"Some people say a cluttered desk is the sign of a brilliant mind. Hogwash. A cluttered desk is the sign of a lazy mind." —Tim Bryce
Hogwash. False dualism is a sign of a lazy mind.
“Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
101–110 of 188 posts
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#102But I will loose it all, that's why you should bookmark everything, have terminal bookmarks of paths, use git worktrees to allow leaving workspace messy. Use a lot of notion docs, .md docs, notebooks. Places where you organize stuff, so that you can come back easily when you need it again.
I saved thousands of bookmarks and realized that I hadn't opened a single one in ten years. It would be better to have open windows.
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
My recently achieved overriding goal took 32 years to accomplish! i worked on it as a side project all that time and it took me places i never expected. Very happy. I recommend being less ambitious! Or be smarter than me! Now my major goal is to complete the first tools in that area. it’s still challenging but I think the first version will have only taken 12 months. There is just a lot of newly settled stuff that I…
Can you please write more about it? What was the goal? Also I love the Angela Merkel method - thinking what you can do in a day or a week is fruitless as the productivity might vary. Thinking in years is too long. Think about what you can achieve in 100 days.
“Don’t weigh yourself every day, do weigh yourself every week.”
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#104What works for me is that often on a Monday I restart my machine. If something is truly important, I save it before the restart. There is something good to start from an empty state.
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#105Yet another text blog that doesn’t work without Javascript.
What kind of sick mind does it take to ensure a straight blog post requires Javascript?
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#106Not to mention that "losing things" is basically impossible in digital tasks: browser history, version control, file system, etc. Losing things is not a tech problem, it's organization problem. And starting with nothing is a great organization habit.
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#107Clearing my tabs and IDE is also the best way to lose context and miss all kinds of things I've had queued up.
Then perhaps list of tabs or recently open files is not the best way to stay organized.
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#108rm -rf ~
What I meant was that this article got me thinking I should just delete my entire hard drive on a regular basis so I can have a clean working surface.
Because I know that my downloads folder and my documents folder and my images folder and my source code folder are all enormous piles of crap.
And it does actually bother me, I just haven't thought of a solution to that.
One solution would be.. automated backups... and then every once in a while, just rm -rf ~
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#109One thing I've started doing at my newest job is to keep things separate; I have separate browser profiles for personal, my employer and my current contract, separate password database files, and I try to keep them on separate MacOS spaces as well, although that gets a bit messy sometimes if I'm being honest.
What I should do is also keep them mentally separate - don't go to HN while at work, disable personal notifications while at work, etc. But at the same time, I often have 'downtime' at work (waiting for an agent, test run, CI, feedback, etc), and especially since the panny-D, private and work have more and more started to mix. I'm aiming to be at the office more often but it's very easy to not go there since there's rarely any compelling reasons to do so. For me, anyway.
Re: “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
#110A thing which happens to me very often: I realize I'm experiencing a very real visceral discomfort nagging at me in the back of my mind.
It happens because I will have ctrl+c'd something several minutes ago. My mind subconsciously "holds" onto the info that I have text copied in my clipboard. It's only when I ctrl+v it and consciously discard it does the nagging go away.
I have no idea why it happens or if others experience this too. But I fully agree with the author about starting from nothing and getting rid of the clutter you think isn't bother you but which you're probably subconsciously holding onto.