The Productivity Cycle

Yeah, it lasted about 2 months. Now I can only do it a couple of times a week unless absolutely necessary. Instead of coffee I used milk/high protein foods to keep the brain going. At one point it got so bad I couldn't recognize myself and I think I lost a good friend in the process. Another hacker friend who tried this approach said it only worked for him if the naps were perfectly timed - you shift by one hour and you turn into a monster. (he promptly lifted his hands waving frantically and screeched to demonstrate) If you make one of the naps last more than 4 hours, I think you can get some REM sleep and last longer.

If you're taking the time to dig through my posts and/or remember them then I assume you stick around as a more active member of this community and create a fake account to vent. So I'll reply for you and for others who may think like you.

I LOVE building things and creating things that add value. That's it! The world can be a very very lonely place for someone like me and many others here. I try to find the handful of people who do that in my real-world community, because only a handful of my 1500+ peers do what we do here. Three of us are so desperate, we are actually teaching hacking culture and development skills to 190 non-tech classmates, just so we can have a common language with them.

That is why I come to HN. To find other doers and share work and get feedback and grow and help others who are facing the same issues. (I am away from the Silicon Valley for 5 more months, but it feels like an eternity of living on another planet) I'd much rather talk about projects than gossip or news and I miss this type of community in real life so much that I've built a full-blown site that allows people like me to team up, and do things for each-other, and discuss projects tackling cool stuff, regardless of who we know or where we are located. It's working and I keep building it without 1 cent of compensation from anyone, because it has to exist. I am also building a people search tool, mobile apps, wearable apps, and a drone, and mentoring a bunch of other entrepreneurs in the making (who found me because they saw my projects). I vote with my time and I am what I do. Thousands of others are here doing the same.

If we see a problem we tackle it. The AMA was done to help. As you can see I haven't posted any of my projects for scrutiny on HN yet because I'm busting my ass to make them good enough to be worth your time.

I'd rather do constructive stuff, than spend it in a flame war, so please do all of the things you accuse me of doing - post your web site, relate this stuff to you, show how hard you work, show what got you fired up to do what you are doing, and what you've learned, and let's talk about that instead.

While the Hawthorne Effect is widely cited, even after many years the results have not been reliably reproduced so it should be invoked cautiously.

Caffeine also potentiates the effects of OTC painkillers

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2012456

When I read one of these Lifehackery blogs with a section that is entitled 'The Nap Month' it makes me feel that the author was procrastinating and trying to justify behaviour they felt guilty about.

I have zero caffeine in my diet, try to sleep between 7 and 10 hours a night - the latter is preferred when I am learning new concepts as it gives my brain a chance to rewire. Walking will stop my sedentary work from leading to constipation more than high-fibre alone.

Really, the secret to productivity is understanding the nature of the problem you are working on. All too often you can think it is all about solving X when in fact it is more about Z. No one really sets aside sufficient time to take stock and review the trajectory of their work so that they smooth the path that lies ahead with proper insight into what constitutes the essential aspects of the solution. As a designer it is vital for me to list every feature I aspire to include and then rank them mercilessly in order of most essential constraining and ultimately eliminating subsequent dilemmas of choice further down the list towards those aspects that would be nice to have but are not essential should you run out of time.

Even if you don't know enough about a highly ranked feature in this list its position in the list should not be influenced by your ignorance of it. It merely represents an area of on the job training that you need to budget for (or realise that you have no time to learn about, in which case you should probably ditch the whole endeavour and pick a project more suited to your skill set, don't pretend that you can reshape your design without it as it will just remind you of its compromised state each time you test it and make you unhappy with your craft).