Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

blogs.hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 116 posts

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#21

Post by Markku »

lsc wrote: post #18
Markku wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I've been considering a 4 x 10 hours week.

But really, commuting is impossible to avoid if you work in consulting, where your customer changes from time to time. You can't expect to move as often. My work used to be only 10 minute walk away ...

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#22

Post by radu_floricica »

jacobr wrote: post #7

This 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…

They are different things. There is lots of research in self regulation and it boils down to (unsurprisingly): the most efficient and elegant way to self-regulate is to avoid continuous self-regulation, i.e. create habits. There is also lots of research on how to create habits :)

A good summary of current state of research is "A handbook of self-regulation", edited by Roy Baumeister, but it's definitely not an easy read. It's amazing though to find out exactly how far we've come in understanding these things - and it's also pretty exciting how recent most of it is.

There are more practical books out there, drawing from the same research. "The Procrastination Equation" by Piers Steel is the best I've found so far.

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#23

Post by latch »

lsc wrote: post #12
latch wrote: post #3

I 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)

When I say stop watching TV, I don't mean stop doing sedentary things. I specifically mean stop watching TV. You can do almost anything else and I sincerely believe that you'll be better for it. Read a book, exercise, learn to cook, program, help your kids with homework, play video games, go out with friends...anything is better than watching TV.

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#24

Post by JesseAldridge »

shii wrote: post #14
JesseAldridge wrote: post #9

Along 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?

Just posted it here: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/My-Lint/blob/master/my_lint...

It's tied to Windows at the moment, but it's only ~70 loc so porting should be easy.

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#26

Post by LiveTheDream »

radu_floricica wrote: post #19
msie wrote: post #11

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?

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).

The first thing I thought after reading this was how unfortunate it is for people on diets that they have to drink a sugary beverage in order to regain the willpower to avoid sugary beverages.

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#27

Post by latch »

Markku wrote: post #5
latch wrote: post #3

I 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…

Something's not adding up for me...even if you are working 10 hours a day, that means you are spending 5 hours commuting, exercising and eating? 1 hour commute each way, 2 hours exercise and 1 hour for eating?

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#28

Post by mva »

What really helped for me is closing email and only check email at two times a day (a bit before lunch and around 16.00) -> tips from the four hour work week. Don't check email when you get into the office, because your further work day will be influenced by it.

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#29

Post by BruceForth »

philipDS wrote: post #17

But 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?

There are still 24 hours in a day, doesn't really matter all that much in which order you do stuff when they still take the same amount of time.

Re: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

#30

Post by BruceForth »

nickpp wrote: post #16

This 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/

From the second article:

> I lost seven pounds in the first week, mostly from going to the bathroom as all the accumulated dairy mucus was cleansed from my bowels (now I know why cows need four stomachs to properly digest this stuff)

WTF? Does he think cows eat dairy? Or did I parse that wrong?

Post reply on HN