I read somewhere that it was a myth that willpower is a limited resource and that we imagine it is limited, but it's not. Does anyone else remember where this was mentioned?
The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
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Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#12I feel pretty confident that the single biggest thing people can do to be more productive, or to have more time, is to dump their TV. Following this is the trifecta of: exercise, eating well, and sleeping enough.
Over the last year, I've spent /far/ more time on HN than I have watching TV or movies (excluding time spent watching movies while exercising)
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#13The notion of 'ritual' is a central theme in Twyla Tharp's book 'The Creative Habit', which I think most HN'ers would find a worthwhile read.
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#14Along these lines, I made a little program which yells at me whenever I have too many lines of code without a comment, or too many lines in a single file. I've found it quite helpful not having to actively think about that sort of maintenance stuff.
Do you have the source online somewhere please?
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#15I'm a massive fan of life-task automation, for the benefits of not worrying about certain things (and therefore being generally happier in life).
Classic example for myself - when I used to commute to work, I would change lanes at exactly the same point every day. There was a month of trial and error to begin with, but this route and those lanes gave me the 'most likely fastest journey'. No more thinking about traffic, worrying that the lane next to me was moving faster, should I change etc etc.
I even have an automated rule for when I need to automate a rule - only when something annoys me three times. Can't find my keys when heading out the door? Very quickly automated where they live (ie, it happened 3 times very fast). Trip over a stair once? Not even going to register as an issue until it happens two more times.
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#16This is Gold, Jerry, GOLD.
And the best advice on creating these rituals, or HABITS is Seifeld's "Don't break the chain", coupled with Pavlina's 30-day trials.
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#17But how can you do your work out immediately when you wake up and have to go to work? Wake up earlier? But you still have to sleep around 8 hours per night.. so you'd have to go to bed earlier, which gives you less time in the evening to do some hacking and other things you like. How can you pull this off? Go to work later?
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#18I feel pretty confident that the single biggest thing people can do to be more productive, or to have more time, is to dump their TV. Following this is the trifecta of: exercise, eating well, and sleeping enough.
After dumping my TV some years ago, there are still some problems with time. Working, commuting, exercising and eating seem to take about 15 hours in total. Now with 7-8 hours of sleep it leaves approximately 1 hour for hacking or time with other people. A bit too little, no? Sometimes it might be possible to combine commuting and exercising, but at the moment it's not worth it, since commuting and meditation, as wel…
>I would say working less for money is the single biggest thing people can do to be more productive, or to have more time.
moving closer to work has similar effects on your free time without cutting in to your free money.
but yeah, I agree. It's hard to have time to work on your stuff if you work 40 hours a week, especially if you need some family or social time. working part time helps a lot, if you can pull it off. Again, though, be mindful of the commute and reduce the number of days a week you work rather than reducing the number of hours a day you work.
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#19I read somewhere that it was a myth that willpower is a limited resource and that we imagine it is limited, but it's not. Does anyone else remember where this was mentioned?
It's definitely not a myth. Roy Baumeister mentioned in the article did most of the work in describing how willpower behaves, and a few years back somebody else pinned down the actual mechanism (something to do with glucose - drinking a glass of something sweet restores most of the will power back).
Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
#20This advice seems to contradict the advice given about increasing your intelligence in a recent post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2562632 Compare this: Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are…
It seems like both the ideas could be true. The apparent contradiction is clearly due to the fact that the two are optimizing different aspects. One intelligence, and second, getting things done.
The conflation of the two leads to the state where you get things done with rituals so it frees up your mind to take up challenges that keeps your brain on it's toes.