Ten minutes a day • Hacker News Board

Re: Ten minutes a day

#31

Post by cheerlessbog » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

Adamantcheese wrote: post #11

Writing for 10 minutes a day is great and all, but if you're not the type of person that can easily switch tasks and be immediately ready to perform then it's not going to work out for you. Similarly, if you get stuck on a task and just want to keep going until you're done, you're going to have a hard time stopping. When I was doing NaNoWriMo I generally tried to go for the estimate of ~1337 words a day, but some day…

Conversely Hemingway recommended to stop when the writing was going well:

> The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#32

Post by drieddust » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

abainbridge wrote: post #12

So if I time-slice the 8 productive hours of my day into 10 minute slots, can I write 48 books in 499 days? Of course not. I've tried working on pet projects for 10 minutes before going to work each day. The problem I find is that while I might only do active work on the task for ten minutes, my brain is thinking about it for much longer. Spending those ten minutes in the morning reduces my ability to do my day job b…

In the book Psycho-cybernetics, auther talks about delegating the details to subconscious mind before sleep and downloading the processed material tomorrow morning. I read the book and dismissed the idea but maybe it some value. I shall try it again.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#33

Post by roryisok » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

> When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them

I do find myself shower-coding most days, but I never talk to people about it. There's never anyone else in the shower.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#34

Post by m3kw9 » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

abainbridge wrote: post #12

So if I time-slice the 8 productive hours of my day into 10 minute slots, can I write 48 books in 499 days? Of course not. I've tried working on pet projects for 10 minutes before going to work each day. The problem I find is that while I might only do active work on the task for ten minutes, my brain is thinking about it for much longer. Spending those ten minutes in the morning reduces my ability to do my day job b…

No, if you read what he wrote, he said during the time he isn’t writing he would be constantly working and think about it in his mind. So practically, he works on it like a few hours a day. The writing just takes ten minutes, the design takes the rest.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#35

Post by beatgammit » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #33

> When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them I do find myself shower-coding most days, but I never talk to people about it. There's never anyone else in the shower.

Get a rubber ducky. It's not a person, but then again, I meet very few people who know enough about what I'm working on that they're helpful in giving advice, so they might as well be a rubber ducky.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#36

Post by beatgammit » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

I like the pomodoro technique [1], which breaks tasks up into 25 minute work chunks with 5 minutes break between parts. I find I'm able to get more work done because I'm focused on one task.

10 minutes seems like not enough time to really get meaningful work done since it often takes me a few minutes to get back into whatever it is.

I think 10 minutes just isn't quite enough time, so I think I'll just include it as a pomodoro internal. I like the idea of forcing myself to do something everyday, so perhaps I'll schedule two small tasks for the internal, and if I'm making really good progress on one, I'll reschedule the other task.

But I definitely like the main idea here, since I often let things languish because I'm worried about them taking too long.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

Re: Ten minutes a day

#37

Post by jungletime » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

Just curious, if I wanted to setup several working environments and make it as quick as possible to switch between them (programming vs video editing vs photo editing). How would I go about doing that on a Mac to be as quick as possible. Several different programs would need to be open and closed automatically.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#38

Post by corny » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

jungletime wrote: post #37

Just curious, if I wanted to setup several working environments and make it as quick as possible to switch between them (programming vs video editing vs photo editing). How would I go about doing that on a Mac to be as quick as possible. Several different programs would need to be open and closed automatically.

I have a several ".command" files organized in a stack in my dock. Each one of them is a bash script that opens all the files I need for a project. When I'm done, I manually close everything.

Re: Ten minutes a day

#39

Post by klyrs » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

Some of this reminds me of how I wrote my thesis. I lived in a duplex, and my neighbors moved out. I'd been sharing their internet, so that went away with them. My spouse was supportive of my decision to not get our own internet connection until my thesis was out the door.

I uninstalled all of the games from my computer, except one. I embarked on a weird quest in the online game I was playing; which was accomplished by running a daily script on a cron job and effectively shut me out of the game. The game I left on my computer was XCOM: Terror from the Deep -- which I was playing on the hardest mode.

That XCOM game is frikkin impossible. So I hacked the save games, extracting them into spreadsheets. My spouse would ask, "Are you playing the spreadsheet game again?" So that wasn't very engaging for long. I'd get bored and go back to work on my thesis.

All that was a success, in the end. When the content was finished, I spent about a week on minor tweaks. I got sick of that, and turned my thesis in two weeks before the deadline. And to be honest... once we got internet hooked up, all my bad habits came flooding back. sigh

Re: Ten minutes a day

#40

Post by p1esk » Sun, Jan 27, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

cheerlessbog wrote: post #31

Adamantcheese wrote: post #11

Writing for 10 minutes a day is great and all, but if you're not the type of person that can easily switch tasks and be immediately ready to perform then it's not going to work out for you. Similarly, if you get stuck on a task and just want to keep going until you're done, you're going to have a hard time stopping. When I was doing NaNoWriMo I generally tried to go for the estimate of ~1337 words a day, but some day…

Conversely Hemingway recommended to stop when the writing was going well: > The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

This is a great advice!