Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral” • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral”

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sun, Nov 04, 2012, 1:35 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #14

A variant (I think) of this idea that I've been using for years: when I stop coding, I jot down what I was doing, whatever problems I was dealing with, and what I felt my next steps were going to be in a little Emacs buffer. It would probably be even smarter of me to take 20 seconds to figure out exactly the right set of Emacs tabs/frames to keep open alongside them, so when it was time to start up again, I'd get suc…

I use old-fashioned paper and pen. Keep a todo list on a page; each day-end I add/subtract and when it gets full, copy it to a new page. This makes me revisit each item, which may create associations to newer tasks that are related.

When I start from neutral, whether at start-of-day or after finishing a task, I check off what's done, then review the list to find a ripe task to launch into.

Re: Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral”

#52

Post by skrebbel » Sun, Nov 04, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #14

A variant (I think) of this idea that I've been using for years: when I stop coding, I jot down what I was doing, whatever problems I was dealing with, and what I felt my next steps were going to be in a little Emacs buffer. It would probably be even smarter of me to take 20 seconds to figure out exactly the right set of Emacs tabs/frames to keep open alongside them, so when it was time to start up again, I'd get suc…

This is related to what Kent Beck calls the "Red Test Pattern". When doing Test-Driven Development, don't stop when the last test is green and refactored; commit/push your code, and then write that next test, the one for the next functionality you want to realise. Check that it fails. Then shut down.

Next day, you'll be sucked right back in because of that damn test failing.

For me, it's also a good way to keep habitually doing TDD.

Re: Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral”

#53

Post by Gorgias » Sun, Nov 04, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #45

Gorgias wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found your article interesting. A quantitative approach to health worked very well for me. I used loseit.com to track calories, macro-nutrients, and exercise. By sticking to calorie limits, eating less than 20 net grams of carbs a day, and running three times a week with Couch to 5K I have lost 90 pounds over the last 11 months. My BMI went from 38 to 24.8. I have tried to lose weight many times before, but a quant…

Holy shit. That is very impressive. What calorie limits did you pick? Regarding eternal counting, two things that may help: Yoga and meditation have both made me much more aware of the experience of my body. Before I would eat long past the level that I now recognize as "full". Often because I just didn't notice. (Reading while eating made that especially easy.) Now I find it much more easy to keep stable. The other…

The website calculated a calorie limit based on my weight. I subtracted 500 calories from what it chose to account for my habit of underestimating the calories in what I eat.

I am planning to try yoga. The trick from Carol Lay sounds like a good one. Thanks for the ideas!

Re: Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral”

#54

Post by sarah2079 » Sun, Nov 04, 2012, 4:14 PM UTC

Evbn wrote: post #38

sarah2079 wrote: post #2

I think a lot of this applies to me, I have a bad habit of leaving windows open for things I am not actively working on even though I know this can really bog me down mentally. However, while I think there is a lot of value in clearing your workspace to remove friction, someone also gave me some really good advice to help with getting started in the morning that is a little bit contradictory. The advice is to leave s…

Just do a code review in the morning to warm up, instead of hurriedly finishing yesterday's work and then tossing it aside to start something new.

The idea is to leave something fun but approachable ready to go to make it easy to get into work mode. I don't enjoy code review very much, so for me trying to do this first would be a recipe for procrastination.