The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill • Hacker News Board

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#151

Post by swsieber » Sun, May 27, 2018, 12:31 PM UTC

0x445442 wrote: post #62

adamweld wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is generally called a Block Plan[1] and is a great system for some students. Looks like Cornell College offers it, you got my hopes up as I'm a Cornell University student and juggling five technical courses at a time has heavy context switching penalties. On the other hand, last year taking Linear Algebra and at the same time having to apply it in a signals processing class was a good combo. [1] http://www.exper…

Yeah, I used to take intersession courses back in my college days where I focused on one course for four weeks. That fit my mode of study way better than taking 4/5 technical courses at the same time. Doing a deep dive on one subject and then moving on was just way better for subject retention in my opinion.

What makes you think that it was better?

Condensed studying feels easier, but leads to lower long-term retention. Now, there are methods used to help mitigate that, but those can also be used to increase retention of spread out studying too.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#152

Post by csomar » Sun, May 27, 2018, 1:05 PM UTC

This is delusional. And to be honest I thought I need the same deep and in the zone kind of work/situation. Until I took this Course which is based on real science: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

You can get stuff done, learn very sophisticated topics on a highly distractive environment (though you'll probably need short periods of concentrations here and there).

The trick is not to force yourself to work on something, close doors and stop calling anyone. The tricks is simple boring repetition, zooming in and out of complexity of the subject, occasionally jumping through chapters.

You can do it in multiple ways. Say you are learning Crypto. You can be reading a book at home, doing an Online course at school, reading HN related crypto topics while on transportation, coding on some lang/crypto library while on Starbucks, etc... and achieve great levels of mastery.

And boring repetition/testing is the most important here. If you are interested on why this works, check the course.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#153

Post by daxfohl » Sun, May 27, 2018, 1:32 PM UTC

pacaro wrote: post #111

Be very cautious with some of these approaches in a corporate environment. Shallow work can be much easier to measure than deep work. It’s easy to be burned if you push the “monastic” approach too hard and neglect the shallow

Yeah a couple of things. They try to map their equation to productivity, but really it's just level of effort. In corp theyd prefer to see max results with min effort, so this intensity times time is not the thing you want to maximize. Alignment with the end goal is more important than intensity. And ultimately this article is about training. Corp is about execution.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#154

Post by taeric » Sun, May 27, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #148

taeric wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the result of deliberate focused work. So, why then don't we encourage more practices that encourage happy accidents? I accept that the one argument is more appealing to emotional logic. I am highly suspicious of arguments that speak to that form of plausibility.

> So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the result of deliberate focused work. Then I'm arguing that you're an outlier in that. And I'll add that for most people, even those happy accidents come when they're engaged in focused work -- not when they're having distractions all the time. Do you really get happy accidents while…

Most of my happy accidents are while I'm biking. When playing with things. When jumping quickly through all the details with a co-worker.

(Twitter and Facebook? Yeah, not so much.)

Do, could I be an outlier? Certainly possible. But I don't think it is a safe thought. More likely, I am a near average person. Which is why I would love studies actually demonstrating this.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#155

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, May 27, 2018, 2:12 PM UTC

tomtimtall wrote: post #116

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #14

One thing I cannot understand is why we have both: (a) a long history of research proving to us that principles like "High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)" are accurate and highly related to extracting the most economically valuable outputs from knowledge workers. (b) open plan offices. Maybe the tech industry is daunting for newcomers because we cram people into a sardine can, give them a…

I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the su…

I've also worked in a variety of different floor designs, and have found open-plan to be dramatically inhibiting, not just for me but also for direct reports who tell me the open plan setup prevents them from getting things done most hours of the day.

What do you propose for developers whose jobs consist primarily of deep focus tasks that require quiet, privacy, and states of flow?

(I would argue this is the majority of developers, but that is beside the point. Even if it's a minority, yet their work output is very important for a given company, it would still seem that embedding them in an open-plan layout they must sit in for the majority of the time would clearly be throwing away more money they could possibly be saved on the real estate. Or you disagree?)

You say, "Not everything is about your personal productivity" but this seems mostly irrelevant, because we're in a section of the possible solution space that focuses on never accounting for developers' personal productivity. Separately, if you're on a team where developers have to invest deep focus into disparate parts of a system or disparate solution approaches (the majority of teams I've ever seen), then it does boil down to the sum of individual productivity for most things.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#156

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, May 27, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

B-Con wrote: post #139

tomtimtall wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the su…

I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office. As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able…

> I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments

I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open-plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion, they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible.

Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc.

It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant, real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing, this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers actually work.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#157

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, May 27, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

apatters wrote: post #124

tomtimtall wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the su…

Absolutely, this discussion always devolves into good vs bad and understandably so because it's very frustrating when your work environment doesn't facilitate your performance. But the typical knowledge worker actually functions on some blend of the manager and maker schedules -- sometimes they need to do deep work without interruptions, sometimes they need to look up from their desk and communicate to make sure thei…

The trouble is that the distribution of work is not an even split between work that requires deep focus and other work that benefits from disruptive audio communication.

Most engineering work requires deep focus. So if the office was designed to allow the majority of work to be private, quiet, and deeply focused, but with occasional meetings or break-out social rooms for the dynamic discussions, that would be great.

Instead, it is designed in the wrong-headed, opposite way: all work is embedded into the dynamic, real-time audio distraction stream. You end up needing to compete for conference room reservations, or hide form people, or listen to music when you don't want to, or abuse a work-from-home privilege, just to get work done, because every day you need privacy and quiet for most of the day, and the default setting of the environment disallows it.

I would agree with your comment if the work divide was more 50/50 between work that needs dynamic communication and work that needs privacy.

But that's just not how reality actually functions.

(A separate part of this which irks me is the assumption that employees can (or want to) 'just work from home' to solve it. It externalizes the costs of privacy onto workers with all kinds of trade-offs not in the employees favor. And a lot of companies actually micromanage this option and are bitterly strict about limiting work from home time.)

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#158

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, May 27, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #137

tomtimtall wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the su…

There is middle ground where the team is together, but only the team and it means 4-10 collaborating people. You are not alone and you are not in one room with other teams (especially often calling teams) and not with over 40 people - which generates too much It should be not one extreme against another.

In my experience, even when managing a team of engineers, it doesn't matter if the people in your nearby open environment are working on the same team or a different team. It's much more about the basic environmental factors (e.g. not having people walking around nearby, having adequate privacy, being able to customize your own lighting, have a personal window to glance out, etc.)

Even when there are only 5-10 people nearby and they are all working on my same team, the open-plan environment is completely untenable and really damages productivity. I would say above all, you need privacy to get into states of flow, and after that, you need to know that you personally control your own schedule, and are in charge of planning when interruptions will possibly affect you.

Whether someone can interrupt you with a relevant question about your team's work, or someone can interrupt you with annoying chatter about weekend golf plans, they both equally prevent flow and productivity.

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#159

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, May 27, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #138

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t buy the argument that bean counters are unable to account for vaguer aspects of productivity loss. For one, bigger corporations invest huge amounts of money into productivity research and take the topic very seriously. They aren’t unsophisticated or naive and corporations will really study the internal incentives they create for cost cutting, to make sure they aren’t mistakenly cutting costs that actually lea…

Maybe all that research you write about does not translate down to workers. Because the corporation around here don't seem to implement any of it and decisions don't seem to be much influenced by productivity considerations. They are not result of complete stupidity either, but they seem to be result of price, how "representative" space is and similar down to earth considerations.

The research is only focused on the end result for workers. It does translate. Corporate managers just have different (often irrational) incentive schemes related to cosmetics, cargo-cult copying, value signalling, etc. And in some cases outright don't care about worker productivity (e.g. if they get paid just because a credentialed worker is associated with their firm, and not based on that worker's output.)

Re: The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill

#160

Post by sampl » Sun, May 27, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

Complexicate wrote: post #115

sampl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building this right now actually. Superclass [1] is a place to submit online learning resources by topic, then upvote/comment on the most helpful ones. The goal is eventually something just like you described, kind of a crowd-sourced curriculum builder. This version is rough and buggy, but would love everyone's thoughts/feedback (sam@directedworks.com) https://superclass.co/ Edit: sign up for occasional email upd…

typo on front page: Superclass makes it easier by "gathing" It's a good idea. I'd like to see this succeed.

Whoops—thanks, I’ll fix it!