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A simple habit that saves my evenings

alikhil.dev

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Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

ambicapter wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce th…

A good night of sleep induces its own feeling of well-being, excitement, awesomeness. I swear, I have terrible sleep and when I get an 85+ sleep score I'm a different person.

I have 3 small kids. Sleep is an achievement itself. I only get to experience at most two of "good", "night" and "sleep" :).

(Back before that, in some previous night, my body would still take 8-10 hours of sleep if I let it, and the more I did, the more tired I felt throughout the entire day.)

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#102

Post by TeMPOraL »

bayindirh wrote: post #42
christophilus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what I read these days can be captured— almost entirely— by a good tl;dr. Unless I’m reading for pleasure, I’d prefer to read content that is as direct and succinct as possible.

The problem with this approach, that I discovered is, normally what we assume as a filler can have a lot of information for other parts of our brain or life in general. I have enlightened from many small details in articles, books and papers. While looks unimportant and irrelevant, these parts can knock down dominoes in one's subconscious, resulting in enlightenment or closure on another subject. Even if that doesn't…

> tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter.

Which is how I drink coffee.

Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind). Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with in adulthood). I wouldn't even touch this stuff, if not for it being the universally approved (socially and legally), ubiquitous wakefulness promoter (aka stimulant drug), and better alternatives are much harder to get (even prescribed, they're not meant to serve as coffee replacements). Caffeine powder (in tablets or otherwise) is how you get to "the spirit of the matter" while skipping all the misery and unpleasant side effects.

I suppose it really is a good analogy to most of long-form writing that isn't pure fiction or explicitly for entertainment.

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#103

Post by TeMPOraL »

auggierose wrote: post #69
pvtmert wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like you are more of a morning person, as a non-morning person, it usually takes me about 4-6 hours to get up-to-speed. because there would be some unexpected twists and turns that will distract me from the task. meanwhile, exact opposite. if i cannot "solve" an issue, if i just wait till the evening by going for a 100+km bicycle ride, i magically solve the problem in the evening (right about at dusk and after…

That doesn't sound like you are a non-morning person, but that you have a very inefficient start of the day. Good news: you might be able to add as much as 20 hours of productivity to your week!

I'm like GP too, I'm usually at my peak performance somewhere after dinner. Used to be a stereotypical night owl, but eventually life forced me to act like a morning person (small kids + partner who is a genuine, bona fide, textbook morning person slash productivity beast).

Close to a decade of that lifestyle, and my body didn't adjust. In my case, there's no insomnia - I indeed start feeling tired around 21:00 - 23:00. Just that my performance curve didn't shift accordingly; only thing that's changed is that I had to give up my most productive parts of day (afternoon, late night), because I'm too tired to do anything at that point.

I'm open to suggestions on how to fix that.

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

bayindirh wrote: post #39
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce th…

I do the same thing as the author does. Moreover, I keep these notes more frequently, to the project's notebook with my other thoughts during the day. When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined versi…

> Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.

That is interesting for me. It's something I wish was the case for me, because I've been struggling with this a lot. I started referring to it as "lack of emotional continuity" or "emotional cache flush". It's like a context switch, but on emotional layer. I basically can't seem to hold on to my emotional state for extended duration, and in particular it gets reset at the day boundary (i.e. when I sleep). This affects both positive and negative emotional states.

Practical consequence of that is that I prefer "sprints" to "marathons" when dealing with tough problems, whether intellectual or emotional - it can take up to an hour for me to "work myself up" the right way to focus on a hard task, or to talk about some difficult personal topics, so I need to make the best of it.

I really, really wish there was a way to do the emotional equivalent of the "write down plans and thoughts at the end of day, read them again in the morning" trick.

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#105

Post by thabit »

jcul wrote: post #89
ivanjermakov wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great trick. I often leave myself a TODO in a source code. But as a plain text, not as a syntactically valid comment. With this project won't compile and on the next day is obvious where I ended up.

That's actually a good idea. I actually hate leaving something not compiling in the evening, it feels like things are unfinished, but it helps getting back into it. I tend to use this more when taking a break for an hour or two. But it is effective. However leaving an intentionally broken comment sounds like a good way to get the sense of completion for the day, but have the compiler focus your attention on where you…

Expand.

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#106

Post by gaanbal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #102
bayindirh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this approach, that I discovered is, normally what we assume as a filler can have a lot of information for other parts of our brain or life in general. I have enlightened from many small details in articles, books and papers. While looks unimportant and irrelevant, these parts can knock down dominoes in one's subconscious, resulting in enlightenment or closure on another subject. Even if that doesn't…

> tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter. Which is how I drink coffee. Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind). Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with i…

coffee, even without caffeine, contains so much antioxidants, you can sort of imagine the coffee bean as carrying the antioxidant burden of the entire world on its back

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#107

Post by TeMPOraL »

gaanbal wrote: post #106
TeMPOraL wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter. Which is how I drink coffee. Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind). Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with i…

coffee, even without caffeine, contains so much antioxidants, you can sort of imagine the coffee bean as carrying the antioxidant burden of the entire world on its back

Antioxidants are good or bad? Can't remember which way it is this time of year.

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#108

Post by adfm »

pimlottc wrote: post #46
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how thoroughly people have internalized that tl;dr is supposed to be the default way to take in information now. Not only for themselves, but for others.

Introductory paragraphs and topic sentences have been an established part of writing for decades, regardless of article length.

It’s called a nut graf.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_graph

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#109

Post by bayindirh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #102
bayindirh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this approach, that I discovered is, normally what we assume as a filler can have a lot of information for other parts of our brain or life in general. I have enlightened from many small details in articles, books and papers. While looks unimportant and irrelevant, these parts can knock down dominoes in one's subconscious, resulting in enlightenment or closure on another subject. Even if that doesn't…

> tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter. Which is how I drink coffee. Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind). Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with i…

I know that everybody has a different metabolism and respect your choices, but I'll kindly disagree and will not accept the blanket statements you did.

> Which is how I drink coffee.

You're not drinking coffee. You're using caffeine as a drug. Which is fine, but the similarity is akin to drinking Soylent and claiming you cooked and ate a particular dish for the lunch.

> Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind).

Coffee is not awful, and not all coffee is bitter. Lighter roasts have a gentler taste profile (plus higher caffeine), and/or you can select less acidic beans. What I generally brew ends up pretty smooth. Either case, it doesn't irritate my bowels.

I'm not particularly critical of how coffee affects my bowel movements. It doesn't imprison me in a particular place in my home or office. Honestly, if you think spending 10 minutes for your body's needs as a waste of time, I think you have to review your lifestyle choices.

> Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with in adulthood).

I'm drinking at least ~400ml milk (for the last 30+ years) and eat good amount of cheese every day. I don't believe this. Don't come with try and see, because I tried, and it changes nothing. My body doesn't care about it.

On the other hand, coffee's stimulant effects is secondary to why I drink coffee. I like its taste, it helps me to digest after lunch, and generally it's a good combination with a cookie or a bitter chocolate in the lunch break before starting the second half of the day. BTW, I drink a bit more than a single cup of coffee every day, because I regulate my intake amount and time, yet I get the benefits. Otherwise, I had periods which I drank 2L per day. So coffee tolerance can be tuned and can be kept in check.

The "spirit of the matter" is coffee as a whole, with all the taste, personal time and whatnot. Caffeine tablets capture a single aspect without any taste or finesse.

It's same for the long form writing. I'm in it not only for the tl;dr, but the story in itself. Funnily, I generally read these while drinking my coffee, so the enjoyment is squared.

We discussed the same thing for the last couple of days with colleagues. Distilling everything doesn't concentrate the contents. You have to lose something, and that something is not only filler for most of the time.

Re: A simple habit that saves my evenings

#110

Post by bayindirh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #104
bayindirh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same thing as the author does. Moreover, I keep these notes more frequently, to the project's notebook with my other thoughts during the day. When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined versi…

> Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left. That is interesting for me. It's something I wish was the case for me, because I've been struggling with this a lot. I started referring to it as "lack of emotional continuity" or "emotional cache flush". It's like a context switch, but on emotional layer. I basically can't seem to hold on to my emotional state for ex…

Curious. That's the complete opposite of me. My sleep is akin to MacBook's Power Nap. Everything stays put except some small background processes. My version also has good and bad sides (esp. dealing with hard events in life).

I understand how your emotions/body work and how upsetting the current "configuration" is, but maybe it's the way because your body is trying to process or overcome something in the grand scale.

Did you try meditation, esp. not the canned ones from the apps, but a proper practice with a proper instructor and mentor? A good practice generally help you to understand what makes you tick, or live a more balanced inner life, which may help you reducing in this "work up" time, or change the things which you doesn't like about yourself.

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