81–90 of 224 posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
You have to timebox everything, making sure you spend enough time, "undistracted" on the important stuff, seriously limiting social media and tech news (hn, tweeter, reddit etc... time it, it's a real time sink), and ignore most of the new stuff until you have achieved your goals.
This is the story of my life, man. You can take a look at a piece Peter Drucker (the "Father of Management") wrote, for the Harvard Business Review, titled "Managing Oneself". Here's an excerpt:
""" We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a person - and especially a knowledge worker- should not take on work, jobs, and assignments. One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people - especially most teachers and most organizations - concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer. """
You can also take a look at David Allen's "Getting Things Done".
I found that the problems you are talking about, for me, have stemmed from poor time management. I didn't know where time went, and I would do/study something, neglecting another thing and then recalling that it's been ages I haven't looked at the darn thing and completely forgot it. So...
So it's not visiting something for a while that screws things up. I needed to make sure that I visit everything at least once a week and make it constant. Not ignore it for a year and then try to get back to it.
Naturally, you can't do everything daily..
I studied Electronics Engineering and I graduated few months ago. I organize my time (think "Country/State budget", finite) into 4 axes(think "Departments"). I assume it's a 16 hour waking time. Each "Department" gets a specific "budget/time"
Axes/Departments: Engineering (9 hours), Business (3hours), Lifestyle (2hours), Culture(2h).
These are the core of who I am/want to be.
- Engineering:
* Reservoir Engineering/Characterisation (General + specific: NMR, sonic, induction logging, etc).
* Electronics Engineering.
* Physics (Landau & Lifschitz, Feynman Lectures, Atomic/Nuclear).
* Mathematics (Old college courses : Piskounov, Demidovich. New ones: Kolmogorov).
* Brush up my rational mechanics (well, basically stuff we did in college in the engineering course).
* Signal Processing (Oppenheim, etc).
* Programming: (Python, currently building an application). C (for microcontrollers and much more). Erlang (because I want to). In addition to the stuff I'm using. * - Lifestyle: Fitness, time with family and friends: Because I found out I was neglecting my loved ones in my quest.
- Culture/Self improvement:
* Short term goal: Fluent in the 6 official U.N languages (3 down, 1 on in progress). Then German.
* Learning how to draw and paint, learn to read music and play guitar.
* Literature (raised with French literature classics, touched a bit of Russian, keeping that going).
* Raised in the military, so I'm interested in weaponery and intelligence.
- Business:
* Economics 101. * Management. * Business.
I divide each day in 16 slots, I have a spreadsheet with colored blocks(each "axis/department" has a color) and make sure I touch everyone of those aspects multiple times a week.
So I may skip today's session of something, but I make it up the next day.
Many of these may not "bring" something or advance my "career", but the scope of all of this is a lifetime. For me, it'd be a shame to die being completely clueless in Physics or saying something "I forgot how we went from Green and Stokes to Ostrogradsky".. I want to be able to say on my death bed that I died an Engineer.
I'm 27 now, completely ignorant, without talent, but a stubborn motherfucker. It also help I'm addicted to reading and find it satisfying on its own.
On one hand, it's like you've got a garage/workshop full of tools: a drill press, a miter saw, a radial arm saw, a planer, a router table, a chisel set, a hand drill, a torque wrench, a rotary hammer, a giant auger, etc. If you try to master Every Single Tool, you're crazy. Nobody builds houses that way. You just pick the tools you need. In this case, I don't think you know what you need. Are you posting a fence, or building a cigar box? If you knew what you needed to build, you'd know what tools to use.
Similarly, back in college, I had a friend who more or less insisted on reading the entire math chapter before tackling the chapter's exercises. I found this kind of baffling: why waste your time reading pages and pages.. rather than waste a perfectly good hour, you can start working on the problem, then figure out exactly what you're missing, filling in along the way. And that's all you're ever going to be doing, filling in skill sets little by little. Choose your battles; John Carmack ain't no React.js expert.
Hi, Michael) "information paralysis" Is that a problem? So, may be it is not? May be it's an opportunity) Let's solve it) Imagine very-very big mindMap (like that, but much bigger http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QCtHZYRX_0w/UcbhaceT4MI/AAAAAAAAAW... ). Imagine, each word in there is a single knowledge. All this knowledges are ether unbounded from each other or bounded in small groups and all placed chaotically. This is how…
Been there, done that (over and over again). You don't have time for everything. Therefore, you must choose what to do, but also you must choose what not to do. That is the hard part - choosing what to let go. Once you did that, the rest is (comparatively) easy. Ideally, devote yourself to one subject and immerse yourself in it. Stay focused, refuse to do anything else. You'll have distractions, you'll doubt your cho…
Make it visual too. I like the Kanban board for this. The "In progress" field should have a maximum of 2 or 3 items. I am using this one for free! https://kanbanflow.com/ you can queue up lots of tasks to be done in the future. when you go to start a new task, you can compare it against everything else in the list to ensure its truly the top priority. Does that make sense? if not, watch this 5 minute youtube video: h…
KanbanFlow kind of looks like Trello from the '90s, but it looks like it might have a built-in pomodoro timer and some other neat features.
If you time block your available time as he does, you're forced to make choices--there is only so much time available, obviously--and the discipline starts to emerge by that simple process.
Start here, but spend an afternoon going through his articles when you have a free chunk of time. If it resonates with you, and you adopt some of these strategies your focus and productivity will both improve.
http://calnewport.com/blog/2013/12/21/deep-habits-the-import...
Try making yourself more project-oriented. Decide that you will do a project, commit to finishing it, and learn what is necessary to complete the project. Get into the mindset that watching lectures and reading technical books is something you do for fun and entertainment, much like watching TV. Projects and research are the only things that should give you a sense of accomplishment.
1. I've found it very beneficial to "Lock down" goals and objectives for the entire year.
Spend 2 days thinking of what you want, with a 4 day review period and match them with a list of habits. Then put them somewhere you'll see every day.
For instance, I put them on the right hand side of my main Trello Board. Every day, I see there's seven of them and that perhaps playing with this shiny object won't "move me" towards their realization.
2. The purgatory list
To deal with the shiny object problem, I've come up with a system for reviewing my urges of curiosity. A "purgatory" Trello board for instance, which I review at the end of the week. "Should I do it?" "Will it move me forward?" The answer is typically obvious. During the week I'm focused on the things at hand, and when I'm done with my week I choose what to do next. Separating the thinking from the doing is always beneficial.
3. Systems.
Read "The War of Art"[1], or "Daily Rituals"[2], or listen to any kind of podcast by productive people. They all say the same thing, losers have inspiration, productive people have systems. Taylor Pearson has the "Weekly Entrepreneur Review".[3] I've implemented it. Tweaked it. It's great.
4. Information diet.
It's good to limit your consumption of information to X amount per day or to specific periods of the day. If you're like me, you love to learn and you want to do it all the time. At some point though, you'll know much more than you can show. Remember "Show don't tell", how much do you know that you would not be able to show other people? Probably a lot! Nobody cares that you "learned X or Y". They want you to show that you know those things. Projects, experience, etc.
In that case, stick to your goal and do.
[1]: http://www.amazon.ca/The-War-Art-Through-Creative/dp/1936891... [2]: http://masoncurrey.com [3]: http://taylorpearson.me/weeklyreview/
gain solitude & figure out your current desire
As far as that algorithms lecture, it's a case study in learning with a purpose. As an adult, learning something which can then be applied or wrestled with immediately is how you pull value from that lecture. What did you do to reinforce your consumption of the lecture within 72 hours of the lecture? What did you do over the next 12 months?
My general advice would be: 1. Identify something you would want to work on even if it wasn't from an engineering standpoint (something that offers the side effect of desire/motivation/focus)
2. Discover your strengths and weaknesses in getting things done by wrestling with understanding the problem and practicing solutions
3. Learn with a purpose in order to build your skills and experience in analysis, design, and implementation of a solution
4. Reflect on what worked or didn't work in steps 1-2-3 for you since everybody is different.
You may learn differently. You may discover new things about yourself that change how you approach analysis, implementation, etc. You'll have to practice things others mention like timeboxing, task lists, etc.