I dont. If I applied what I did at work all day to what I do at home, both would become very monotonous. Sometimes I like to do things slowly just to take enjoyment in the act of doing, or I like to keep a routine so I can do chores on autopilot and not have to really think about it
Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
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Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#12I store physical items in my home in an LRU cache. Items I use all the the time are close to the places where I use them. Less frequently used items are stored further from the place they are used, for example in a closet or the garage.
This clashes badly with my roommate, also a programmer, who strongly prefers to store items by category. He will put all the kitchen gadgets on a shelf by the kitchen even if those gadgets go months without being used.
The advantage of his method is that you always know where something is, because it’s in the right place. The advantage of my method is that most of the time I get things done faster, though sometimes I end up spending some time looking for a thing I use only infrequently.
It turns out he also has much more stuff than I do. Since caches are more efficient with a smaller working set, it makes sense that we would each prefer our own strategy. Who knows which direction the causation goes.
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#13Hard to measure but I believe I think more about how things might fail than other family members.
It sort of makes sense in an engineering/programming context, but life in general doesn't really lend itself to that level of control.
Did you ever try thinking about how they might turn out for the best instead to compare results? Energy follows thought, the more you focus on it the more likely it is to happen from my experience. And the only place and time you're ever going to stop failure from happening is here and now using up to date local knowledge.
Take it or leave it...
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#14Hard to measure but I believe I think more about how things might fail than other family members.
I've seen similar - Them: "You're too pessimistic" vs. Me: "You haven't thought this all the way through".
There's a balance to be struck though, because often worrying too much about things that don't happen or saying "I told you so" when they do only really serves to annoy people.
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#15I store physical items in my home in an LRU cache. Items I use all the the time are close to the places where I use them. Less frequently used items are stored further from the place they are used, for example in a closet or the garage. This clashes badly with my roommate, also a programmer, who strongly prefers to store items by category. He will put all the kitchen gadgets on a shelf by the kitchen even if those ga…
What an excellent answer!
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#16Don't have much to say about how to do things, but I'd say try to reduce the number of things to do, so the little you still have to do won't be a big deal. For example, I only communicate with companies/suppliers via email/phone (and change suppliers if they can't accommodate that). This means any physical mail that arrives must be spam, and goes in the trash without even being opened - anything I care about would i…
Disposable forks and plates seems wasteful
Plates are paper so the environmental impact should be relatively low. I agree that the plastic forks are still a problem but haven't really found a solution. I do wonder though, would never having to wash dishes offset the impact of disposable cutlery?
Edit: never mind, see below. Apparently paper still has a ton of impact as far as manufacturing it goes (it's not just renewable trees, there are chemicals involved).
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#17Don't have much to say about how to do things, but I'd say try to reduce the number of things to do, so the little you still have to do won't be a big deal. For example, I only communicate with companies/suppliers via email/phone (and change suppliers if they can't accommodate that). This means any physical mail that arrives must be spam, and goes in the trash without even being opened - anything I care about would i…
Disposable forks and plates seems wasteful
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Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#18Whenever I'm trying to look for something in a (mostly) sorted list, I always do a binary search. I can't recall the exact circumstances this has come up in real life but it has.
Dictionaries and other sorted books is what comes to mind for me. Always open from the middle and pick the next stack of paper to split from either the left hand or right hand until we get to the page we want.
In school, we'd need to open a specific chapter of our textbooks, and I'd search by the same method.
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#19I have very similar instincts, and it weirds me out sometimes. I have an in-depth understanding of the efficiency difference of the direction I mow my lawn (NW/SE is the best for the shape of the yard, but you can't do that every time. N/S is second most efficient. E/W is third and I can't stand it), and am constantly wondering if there is a better way to snowblow my driveway.
Past that, I feel myself optimizing paths through the office and hand movements for juggling things and the door, stuff like that. And then when I see people use less than optimal routes and techniques I wonder why that's the case.
Re: Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?
#20A literal one that I probably picked up from another comment section here: Treat your closet as an LRU cache—always put clothes away on one side, and start looking for items from the same side. As an added benefit when you run out of capacity, anything that has ended up on the far side is a likely candidate to be evicted to a higher latency storage layer (bins in the attic), or simply deleted and recomputed if ever n…
You also have to add a recompute expense to that calculation. The $500 3-piece suit that you only wear to special work events, weddings, etc. shouldn't get deleted just because you haven't used it in a year.