it didn't, then you are in trouble.

This is an underrated comment. Not only this, but there are some micromanaged environments that make this impossible and you're immediately hit in the face with a meeting first thing in the morning that destroys any energy you might have had to continue after being asked several ways if it's "done yet".

I've been 60 minutes of focused work away from wrapping up this current ticket for the past two days. Too exhausted to get going in the morning before meetings and interruptions kill my productivity for the day. Usually I start work two hours before the workday actually starts because context switching and meetings drain me, and deep work won't get done otherwise. The curse of ADHD.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#43

Post by nonethewiser »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #36
irrational wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted balance.

Well working 100 hours is still common in investment banking. But why focus on these subsets of jobs?

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#44

Post by nicbou »

It's too effective.

I end up sitting at my computer to watch a movie, and end up finishing work in the evening. I'm nerd sniping myself, and it's not healthy. Then in the morning the madness continues.

I want to make room for other things in my life. I have to Cm+Q everything in the evening.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#45

Post by JoeAltmaier »

My old colleague Mike Rowe said it this way: "Always leave it compiling" meaning, make a change and don't test it, just start the build and walk away. So when you returned you had something to dig into (didn't build, or did and needs trying).

Also, you had a good feeling that maybe what you just tried will fix the problem or whatever. So you don't go home frustrated and depressed.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#46

Post by augment001 »

gweinberg wrote: post #34
irrational wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the station before the parking filled up.

Yeah - I couldn’t enforce a late start, 9am was too early to ask people to come in.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#47

Post by karaterobot »

> Exiting after hitting a “neat” stopping point - unless the task is done, leaving the system / code too clean makes it hard to know what to work on next. While it’s really tempting to try to stick the landing on an internal milestone, it can often be more productive on net to stop just short of a neat milestone as an onramp to your next coding session.

I have heard novelists talk about similar strategies: end your writing day knowing what the next thing you need to write is, but not actually writing it. So, the next day, you can sit down and get going immediately, and use that momentum to launch you into that day's work.

I think I do the opposite. I most often reach a flow state when there's something wrong, and I'm trying resolve it. It's repairing the broken state that absorbs me. When I get to that resolution, the challenge is having enough self-awareness to stop: I look up, and afternoon turned into night, my shoulders are cramped, my neck hurts, but hey why not keep this going?

Even after resolving the problem, the overall state of the application is still "broken", i.e. incomplete, so I always have something to bring me back.

The thing for me, as a former-professional programmer, current hobbyist, is that it's easier to reach a flow state if you care about what you're working on, and get wrapped up in it. If you're working on some corner of an application you don't care about except for the paycheck, you probably have a harder time getting motivated. So, what works for me may not work for everybody.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#48

Post by augment001 »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #36
irrational wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6pm? Man, I’m so glad I didn’t work for you. That is late.

Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted balance.

You are actually forced to do it if you choose to work for a place like that.

Re: A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken

#49

Post by srcreigh »

yuuuuyu wrote: post #23
generic92034 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand it can be helpful, in my experience, to stop right in the middle of a very hard problem, where you are still searching for a good solution. Come the next morning I often know at least a possible solution, without having worked on it consciously.

The risk with this is that you keep procrastinating away before getting going again. It's the anticipated pain of frustration that prevents you from starting. Not so much if your idle time generated a solution to the problem. But if it didn't, then you are in trouble.

Yeah, you have to give it a solid effort for this to work. On day two if it's not solved yet, you have to give another solid effort before resting.

I'm not sure if in this scenario it's an option to solve the problem on the first go. Usually when I hit this scenario, I am simply unable to do it in the first place, but the next day is easy.

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