Tell HN: Stop surfing and start making things people want
I've hit a slump and can't get to work. I have a to do list and I'm going to cross out five items before the end of today.
What progress are you making?
What progress are you making?
These are the moments I work hard for.
Today's item: Get buffering working on complex lookups.
I also nailed a freelance proposal, got it accepted, and did half a day of well-compensated work that should make the client happy.
Progress on Appointment Reminder, on the other hand, was not so great this week, aside from paper prototyping and a few more pages added to the development notebook.
[Edit: Pace Paras, none of this was actually done on Sunday. I quit working weekends when I went full time, aside from de minimis customer support.]
Seriously though: BCC is largely in maintenance mode, and the types of things I need to do are not very intensive in wall-clock time. Appointment Reminder is not and won't be for a while, but that jives very well with BCC, since while I'm waiting for AdWords results to get back I can go code.
Client work I slot in when I have slack time or when I'm unable to make creative progress on my own projects. Thomas had a great line about this: on those days when you just keep banging your head against the wall, "it is great to know that you can just got 'be billable'."
It takes so much money, time, and knowledge to focus on a venture and on any given day the distractions and discouragement are intense, preventing the focus and the space I need to gain that focus. Also great ideas only come out when I am focused. I have taken on a government job, that is interesting, but I fear it will take me further away from being my own boss. It seems that the only way to separate yourself from the herd is to make an original and "hard to emulate" product that won't be easily re-created or copied by the "big boys". I'm working to save up money, then I'll drop off the radar and go for my dreams. Wish me luck!
I have been surfing the past few years instead of getting to work myself. Thanks for making me feel even worse! :P
Allow yourself to be less productive sometimes. That downtime gives you a chance to reflect.
If I can't snap into it after forcing myself to work for an hour, it's just not meant to be. And if I pretend to be productive for a day and don't get anything done, I usually feel like crap.
I've never been much of a cleaner, so maybe that makes it worse.
I do find it cathartic for some reason. Hopefully cathartic enough.
I have to add a comment/suggestion. Have you thought of allowing tweets to register as events on the timeline? This is a problem that plagues TV NEWS anchors. Every time they blowup twitter.com to show viewer responses or reactions to a certain event, there's no way for them to manage the tweet other than to have multiple browser tabs open and switch between them.
Terrible experience for the audience and the the anchor as user.
Letting them to save tweets in a fashion that annotates on your timeline seems to be the ideal solution. Keep it up!
-explore possibilities that challenge my sense of the problem space (closely allied with reading stuff on the internet, that leads to HN, etc.) -try out various different ideas -come up with a pretty cool idea (using a two-dimensional array for double dispatch -- b/c you can create a nice text table of which functions are being invoked...) -that cool idea encourages me to really solve this problem well -i realize that at this point i really don't need to do something that extensive -i solve it simply using closer to the bare minimum of what was needed -i solve other simple things that i've had queued up
and repeat. in other words, there are two types of productivities that i think we as developers go through. exploratory, expansive stages. and synthetic, work stages. this probably isn't news to anyone. but they really are two different things, and you really have to balance both to be efficient. too much 'getting it done' and you'll lose interest and miss large steps figured out by others or by yourself. not to mention you'll lose the expansive 'energy' that comes from solving things abstractly and in a new way. on the other hand, too much of an 'exploratory' attitude and you not only won't get stuff done, but you'll lose the confidence you had about how well you can solve things in small steps, that build up, etc.
anyway, that's just my sense. there may be more than just two 'phases'. and the phase change is more a calibration of emphasis than an all-or-nothing switch. when i'm going through the exploratory phase i'm much more sociable, taking breaks, etc. and then i pwn in the work phase. or something. i also download and watch a fair amount of tv.
but i think part of what makes one developer more experienced than another is that they have larger phases. they've had the confidence from experience to not need to get to that work phase quite so quickly. of course, you can make mistakes, and not be ready for quite so large an explore/work phase balance -- and have to reel it back a bit, but generally speaking, one's threshold sort of increases (the more features are delivered on time, the more projects are delivered, etc.). anyway.... more important than anything is probably being honest with yourself (if you are the type who naturally tries to self-improve). anyway, this is all a bit off topic...
Alright, back to work. Good luck with your 5 items ;-)
(Actually, I'm waiting for a data extraction script to finish, but I suppose I could be doing more productive things than HN while I wait)
Create a big calendar, above your workspace, or somewhere you see all the time. Every day you do work, put a cross on it. Try to get as many crosses in a row as you can. Hemmingway used this method apparently.
The other that actually works great, the first task you do in the morning should be the one you least likely want to do. The one that is easiest to put off. Surprising how good this makes you feel.
Awesome stage up Monte Zoncolan, one of, if not the hardest climbs in Europe. Went to see the stage finish in Asolo in person yesterday.
All you need to do is make a http post to my api with the details of the work you want completed* with a url for me to post back the answer to. I take care of dealing with the mturk api and qualifying answers.
* Title, price, and a form partial which provides instructions and the form inputs to be answered.
Woke up at 7:30 to go into office, respond to some emails, printed out boarding pass, grabbed nicest laptop, went home and packed, went to airport, flew to Madrid (watched Dr. Who enroute for break), drank sangria with friends over tapas, took bus outside of Madrid, mingled with conference attendees, came back to hotel room and obsessed about my app stats with AppViz, read my tech blogs, responded to this, now perhaps sleep.
I use the pomodoro method (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com) when I'm in the fugue where I want to be productive but am somehow not managing to.
1 - user finds my site and signs up. >> Transactional email <<
2 - repeat step 1 enough times.
3 - send out newsletter. This will now start happening every 2 weeks. >> Newsletter email <<
Why should I be paying/configing/templating/testing/managing 2 mail services (mailchimp && sendgrid/critsend)? I don't have sophisticated newsletter tracking needs. I just need to be able to manage a list and use the same/similar API I use for transaction emails, but instead of plugging in an email address in the "to" field, I reference the name of a list stored on the sendgrid server. Doing this, I only have to sync my lists. I don't have to write code to handle sending 5000 emails, taking into account limits on how many addresses will fit into the "to" field on each API call.
Both sendgrid and critsend are working on these features. Its just not there yet.
http://github.com/raganwald/go/commit/40800b91b896f17d8371c1...
As of this moment, you can actually play standard Go with a friend or play a variation called "One Eye Go" where you cannot play into an intersection without liberties unless it extends one of your own groups that has other liberties.
I'll be adding other variations soon, next up are the games that have standard rules for capturing stones but where the objectives differ from taking territory. For example, to connect two sides, to create a line of seven stones, to make the first capture, and so forth.
I just want to be able to take out an iPad and use it as a Go board that remembers plays for analysis.
My advice:
* Don't fuck around with taxes.
* Get to W2 as quickly as you can.
* Get a real accountant.
Best part was being outside. I need to get myself a laptop to enjoy hacking in the sun.
but without other people and their feedback, I eventually lose steam.
We need other people. We evolved that way. As with sex and many other things, you can do them on your own, but they aren't nearly as compelling and rewarding.
If not, then maybe you don't need outside forces to make you work, you just aren't good at doing it by yourself (yet).
Tomorrow I will make progress.