Ten minutes a day
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Ten minutes a day
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Re: Ten minutes a day
#2I find it relatively easy to stick to doing productive things every single day if I do them the first thing in the morning, before I have breakfast. Later in the day things always get in a way and it is much harder to concentrate on non urgent things.
Re: Ten minutes a day
#3> Writing every day kept ideas top of mind. When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them. My ideas were always nearby, making it easy to jump back in.
This sounds like the main takeaway. Even though the direct time spent on an activity may seem small, the total effective time spent on that activity shoots up if it is performed daily (v/s weekly or longer).
Re: Ten minutes a day
#4I have a 10min attention span for intense activities like reading. I use this to my advantage to do I might otherwise not do.
* Reading: I take my Kindle to the toilet.
* Solve quiz on Brilliant.org during office commute
* Listen to audiobooks before sleep
* When waiting for the next meeting, I read bookmarked articles.
--- My Lessons: ---
* It is very important to stop doing something once I realize I have no more juice.
* My total learning time per day is around 1hr on best days.
* Takes 1hr to reach office. So during cab rides, after a quiz is done (10-15min), I nap.
* When zoned out in and realize I'm doing random wild-wild-internet-reading, I immediately turn tech off. I just talk to people (work or casual chat).
* During times of silence, I observe things around me. I learn new things about stuff that has been around me for a long time. I put these observations to use when I draw (I use Procreate app on iPad). For example: I observed reflections in water and attempted to draw a reflection https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/
Re: Ten minutes a day
#5> Writing every day kept ideas top of mind. When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them. My ideas were always nearby, making it easy to jump back in. This sounds like the main takeaway. Even though the direct time spent on an activity may seem small, the total effective time spent on that activity shoots up if it is performed daily (v/s weekly or longe…
I also liked this: "... today might not be a good day, so let’s use it for something I have to do anyway."
The idea transfers well to coding. Maybe you're not feeling inspired today, but there's probably something mechanical that needs to happen to your project -- resolve a TODO, update the docs, triage a bug report. So do it, and even if that doesn't snap you back into the groove, at least you got that one thing done.
Re: Ten minutes a day
#6The post concisely explains the power of taking small steps in terms of productive work and projects. One thing I do is the pomodoro technique every day. I track and graph the amount of pomodoros I do, so ostensibly I could go back later and measure how many pomodoros it took me to complete some specific project.
The author has sewn together the concepts of non-zero days, the Seinfeld method plus a tweak to the pomodoro technique and then measured his progress. This could work for anyone, it's a good combination, simple to implement and with a little patience almost certainly leads to powerful results over time.
Re: Ten minutes a day
#7> Writing every day kept ideas top of mind. When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them. My ideas were always nearby, making it easy to jump back in. This sounds like the main takeaway. Even though the direct time spent on an activity may seem small, the total effective time spent on that activity shoots up if it is performed daily (v/s weekly or longe…
I also liked this: "... today might not be a good day, so let’s use it for something I have to do anyway." The idea transfers well to coding. Maybe you're not feeling inspired today, but there's probably something mechanical that needs to happen to your project -- resolve a TODO, update the docs, triage a bug report. So do it, and even if that doesn't snap you back into the groove, at least you got that one thing don…
I've been using a technique similar to what I described in the original post to teach myself Haskell, and your comment 100% resonates with me. In the case of learning a new language, just getting a piece of code to run and testing it out has been a great way for me to get into the groove. I suspect that writing unit tests might be another good entry point.
Re: Ten minutes a day
#8I think my problem with the 10 minutes day is that maybe my ideas wont come until minute 9 and now I'll need to put them down, which will take me another 15 min. This probably works for things that don't require imagination, like exercise or labor work.
Re: Ten minutes a day
#9I think my problem with the 10 minutes day is that maybe my ideas wont come until minute 9 and now I'll need to put them down, which will take me another 15 min. This probably works for things that don't require imagination, like exercise or labor work.
Surely, 10 min is a lower bound. If it takes more time, I guess, it's even better.
Re: Ten minutes a day
#10As a hobbyist coder, I've tended to have a lot of success doing the same with coding. I try to have a contribution on GitHub every day. Doesn't have to be a big new feature, maybe I fixed something, maybe I edited some comments somewhere. But I'm touching my various projects frequently, which by that nature, tends to keep me on a track of progress.
When I fall off of the routine, sometimes I have a gap in working on my code for months.