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Comment by tapanjk | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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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.

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.

“You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side.”

— Joel Spolsky, Fire And Motion, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

"If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward"

- MLK

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