Likewise concepts like Compound Interest and arguably knowledge of fallacies, such as "sunk cost fallacy".
What are some force multipliers that are available to most people, but which most people don't regularly put into use?
People get all worried about losing their followers & social connections. The social fabric is very adaptable. It does not require public technological codification. You realistically only need fewer than five good friends to be happy; text them. I can guarantee your followers don't care about you at all. The ones who do will reach out to you in other ways.
Since the OP also listed a fallacy, one in the same vein is the endowment effect - where people value things more simply because they already possess them. Consider the example of you holding a stock priced at $200. Now consider an alternate universe where you didn't own that stock but had $200 cash (plus some extra for transaction costs). Would you buy the stock? If not, you should probably consider selling it. This same thought process can be applied to nearly anything in your life: job, significant other, city in which you live. It's good for keeping you out of traps.
I worked hard to start reading longer form articles and books again, but my attention span was so crippled! It was a really weird experience to quit reddit and social media. I still get memes from my friends, and I would have found them funny before, but now I’m so out of the loop I find the majority of them to be so half hearted. I guess memes are funnier when you’re reading tons of them and get that quick jolt of amusement.
I've completely dropped twitter/facebook/etc, but have found that I keep coming back to HN and reddit primarily to keep some level of awareness of things that happen outside of my "bubble".
How would you maintain that level of awareness while still dropping those social media platforms?
Well that's just the thing! We observe Trump attacked from all sides of the establishment - the left, (some of) the right, and the entire government bureaucracy ("the deep state").
There is a rift somewhere in the system, and we're not discussing it...
However, it does praise some actions that Trump and the Republicans have done with regards to covid19. I overall find that it greatly tones down the extreme takes / perspectives I see on Reddit, and finds lots of nuance
Nonpartisan, yes. Nonpolitical? Absolutely not. The reason for its foundation was (specifically) to campaign against a policy held dear by the government of the day, and (generally) to promote a specific politico-economic worldview, that of free market capitalism with a strong emphasis on cross-border trade. Sometimes this can make their positions appear a little more left-leaning than a classic US libertarian could stomach, such as supporting the existence of the EU, if not every one of its actions; and tending to prefer at least a light touch of regulation on the markets, so long as it keeps the wheels of international commerce turning smoothly. Also, they are at pains to separate their news reporting (usually impeccably balanced and impartial) from their opinion pieces. As an answer to OP's question, I would actually second the recommendation of The Economist as an excellent way to keep abreast of world events while cunningly sidestepping the hysteria and sensationalism of nearly all other media (yes, including most "serious newspapers" these days).
Four years later he's gone, even allegedly called Trump a "fucking moron" on the way out.
The Economist loves free markets and a more laissez faire. GOP types quack about that stuff but lack in delivery.
Awesome content, but if you read pay attention closely, you can basically write the story without reading, because you know what the answers will be.
The paper NYT and WSJ are a great way to go. You get clear editorial contrasts and lots of content. Science Times and other feature sections are always a treat.
Most of the time that side is going to be the free market technocratic solution, hence the parent comment about being able to predict where the article will go, but even then I feel like I have an idea what the argument is and where the sides are.
Scheduled violations of the rules seem to paradoxically help you follow the rules. Tim Ferris advocates for one dietary cheat day per week, with the idea that it takes incredible will power to give up donuts forever, but almost anyone can put it off until Friday.
Schedule your cheats.
Edit: scheduling is also great for beating procrastination. “I will change my oil at 7:30pm Tuesday” is way more effective than “I need to change my oil soon”
He also spent a lot of time with me on understanding that motivation and discipline are most times just thin wrappers around what people actually want. Thinking less about "If I were just more disciplined I would be able to do this" and more about "If I actually wanted to do this I probably would", and then focusing on what you actually want, or why you don't want something, is probably a much more valuable of a use of time for some people than thinking about motivation or discipline.
I am not posting this to say "If you're a disciplined person, you're wrong" - but moreso "If you're a person that believes you struggle with motivation/discipline, maybe you can rethink those concepts".
I'm not going to debate you because there isn't a debate.
He said "Be tougher."
To paraphrase the context: mental toughness is a choice, and if you aren't as tough as you want, you just have to be tougher. Choose it. In each moment when you are tested.
Thanks for your comment. For a while I had been wondering why I couldn't focus, wasn't able to accomplish some simple long term goals, etc. Be tougher was my fix, and your comment expands on some ideas in a way that makes sense to me.
The technique they mention (AVRT addictive voice recognition technique) is actually useful for all sorts of things. “That’s my anxiety speaking. It is separate from me and I don’t have to listen to it”, etc.
You can personify and diminish all sorts of negative personality traits. “That’s my impulse to complain / interrupt / lash out / etc”
Twitter and Reddit are flexible enough that you can use them strictly professionally and be better for it.
One thing which helped a lot was realizing just how slow things really move. People post very interesting technical things every day, but those are usually the products of maybe a year of intensive offline effort. You don't fall behind by skipping reading those. You do fall behind by endlessly reading those and doing nothing with your own time. Four hours sitting with a textbook in your area of interest is worth more than a month's worth of twitter posts. As a corrolary, you needn't worry about falling behind in general - because of how slow things move, you'll always be able to catch up. It takes probably two orders of magnitude less effort to understand a concept than to research & come up with it in the first place.
As you develop an area of interest and talk with other practitioners, you'll naturally hear about interesting things eventually. The rest is just brain candy you wouldn't have cared about anyway.
The only thing I find unique to Hacker News is much higher quality analytical comments about politics, economics and tech industry labor issues. Almost everything else is in one ear out the other.
If I do post on Reddit I'll disable inbox replies and just check once a day or something for any replies.
Edit: Also since HN doesn't have a 'disable inbox' type (that I know of?), 75% of the time I'm not logged in. I'll log in if I really have a comment and then log back out.
I do agree with you overall though. I have a virtual desktop dedicated to social sites, and a separate desktop for work, and I keep myself always aware of what "mode" I am in.
Facebook is utterly useless, I deleted my account years ago.
For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.
Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.
I do a lot of "reddit [thing I want to know about]" in DDG, just to kick the Reddit results to the top over all the webspam. Not "!reddit [thing I want to know about]" because Reddit's internal site search is, like most, worse than DDG or Google.
Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.
HN gives me a treasure of information in so many areas I have found invaluable when I need it.
Just use something like Zotero so when you see something interesting, you just give a quick look at it, and save it without spending a significant amount of time.
And also learn to manage yourself. Without it you will not need facebook to waste your time, you will fantasy dream while looking at the window or staring against the wall.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well."
This is among my favorite devices of all time. It is quick, nimble, and lightweight. It has completely replaced walking, a car or a bicycle for my local trips. While there is a learning curve, unlike a bicycle, it has required almost [2] no maintenance in ~4000 miles of riding, and both hands are free to hold things so I can carry much more than I ever could on a bike. I've transported a desk, groceries, a 50 lb box of firewood, gardening tools, and so on. Plus, riding one is just plain FUN: it feels like skiing or flying. You really have to try it to know.
A pessimistic estimate of the V5F monowheel's efficiency:
* Battery = 320 Wh = 275335 calories
* Weight = 12 kg for the device, so with a rider around 95kg
* Range = 20 km on the low end (25-30 km is typical, manufacturer claims 38±3 km)
Efficiency = 275335 calories / 95000g / 20km = 0.14 calories/g/km
An optimistic estimate given my actual riding experience:
Efficiency = 275335 calories / 91175g / 30km = 0.10 calories/g/km
[1] https://www.myinmotion.com/products/solowheel-glide-2
[2] It still works just fine despite me beating the hell out of it, but the battery has worn down to ~70%
So, that seems low to me. I would expect you to burn more than 10 kcal, but it seems the right order of magnitude at least.
I wonder whether this will still hold true when the costs of building and maintaining
1. a bike
2. a flat road to ride the bike on
Take all the transportation conveniences a regular bike can without getting sweaty.
Static typing. It's like having a secretary who is doing all the writing, and you only have to think big things. It's a relief.
Higher-level abstractions such as query languages (SQL, LINQ) or markup languages (eh...). Forest for the trees etc. Also DSLs (consult someone with experience first - far too easy to get bogged down).
The most productive way to write software is to borrow something already written. Don't hesitate to buy components from professionals - you're paying for better support, longevity, and less version churn.
Do you call it dynamic because of the delay in getting error feedback, because the RDBMS you use is genuinely loosey-goosey with types, or for another reason?
For my part I use LINQ2SQL and the whole thing becomes statically typed.
Funny. I see this as exactly the opposite.
To me static typing is a bureaucratic delay where you have to tell the computer what it already knows (but thank the deities for "auto" or the walrus operator in Go) and dynamic typing as the computer just doing what you tell it to do without bothering me with trivialities.
Yeah, maybe static typing makes the IDEs smart, but I dislike IDEs being "smarter" than compilers, I mean, the compiler should be the smartest one. If your IDE knows x is an int, why can't the compiler know?
It sounds like you haven't used something Hindley-Milner based - I'd recommend giving it a go, so that you can feel what it's like. Much as Typescript gives you incremental typing over JS, so too does type inference give you incremental static specification of the types over the fully inferred program. When you don't need to write down the types, the inference engine gets out of your way; when you want to use the types to constrain the possible programs you could be writing, the inference engine puts up the guardrails to stop you making mistakes.
This is exactly it. Thank you.
The best programmers I have worked with always pay attention to this. They quickly address any barriers in the way of an easy and simple build.
Sleep, diet, exercise, attention, focus, productivity, knowledge, workflow, socializing -- anything we do repeatedly is a habit. Right now, in each and every moment, we are all the average/sum of the daily habits of the past few years.
So, the "level" we achieve in each domain is a lagging indicator of our habits; fat stores up over time, dirty dishes stack up, lack of knowledge is the result of lack of learning habits, etc.
If you make weekly improvements to your habits, that means small changes are sticking each week. While 1% better doesn't seem to matter much in the short run, if you stack 1% every week, in one year you're now 50% better in your routines.
How to do so? Here are some ideas:
-Make the bad habits harder to do. Keep the snacks, games, distractions out of reach, so you have to expend extra effort to get to them. You want high-effort barriers to beginning bad habits.
-Make good habits easier to do. Prepare yourself for workouts in advance. Commit yourself to things that will be helpful. use daily streaks, motivation, positive thinking, and imagination to encourage your good habits.
For more information, check out James Clear + Sam Harris' conversation on the Making Sense podcast (or the Waking Up app).
Try this for 5 days, it'll give you everything that the book gives you and it is very low commitment.
Also, if you find that it works, you can move on to the book.
Since many of us are taking online calls now, this is a great time to record your side to hear how you really sound like. You may be quite surprised - it's not just that your voice sounds different, how often you use filler words, repeat yourself, ramble and the tone that you used can be quite different than what you thought it was. From there, you can identify your weak points, practice (speak on your own and record it) and improve.
2. Read smarter material.
3. Write more and edit your writing more than you normally would. That will force you to think about where you can improve your verbal expression.
I guess the opposite is true if you're the one dominating conversations :-)
I'm currently between roles (COVID layoffs), and I got feedback on my webcam interview demeanor and speaking style.
My approach for this was to practice my answers to common interview questions out loud while recording myself with Photobooth and then watching the recordings.
There are a couple of dimensions in which I've found this helpful:
* Sheer number of reps. These help me get more comfortable with telling my career story up until this point, and I've found that my comfort has a direct impact on my interviewer's comfort
* I spot tics and habits that I wouldn't have otherwise. I noticed that I had a tendency to start my answers with "so, uhhh...". In some cases simply realizing the presence of a tic/habit was enough to get rid of it
* The recordings reduce the channels from 2 (output + input) to just 1: this helps me analyze what I'm saying and how I'm saying it without having to also think about what I'm going to say
* Recordings also provide a historic record that I can look back on and see improvement, which helps keep me motivated when the job hunt gets me sad
I can use my tech skills to MASSIVELY enhance the trades side of the business. While i can do enough of the trades myself to cover my employees sick days, emergencies, etc, i dont do it day to day. I run the business and make sure i'm using my primary tech skills to grow us. Its working well so far.
When we started we did anything, painting, small handyman jobs, fences, carpets, gardening, etc. But I ended up just concentrating on kitchens and bathrooms, as they are generally the most investment worthy home improvements a homeowner will want, which means larger profit per job and also they're more room to take away a homeowners problems. Typically if they project managed it themselves, they'd need to bring in a large list of separate trades. Labourers for demolition, plumbers, electricians, joiners, tilers, cabinet fitters, flooring fitters, decorators etc.
The people i hire, with backup from myself, can do everything the job needs, which means they only need 1 company to do it. We have a wonderful woman in the office that does all the customer service, we take away all the old crap we've removed, we help them pick the new bathroom suites and kitchens they want, etc. Its a full service. I think in America, the term for this is General Contractor, over here in the UK, its not typically used.
My advice for you, if you're starting from scratch, is to get some DIY skills to begin with, start with your own home. Try things, Youtube is the second best tool for learning anything in my opinion, only surpassed by actually doing it. If at all possible, whatever you are trying for the first time or are unsure of, try it, then pay a professional to inspect your work AS your doing it and sign it off at the end. Get them in before you start too. Any tradesperson that wont do give you advice that you're willing to pay for isnt worth knowing IMO. The ones that are, are the ones you hire when you do bigger projects that you need help on. Plus anyone that can explain their own job to an outsider, generally is pretty good at what they do.
I'd be able to give you more specific advice with more information, happy to answer any questions.
What does your software business do (if you dont mind telling me!)
Also what's your profit margin on say a bathroom or a kitchen?
For hobbies: I do Karate, I do aquascaping, and play guitar (acoustic, electric, bass) and sing (mostly church related weekend gigs).
For languages: Indonesian, English, Japanese (still not proficient but I can get by, Kanji reading is still working on it).
Not sure how I combined all of those. Totally unrelated lol.
There are people out there that provide a very specific service cutting kitchen worktops, explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux3EZhhYdZo
Its typically done with a jig and a router, its not that hard IMO, but a lot of kitchen fitters either cant do it well or hate doing it and they hire someone to do this (as well as other things like sink cut outs) and they get paid DAMN GOOD money to do that, especially if you can show up at a new housing development where you can bash out 30-100 homes as one job.
Personally, while i have no experience with CNC's, i know what they are and how they work and i reckon theres a way to make this job more efficient by having a CNC machine in the back of a van that can be setup to cut these joints. I've not tried this idea, but i may do it one day.
This is the kind of different persepective you can have from completely different skillsets and experiences that people who do the same thing day in day out for years just dont arrive at.
That assumes the essentials of proper sleep, nutrition and basic fitness are taken care of [3]. Aside from this meta 'help' stuff, the one tool that was a 100x force multiplier for me is Karabiner [4]. Share it on HN all the time but no one uses it. :|
1: https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/
2: https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
3: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/health
4: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/karabiner
I think the people who are inclined to be constantly learning are probably less inclined to focus on broadcasting their life to others.
That's not to say that there aren't people who learn in public and create valuable content in the process, they just seem rare.
I also hope more people make an open learning repo [1] where they test out new technology in the open. It's been a nice productivity boost for me.
1: https://github.com/lpil/learning & https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/learning as examples
I have a notes SVN repository dating back about a decade with over 600 text files. I could split them into many more files as these notes aren't "atomic" as Zettelkasten folks say.
The main barrier to release at this point is that many of these notes contain private information, or have brutally honest assessments of certain things that I don't want to be made public. If I had written them with public consumption in mind from the start then I would have done things differently.
Another problem is that the quality of many of these notes is not at a level I'd be comfortable releasing. If I had intended to release these notes in the first place I would have spent some extra time to clean them up earlier on.
My current plan is to slowly ramp up a public repository once I revamp my personal website, but as with many plans, I keep pushing that into the future.
I have a huge problem with this and I'm not sure how to fix it. When I start researching something, I don't write about it, because I don't feel like I know enough and I don't want to repeat the same "generic advice" that many people already presented. Then, when I reach my desired level of understanding, I start writing a blog post. I start with "fundamentals" I had to grasp before I could understand the topic. Then, after 6000 words, some diagrams, and several tens of hours put in, I start writing about the topic, but at that point it's almost guaranteed I'm already interested in something else. So, obviously, I leave the previous topic to rot in the "unpublished" folder forever.
It would, thinking realistically, take someone paying me for the extra time to finish one of these posts, which would become either a really looong article, or a short book/pdf. That won't happen, because most of my enquires about how to be paid for writing something like this lay in the same "unpublished" folder... That's on top of the topics being rather peculiar (most recent example: "Using Haxe's Lua target to script my (Awesome) Window Manager" - started from quick intro to OCaml, two fixes I made to the Haxe compiler (which is written in OCaml) to get Lua target really going, quick intro to Lua and LuaJIT, plus AwesomeWM architecture and class library... at which point I stopped, and switched to the next topic: "Wiring and writing a Home Security-like system with RaspberryPis and Erlang/Elixir", which will turn into another abandoned try at a write up.)
Basically, I start writing at the point I'm pleased with the solution to a problem (eg. the state of my WM, the monitoring around the house, or most recently a working Tizen Studio for native devel on non-Ubuntu Linux), which rids me of the problem, so then I have no motivation to write about it, or its solution anymore. I could go back, change the title, and generally edit whatever I have already scribbled, but that feels like work, and at that point I'm already learning about something else entirely...
This is why this:
> I think the people who are inclined to be constantly learning are probably less inclined to focus on broadcasting their life to others.
seems plausible to me, at least. Though whether my broadcast would be more valuable to others than the "generic advice" (or more specifically, shallow posts on some tech, in "3 things you didn't know about IEx"-like style) is doubtful.
HammerSpoon: https://www.hammerspoon.org/
For me, the two biggest improvements were:
1. App switching (hold F then use all keys under the right hand, each key bound to launch and/or focus a particular app)
2. Window management (hold W then use right hand as arrow keys to snap windows)
Paired with a keyboard that lets you remap held keys to modifier combinations (I use Ergodox) has been great.
See https://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/downloads/ or https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/scripts/ for a larger collection.
For example, I would have never thought of AltEdge ("Sends Alt-Tab when the mouse is on the left edge of the screen and keeps cycling through the windows") or Barnacle ("A programmable toolbar that fits inside any window") or MonitOff ("Turns off the monitor at user defined idle times during the day") but it took 10 seconds to download the executable and try out one of these (AltEdge).
https://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/download/altedge/
For me, Windows' programmability, especially AutoHotKey, has been a major reason to find Mac OS rather unattractive. Over the years, AutoHotKey has solved several minor-but-daily annoyances for me.
Ha, never knew you could do that. Pretty cool.
That's it :-)
It uses Lua for its scripting engine.
Not sure there's quite an equivalent for the executable feature, but it does support publishing and installing modules written by users, which are called 'spoons', IIRC.
My config: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...
Article to explain how to achieve this: https://medium.com/@nikitavoloboev/karabiner-god-mode-7407a5...
I know this one seems a bit obvious, but in the workforce, I rarely see people with them.
Work journals are not very exciting. But just writing things down really makes a difference somehow. Those boring meetings become slightly less boring when you take notes. That thing from six weeks ago doesn't slip by you as readily. That person's name on that one call isn't a mystery. Your year end report is chock full of stuff, not just a few .ppt bullet points of a few highlights.
It's pretty straightforward, and just takes about two weeks of practice to get into the habit. For the effort, it really does multiply.
In practice, I list the name of the 'activity' (a meeting, a work session, some forms filing, etc), the people at the activity, and then note whatever it is that needs notes to be taken. To be clear, I'm not taking minutes in a meeting, just more like action items for myself, and anything really important that came up.
Like I said, it's not 'hard' stuff or very complicated, I may only have like two bullet points for an hour meeting sometimes. The habit is what matters.
[0] http://lsc.cornell.edu/study-skills/cornell-note-taking-syst...
My journal is a simple org notes file in emacs. I have a to do list on top and a daily log at the bottom and use search to find old info. The more I try to organize it, the harder it is to use, so I keep it linear now!
Achieving ambitious goals is much easier when you break it down into weekly or daily habits.
Practicing something once per week means 52 times per year, or 520 times per decade.
Practicing something every other day becomes 182 times per year, or a massive 1,825 times in a decade.
Just imagine how your life would be different if you had 500 x 30 minute workouts over the next decade. Or 1,825 x 30 minutes of reading another book.
Putting 30 spare minutes to use once a week isn't as difficult as it sounds if you make it a priority. The results add up over time.
Don't think in goals, think in consistent habits.
Don't think in weeks or months, think in years.
Most people will fail at everything that takes more than half a year to see success.
Losing weight, getting fit, learn a language, learn an instrument.
Most workflows can benefit from multiple monitors. it's a silly thing to be bottlenecked by screen area on a fancy computer when used 1080p monitors are nearly free in 2020.
Take regular walks and use that time to think. There is something about a steady walk that seems to improve problem solving, especially for more abstract/creative things.
When working, put the cell phone out of view and out of reach. It's too easy to subconsciously pick it up and start scrolling a feed before realizing focus had been broken.
However, keep in mind that the 16:9 aspect ratio is better suited for movie watching and somehow the whole industry (except for Apple, and Dell also seems to have picked that up in its latest XPS line) uses that, even in professional settings. 16:10 is way better. 1920x1200 displays do exist and I recommend that. Used ones are a bit more expensive than used 1920x1080.
I'll forever miss the 1400x1050 display that I had on my ThinkPad T42. It was awesome for displaying content vertically (think code and/or documents).
Maybe it is becouse widescreens have more inches diagonaly for the same area as 4:3 that there was a push for consumer TVs with widescreen?
I wish there were more options for ratios in the stand-alone display market. Rumor has it, Microsoft will be creating a line of Surface displays. [2]
In my opinion 16:9 is unappealing for productive work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface#Model_compar...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117584/microsoft-surfa...
16:9
16:10
16:10.66 (almost 3:2)
16:12 (4:3)
I'm sure you can tell the difference between 16:12 (old TV) and 16:9 (widescreen).
Think about it: when you're writing code or working in a shell or reviewing a configuration file or working on a word document you'll probably use vertical space more than horizontal space.
On linux I like using a 4k display at 100%. I don't really care about window chrome, icons, etc. I care about text and mainly use a text editor, terminal and browser. They all allow me to set the text size. This way I get the best of both worlds: unobtrusive window chrome and legible text. This works great on a 24" display.
I also started taking 1mg melatonin an hour before I want to sleep. That works wonders for me.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...
... and, umm, mindfulness, I guess.
(I am not a doctor)
It's worth noting that many allergy meds (like diphenhydramine) are anticholinergic, but only ones which pass the blood-brain barrier are linked to cognitive decline. So newer allergy meds like cetirizine and loratadine are better.
- Temperature control. I sleep with the AC set at 65, a fan and a BedJet device.
- Blue light control. I wear blue light blocking glasses at night time
- Wind down routine. I am careful not to exercise, watch exciting shows or do anything that raises my hearth rate at least an hour before bed.
- No alarm clock. I have found that when using an alarm clock I invariably get anxious about it going off.
Hope some of that helps.
What really helps is silicon earplugs (they warm up to body temperature and mold to fit, so comfortable I've forgotten to take them out until I'm half way to work) - a lot of my issues are I require silence to sleep and stay asleep and the modern world just isn't conducive to that at all.
Do you have a thick blanket then? Or are you just covered with a thin bed sheet while the air around you is 65 degrees F (18 degrees C)? That sounds like it would be freezing.
2) I can't sleep with few or no blankets anyway. I mean I could probably adjust to it over time, or if I'd hiked 20 miles that day I bet I could, but I certainly can't right now under ordinary circumstances.
I don't start to think a room's too cold for comfortable sleeping until it's under like 60F. My sleep gets worse if it's over about 68.
- Exercise, even if just 10min daily
- Sleep in a colder room
- Maybe is a lot of noise around you, and night is the time for your brain to work cleanly. Reduce it (I find this recently)
- Stop being worry about not get sleep. The more you worry, the less you get.
- If can, sleep when you feel it, get up when not. Not force to get sleep if you know you can't. I think this help to reset the clock. After a while things start to settle.
- Substances amplify what is wrong, maybe. I think is better to fix the macro stuff, the routine, and then maybe use something.
... so yeah, as a married guy with kids and a job, falling asleep is hell basically every night.
Now if it would be possible to get a 27" 5k screen like the new imacs, that would be absolutely great. Same "actual resolution" as the older 27" but with much sharper text.
Personally, I'm in the preferring-two-monitors camp. If I can't have two, I'll have three, please. And large ones. Particularly when I'm doing web work, the convenience of having an editor with ample space to open many source files at once on a main screen, an auto-reloading browser with accompanying dev tools on one side monitor, and multiple pages of documentation on the other side is a huge win.
I know other people who are also in this camp, and others still who for similar reasons to others commenting here aren't a fan of lots of monitors. They typically have very consistent patterns in how they set up their working environments and often multiple desktops that they switch between frequently.
I suppose the conclusion is not so much "have multiple monitors" but rather "invest a bit of time and if necessary money in customising your work environment to work well for you".
A lot of doctors and health professionals will say that this is bad advice and that it encourages people to obsessively flush electrolytes and minerals out of their bodies.
Which doctors, specifically?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=too+much+water+electrolytes
These results seem to indicate one has to drink a lot - not just enough for clear pee
But it's not hard to find warnings:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hyponatremia/...
> Drinking water is vital for your health, so make sure you drink enough fluids. But don't overdo it. Thirst and the color of your urine are usually the best indications of how much water you need. If you're not thirsty and your urine is pale yellow, you are likely getting enough water.
You see it all the time - young people drinking eight litres of water over an hour or something stupid like that during arduous physical activity because they think they should 'drink until their pee is clear', then wondering they their legs don't work anymore.
What does that even mean? If your body contained toxins that you needed to « detox », you’d be having a pretty bad day and kidney failure.
Detox is meaningless. It’s not like your body is « polluted » and and you can only clean it by « detoxing ».
Healthy skepticism that this makes a difference in day to day human health may be warranted, but skepticism that the claim is even meaningful in the first place is not. Your body does routinely contain a lot of toxins, and it has mechanisms to clean them out. “Polluted” is not a binary yes/no attribute anywhere else in the world and it hits not binary in your body either; it gets more or less polluted as it excretes less or more waste.
See https://duckduckgo.com/?q=detox+fallacy for more in depth explanations.
No. My productivity is much better with just one monitor.
More monitors just mean some workspaces are switched between by moving my head instead of switching what’s on screen. For some tasks it’s easier for others it’s not.
I do find a larger higher resolution monitor more useful than having two or three small ones, especially for my IDE where I have splits and such. I use a 34” 1440p currently but would love to go larger/higher resolution (but 4K at those sizes is out of my budget right now)
Pretty much what I do with my single screen. Probably down to being a contractor for a long time and never knowing from one day to the next if I even had a desk to sit at, never mind a monitor or two.
I'd rather flick my eyes over to the browser window documenting function signatures, error cases, etc. than alt+tab through potentially several windows to find said docs window, then alt+tab ing back to my coding window to use said information.
But apparently some people prefer to do that, than to spam a few win+arrow key combinations, to spread their windows out for initial setup.
However, if I have ~10-12 windows I regularly need to switch between (2-3 related projects in the code editor, 2 browser windows - 1 browsing/docs, 1 the actual app I'm working on, terminal, db mgmt tool, Figma, Slack, email, Calc for some of the data, file manager), a tiling manager or multiple desktop on just one physical screen make things significantly harder for me...I might be missing something obvious in how it's supposed to be used.
This would give my GCSE Chemistry teacher apoplexy.
Clear is not a colour.
If your urine stream has much color, you are dehydrated or perhaps sick:
https://media.healthdirect.org.au/images/inline/original/uri...
Pretty clearly talks about colour.
Yes, there's plenty of confusion, given "clear" is not a colour. Your urine can be perfectly clear while still being yellow.
I used to believe this but not anymore. Way back in 2007, I spent $2500 for 2 Samsung 30" 2560x1600 monitors ($1250 each). I envisioned a massive productivity increase with scenarios such as:
- email inbox one screen with main "task" window on another screen
- video tutorial (e.g. Photoshop training) on one screen while following along on Photoshop on the main screen
- debugger on one window with the code output on another screen
Eliminating all the Alt-Tab window switching would be supposedly be gone. That was the theory. The problem is that I didn't realize that my eyes hated having these giant lightbulbs in my peripheral vision. It was uncomfortable enough that I often powered off 1 monitor which negated the point of multiple monitors. The other thing I didn't like was the extra heat 2 monitors would add to the room.
I went back to 1 monitor and Alt-Tab is minimized if the single monitor is big enough (at least 27") to have multiple windows of reasonable size. For me to go back to multiple monitors, I'd need the "wing" screens to be color e-ink panels[0] so that they don't act as bright flashlights in my peripheral vision.
I recognize the productivity benefits of multiple monitors -- especially for "dashboard" and monitoring[1] such as stock trading, devops IT corporate/cloud systems monitoring, SpaceX rocket launch monitoring, etc. Having your peripheral vision notice an abnormal activity is useful in those scenarios.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=e-ink+panel+&tbm=isch
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=multiple+monitors+trading&tb...
On macOS, a utility called HazeOver makes working with three monitors much nicer.
I use tiling window managers to help make this work. (Currently, xmonad on personal laptop, and trying out i3 on my work laptop to see if I can get is as productive for me as xmonad.)
When docked, the laptop's screen usually displays my first virtual desktop, which is for email, chat, misc monitoring. All the other desktops are for Web and tasks.
There are two many tools, setups, and conventions to get into here, but I'd just like to say I'm currently a fan of the approach that all I need is my laptop and Internet to do all my work.
(Well, sometimes I need other specialized hardware. But I don't need to be at my desk for the big monitors.)
I'm using 3 monitors - the two main are right in front of me, the one on top of the other, and the 3rd is on the side, rotated vertically. I tried several arrangements and I found this one working great for me.
> The other thing I didn't like was the extra heat 2 monitors would add to the room.
This has probably changed with modern monitors. I don't think I've ever felt that a non-CRT monitor was hot, but even it might have been true a long time ago, it definitely hasn't been the case since at least 2015.
Do people not use social networks on their computers? It's as easy for me (easier actually) to subconsciously open HN on a computer, unless it's blocked somehow.
Take Facebook as an example. Your phone will ding on FB updates or incoming messages on Messenger, even when the phone isn't actively being used. On a computer you need to have a browser open and have Facebook opened in a tab for it to give you any notifications.
So it's easier to avoid on your desktop than on your phone.
Maybe some people benefit from this but I’ve always found it distracting and in some cases a bit annoying. I’ve always preferred simply having multiple desktops and switching between them instantly with a keystroke which is great in most Linux DEs/WMs but a terrible experience in Windows. It’s gotten to a point where even though I have 2 displays, I just turn one off 99% of the time.
Also very useful: the windows-key shortcut overview that the PowerToys added (keep the windows-keypressed for a second or two to bring it up).
I only use W10 as a secondary OS and never used windows as main since XP/2000. So far never got to dig deeper into this. It seems to me that out of the box a lot of the functionality is there, but there are also a lot of related third party (often paid) tools.
What are some good combination of tools (third party, paid or not) and settings for a more keyboard centric i guess you could call it, setup of Windows? At the moment to me it feels a bit like, that I could do everything with just keyboard but I'm not meant to.
I agree with the grandparent poster that the Windows situation is very bad compared to something like i3.
I highly recommend using multiple desktops with dedicated hotkeys over alt+tab to switch between applications. Much much faster to press fn+cmd+<h, j , k, l> and immediately bring up the application you want than to tab until you find the application you are looking for.
Example for my desktops setup for web application development over the last couple of years:
1. Browser with the product I'm currently working on, nothing else
2. Shells for all sorts of small tasks like tailing a log to REPLs for quick experimentations
3. Application IDE(s)
4. SQL IDE
5. Music player
6. Communication (Mail, slack, etc.) and secondary browser for miscellaneous things
The greatest thing for me is, that what I'm currently doing is in full focus and everything else basically doesn't exist. No notifications dinging in peripheral vision or other distractions. Also it is nice, that when I switch to laptop only, the workflows are exactly the same just with more limited screen space = less tiles I can use.
If for a given tasks it is beneficial to have things side by side, it is just a couple of key strokes to re-arrange windows and or create an ad-hoc desktop until the task is finished.
Of course I could use multiple desktops and tiled windows on multiple screens, but from my experiments it added more complexity that benefits.
I would rather go for a bigger, higher quality screen than adding another.
So, you could use a 27 inch 4k display at 16:9 aspect ratio (which is 3840 by 2160 pixels) in a way that gets you the native resolution which results in much more usable space but the displayed quality isn't all that great. You can run them at 2560x1440 rendering which sacrifices some pace for much improved quality. Works well when you don't sit super close to your screen. Or, if you like more space but still have a little better quality than the jagged mess that is the native resolution, you could run it at 3008x1692. Close to fully usable space but still way better in terms of quality.
The scale of your computer rendered interface and text versus the actual pixel size and density on your display gives you a balance to choose from for space vs. quality. Which one works best is a combination between physical distance to the screen and personal preference (which mostly forms based on cognitive load).
I kinda regret not getting 2x 1440p monitors with similar picture quality for less money.
Meanwhile it makes using Linux a giant pain in the ass, unless you go all-in on a major desktop on a major distro, and then also get lucky. Possibly I'd have a better opinion of it if I were using it with macOS rather than Win10 and Linux.
[EDIT] and OMG lacking auto-temp-control based on surrounding light has me really wishing I'd just put the monitor cash toward an iMac. Way more eye strain.
Though when a task only needs one screen for more than a couple of minutes to stay focused shutting off the other screens does help.
Then I upgraded to 3 displays, it's much better. Because I have an explicit main display.
So a viable way is, even with two displays, don't try to utilize them. Put the main one in the center, and pretend the other doesn't exist. Once you really want to use the other display, instead of for the sake of utilizing them only, you'll know it.
I did that before switching to single display after having multiples from the first day of my career onwards. But I didn't even had to try. By the end, because of how my work and setup has evolved, the second display was switched off 99% of the time.
So when I have the choice I put the entire budget into an ever better single monitor, rather than splitting it.
With that being said, I ended up with 3 monitors in my apartment because I bought them incrementally across 3 years(though they're the same model). And also I play video games from time to time, for most of the games, it's better to have 3 monitors instead of an ultrawide one.
Main task in the main display, docs and other references on the left display and email/messages on the right. Works wonderfully.
I’m so used to this setup that when I go to my real job and am constrained to a single monitor I feel like I’m looking through a periscope at my work.
With every recurring meeting no matter the frequency you have to be quite careful in my opinion and constantly re-evaluate and tweak to keep it useful most of the time, instead it being a dogmatic ritual that has to be done a specific way because somebody learned it as such from an "Agile" book, certificate, course, video.
People rarely understand the point of agile and, specifically, standups. Using it as a daily check in, especially as status updates, is contrary to agile's intentions. The real purpose is to make sure that people on the team frequently expose problems. If people are already doing that consistently, then standup as a practice is fairly moot.
I think there is an useful status update component to standups. Not to your boss, to have a shared view among the team what the state of the product is. But this has to be aligned with how fast to product is meaningfully changing. Some times this might indeed be daily, but otherwise it quickly becomes just noise.
Of course some managers think the product has to or can meaningfully change every day.
I agree, that if you do them you should make them about exposing problems.
Everyone seems to prefer it. They don't have to stop what they are doing at exactly 10am, and they can re-read things that are relevant and skip things that are not easily. There is also a bit more personal accountability because everyone can see what was said in previous days.
sloppy focus is way more helpful than multiple monitors. You can have your editor largely obscured by documentation (or the other way around) and still type. This is especially nice with modern UIs which seem to think wasting screen real estate with white space and ribbons is an important recent innovation.
One monitor for code, one for the browser (and devtools window) and a third for everything else (an API document, or a spec, a control for the music I'm streaming or a chat window etc.)
I've found the same setup works really well for any workflow that involves making a small change and immediately seeing the result.
I am a runner and a weight lifter and a former Sergeant in the army. Dehydration is overwhelmingly more frequent than electrolyte depletion. Even when there's no physical exertion involved.
I also liked the lectures on convex optimization by Stephen Boyd a lot.
Steve Brunton on Fourier analysis.
It's all very subjective of course. Andrew Ng would be mentioned by most and I've watch the series as well, but I find that suddenly I'm intrigued by a mathematical field via some connection I didn't make before.
For example, I experiment with auto-encoders, then I read some papers on using the Wasserstein distance as a metric. Subsequently, I'm watching clips and lectures on optimal transport.
The nice thing about math is that it's so self-motivating to me. The more I learn, the more I want to know. I don't know, maybe it's a type of addiction.
When I’m thinking really hard about something, I _have_ to pace back and forth.
I’m not sure that walking will make me think harder, but I’m sure it can’t hurt.
It’s now my default thing to do if I am struggling with a problem or just feeling slightly unfocused, even if it’s raining - I’m fortunate that my office pre-lockdown was on the ground floor, and my apartment has a large enough balcony that now I tend to pace up and down there rather than mess around locking up and going downstairs etc. I can see how having a lift to wait for etc. might make me less keen to do this all the time, but seriously, try it! (It’s good for you too :))
All good advice. You missed one though: get your ass into shape. You need to be doing strenuous exercise. The difference this will make in life can not be explained, it can only be experienced... just like The Matrix if you will.
Also, with 1 set of exercise you won't really start to sweat and you can do it every day.
The issue with three sets is muscle soreness. I want a fully functioning body every day.
I appreciate the fact that we all can't be athletes: having said that; there was a time in my life when I would open my eyes Every Morning to blinding pain from my workouts. But now, 30 years later, the benefit (I believe partly from having been in such awesome shape and I do still workout strenuously, but not to that level) is that even at 60 years of age I still have stunning reaction times, I can still do things most 35 year olds can not and my driving is still freaking crisp!
PS: I can still do over 60 consecutive pushups and planck for 4:30 minutes. Sure somedays I'm sore as hell but fuck that old age shit... ;)
Currently I am on a quest to like exercise for its own sake, and I am coming from a place where I strongly disliked it. I am surprised that I have found a way to like it at all.
I’ll be blogging about it in a month from now as I would be on month 3 then :)
Cheers!
Here is how my partner and I ate for the last five months of working from home:
* Eat more veggies and salad, more beans and legumes, some fruit.
* Eat much less bread and pasta. Cut out most sugar and fruit juice.
* Make 1/3 of your dinners vegetarian, and split the other 2/3 between chicken/turkey and fish. Eat little red meat. * Have dessert as a treat twice a week.
* Evaluate portion sizes. You probably will be perfectly happy only eating 2/3 as much for your evening meal.
* Realize that most snacking between meals is because you really want a small break from work, not because you are actually hungry.
In combination with regular running, I have never felt fitter or been in better shape.
Why do I ask for some reputable sources? My attempt to build a plan according to my “common sense” (similar to your advice actually: dropping most of red meat, eating more legumes etc) lead to me developing hypotension and iron-deficiency; of course I can adjust the diet now I know this, but I’d rather do it the proper way this time.
If you are following a coding tutorial; you need to alt-tab back and forth from browser, terminal, and editor. If you an have an issue you may do it ten times before finding an issue which breaks flow.
Much better use of your time to stay focus and just glance at the second monitor. Same with research and an office suite.
If this is your cup of tea, I recommend checking out VR Desktop style workflows (arguably a good way to experience "working in The Future™", with infinite screens, customizable environments, etc). Here is one for Linux that we've been working on for a few years: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula
You really want one monitor, properly positioned forward of you. You should have a keyboard at the appropriate height with a wrist rest to support and angle your wrists (also make it warm - not cold plastic or metal). Your seating should allow you to sit up or slightly reclined. Your head should be balanced on top of your neck, you shouldn't be hunched or twisted.
laptops - well, let's just say NO laptop is osha approved.
bed, right?
If you are coding in bed, well... I just don't know the ergonomics of that situation. I don't know if this requires further study or a prompt curtailment of that line of thought.
Pareto distributions: start with hypothesis that any attribute you are looking for in a given sample is Pareto distributed in the whole. Applies to everything. It's more than the 80:20 rule. The shape of probability distributions in general (s-curves, bathtub curves, etc) is a useful filter for a fast path.
Negotiation: I recommend starting with the classic, "getting to yes." The level of confidence you can bring to a discussion when you have a clear idea of what the outcomes look like, and to have pre-accepted them, is a form of charisma. Learning it is also good for the culture in general.
Could you elaborate?
I read it ~30 years ago, the only thing I remember is that you always want to understand your "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement" (BATNA), e.g. knowing that you can walk away from a car dealer's deal, if you don't like the terms.
All jokes aside - Learning a section of domain you interact with regularly just enough to be dangerous.
Example is, as a programmer, doing product management job for 6 months or vice versa.
Danger here is it's easy to wield that new found knowledge as a weapon for evil - such as talking down at people, when really you want to be using it to be more effective.
But thankfully, most people have seen it done well in one form or another - a product person who can speak technical and not be jerked around or an engineer who has a keen eye for product flow or growth efforts.
Most people tend to assume that they have a fixed amount of energy, motivation and ability for their work, and don't realize how much these can be inflated by positive emotions.
This is where a musician finds the perseverance to do the technical exercises that get her to playing a piece. And where a budding scientist finds the patience to work through a complex topic in spite of all the overwhelming conceptual hurdles. And where a programmer gets the motivation to learn arcanes of some obscure tool.
For example, I recently had to learn a desktop programming toolkit in Python, which I found very tedious and uninteresting. But knowing that I was doing it to help a team of engineers design a new kind of lightweight electric vehicle really drove me to put my heart in it.
Even when your project isn't aiming for such impacts, just putting (good) food on the table of your family can be a motivation I guess.
That said, what forces you to follow fads? I've basically stopped doing it when I got started with Clojure about 6 years ago and it's been fine. It does take some convincing to use that for a project sometimes, but the feeling of empowerment has not faded, and compared to JavaScript churn the still waters of the Clojure ecosystem are quite enjoyable. My point being, fads are not necessarily a fatality.
This could mean a temporary break or more drastically, career altering. Many people have the power to shape their life, but they choose to keep going in one direction because of how much time they invested. Even when that direction no longer aligns with them.
In terms of success: I have dozens of side projects lying around, some of them educational, some practical, most unfinished.
It is completely fine, even beneficial to do so. At work you are already forced to finish and maintain stuff. Giving yourself some free, playful space balances this out.
Also in time some of those things trickle down (quasi) to your day job, or at least it has for me repeatedly. Not in the exact form I was expecting, but in tangible ways nonetheless.
There are two things that eventually keep me “on track” when I have a low phase: reminding myself that I’m a creator with ridiculous power at my fingertips is one. I keep a collection of notes with interesting and fun ideas (together with a friend). The other is more like a safety net so to speak: I seek long term financial security. This is one helps especially when I think about people close to me and how I can be strong for them.
Not talking about your style, prose or grammar, but how you structure the points you want to come across. It's not just useful in the context of "business writing", it's useful whenever you want something from someone else: to take an action of any kind.
I see it every week at work where people put a presentation together at first glance seems to be coherent, but if it had been written out as a document / memo, you'd easily see the gaps in their thinking. Forcing yourself to write out full sentences (not bullet points) into paragraphs and those paragraphs having a logical connection to each other, shines a spotlight on places where your thinking is weak or there are unfounded conclusions.
Here's the good news: there's one book that will teach you this thoroughly: Barbara Minto's - "The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking". Bad news: the book is out of print, since the author wants people to either buy her courses or her updated textbook which she charges $150 for (not a typo): http://www.barbaraminto.com/textbook.html
The book is insanely useful, so find a used copy of the 1987 or 2002 edition in a used bookstore.
1. Even if the end-medium is something else than a written document (presentation, video etc), you're still presenting your ideas from a->b->c, so the gaps are still there and aren't as apparent, but the recipients' brain still observe it.
2. If your writing goes unread, it can actually be a symptom of the lack of convincing presentation of the ideas. I spend probably 50% on the time on the introduction and it's what I write dead last. Another problem may be length: if it's too long it'll tire the reader (unless your writing is very good). Problem is that to write something compelling that is also short, is very very hard. I can bang out a 10-page document on a deadline in a day without much problem, but a 2-pager I'll have to spend much more time on.
Writing is very much a must-have, in the corporate or business environment especially.
I don't mind high level videos to give a 10,000ft view but for everything else the written word wins every time.
Currently re-reading A Philosophy of Software Design and just started "Grokking Algorithms" alongside the 2-3 fictional books I have on the go at any given time.
Where I currently work there are two of us who actually leverage the debugger everyone else is using printf() style debugging.
I can find an issue faster in a codebase I've never seen than devs who've worked on it for years but in another part - the superpower? hit a breakpoint nearby and single step through it at high speed adding stuff to the watch list then repeating it and watching the watchlist mutate.
But in my experience JS debuggers (outside the browser and inside the IDE) were kinda brittle, probably because of all that bundling and compilation going on.
Even when I'm working in an IDE that has great debugger support, I tend not to use it. I just prefer to put println's in a bunch of places, then run the code, and look through the log to see what happened.
I just find it easier to see a full log of the execution that I can open in Emacs and search through than to step through.
However, one thing I'd love to have is the ability to effectively capture the entire execution of a program, and be able to display it in log format, but then be able to jump into what the execution context was at the time of a particular log line and inspect things/step through what happened.
Creating can be blog posts, photographs, videos, software anything, doesn't matter as long as atleast one other benefits from it, just one.
This is the entire collected set, but individual collections for each specialization are also available. https://store.hbr.org/product/harvard-business-review-guides...
It is shocking how fantastic this series is and how little the tech world knows about it.
1. iOS Shortcuts - Lets you perform repeatable actions in the tap of a button. Most of us do the same thing over and over again every day. The few seconds you save not having to re-do something everyday really adds up over time. I'll give you a personal example. I've been trying to maintain a journaling habit for a while. None of the existing tools fit my need. I now have a Shortcut that creates a journal entry in Bear (https://bear.app) every afternoon for me to fill in. This simple automation helps me maintain my journaling habit because I don't have to use another journaling tool. I already use Bear for everything. Bear doesn't have an in-built journaling feature but Shortcuts lets me use it the way I want.
2. Learn keyboard shortcuts - you probably use a bunch of different software every day. Take some time to learn and get used to using keyboard shortcuts. The instant gratification you get from being able to rapidly navigate through the UI boosts your productivity.
3. Use checklists - checklists are useful for your personal and professional life. I have a Todoist project called #checklists where I store a bunch of different checklists like: start of the month, everyday checklist etc. In my everyday checklist for example, I have tasks like "Drink 3 litres of water", "Read for 30 minutes", "Workout", "Top 3 priorities for today", etc. I set these lists to repeat monthly, every day etc. (something you can do very easily in Todoist). This helps me form habits easily. A huge part of habit forming is to have someone (or some tool, like Todoist) nudge you to get started or remember to do something.
Why is this? And what can we do about it?
Kindness in your workplace and home is a huge force multiplier. Machiavelli asked is it better to feared or loved and my answer is loved 1000x over. People will do for one they love things that couldn’t be imagined for one they fear.
Furthermore it’s relatively easy to be kind. Kindness comes in many forms: remember someone’s birthday, give them a ride home, try out their app, buy something cheep from their side hustle , check their mail for them when they’re gone and water their plants, be honest about their performance at work and what they can do to improve, buy your team donuts one morning. All these are easy ways to show a little kindness.
Don’t try and take the shortcut and try to be nice or liked that’s not the same as showing kindness. It’s so easy when someone asks how they’re doing at work to brush it off and say “you’re doing fine!” all cheery but it’s another thing entirely to say “hey you’re doing good but you can improve on x and here’s the way I did it”. It doesn’t cost anything to be nice but true kindness can cost quite a bit and be uncomfortable.
[0] Of course there are exceptions to this rule, especially in e.g. mathematics. I bet Terrence Tao can eat almost everybody's lunch in math.
“The popular image of the lone genius ... is a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one, at least in the world of modern mathematics.”
Its like multiple monitors, except its cheaper. Like $0.05 a page. A lot of paper-style documentation is still a gross force mutiplier, even in the age of multiple monitors.
Learn to use paper tools to create booklets that are useful to you. I like 2-hole punch (2.75" US Standard) and comb binders. Spending a few minutes honing your paper documentation for your current task can make you grossly faster.
But exercising and eating well are also good to do.
Read more here: https://gridology.substack.com/p/how-do-you-incorporate-feed...
Learn and understand a niche business or industry. Gain expertise in a knowledge or industry domain. Software is just a tool that brings a means to an end.
I really want to find a mentor but not sure where to even begin.
The way I have found mentors is by starting with taking lessons in a skill from people, which establishes the necessary boundaries in the relationship. If they are the best at what they do, mentoring becomes the effect of the relationship itself, since mastery above the skill is what you are learning.
Mentoring someone means sharing the right experience at the right time, which means you have to be around to do it, so it's less of a transaction than a way of relating, but it can start with the lessons/transaction based relationship.
"The Psychology of Human Misjudgment," by Charlie Munger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws
http://web.archive.org/web/20151004200748/http://law.indiana...
If I may paraphrase Mr. Munger, you never want to be a one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest of life.
Furthermore, getting a solid workout in the beginning or middle of the day can do wonders for clearing the mind and stimulating creativity & problem solving.
Most of the rules that most people live by are bullshit and only serve to hold you back. The key is in figuring out which is which. In the extreme, many laws are not even enforced.
I’ve mad my living breaking all the “rules” and by doing everything wrong.
The pearl clutching rule followers equate rule following with ethics. They’re often wrong.
I'd like to hear more about this.
Why wouldn't they?
•Staying in present. Philosophers called it 'optimal state of consciousness', Psychologists call it Flow, Rich kids call it as Mindfulness. What ever it's called, its just simple focus on the present and it works wonders on mental health.
•Using DND/Aeroplane mode more i.e. limiting phone calls to absolutely when needed. As a side-effect saves battery as well & good for privacy too.
•Using email over chat, improved the quality of communication & again good for privacy too.
IMHO:
-> Mindfulness is "constant emotional self-awareness". It's a skill that enables you to being aware of your emotions and state of mind while experiencing your day to day life. This sounds ridiculous until you realize that most people aren't aware of how emotions influence their rational decision-making. We can easily see how others become temporary irrational for emotional reasons but somehow we also try to denial that the same happens to us on a regular basis. A mindful person is in a way constantly calling theirself out in their mind (e.g. "I'm currently overenthusiastic/angry/anxious/etc. because of ...")
-> I think of "Flow" as a state of mind. It can be achieved by doing something that creates a positive feedback loop with challenges and achievements. This series of challenges can be of physical/cognitive/etc. nature but needs to be always of the right difficulty level. Too hard tasks will make you feel overwhelmed while easy tasks create boredom. Both extremes will make you lose your focus and/or motivation and that's where mindfulness can be helpful. Once you become aware of the problem, you can adjust the difficulty level by adjusting the difficulty with better goal-setting and other productivity tricks. Hit the sweet spot multiple times in a row and you achieve Flow.
The general principle is never to go all out and gain the maximum efficiency, for then you lose the slack you will need when something unexpected inevitably happens. Even the best can so easily lose themselves in competitions where their desire to win drives them to take unwise risks and forego a reasonable margin of error. This is not so much a force multiplier that people don't know about, but more one that they disregard because it never seems important until you need it.
Secondly, breathing.. everybody breathes , very few people learn how to use breath control to direct attention, calmness, clarity of thought,
Lastly, mindfulness, when we eat, indulge in binge gaming sessions, basically when we give way to our immediate gratification instead of being in the present and doing the right thing.
Doing many small things right compounds.
Are there any good resources online for learning this?
I personally like McCaskill's handbook from NASA Langley because it's focused on practical matters:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900017394/downloads/19...
"Effective writing involves far more than following rules of grammar. There is a craft to creating phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that ensure communication."
Even as the greatest developer, in most settings you have to work with people. You can get very little done all alone nowadays - The basics of making people feel appreciated takes you really far.
I am not very socially adept - so this was a revelation for me when I stumbled on it after years of 'reward for good work is more work' philosophy.
The problem is, most easily accessible passive income sources aren't enough to live from, so people don't start investing time/money into them.
But multiple of them can add up over the years.
Publish on Skillshare, Educative, Gumroad, etc.
Shipping and revenue should be your goal. Sure, aim for a polished product, but don't waste time with things that don't further your goal (unless it's a security/correctness/legal issue, sure)
- You don't need to rewrite your frontend in the latest .js library just because. Ship first, think about rewriting later
- You don't need to apply those 5% micro-optimizations if your site is working fine (at least not before shipping)
- You don't need your resources in a global redundant CDN right off the bat. Use existing CDNs (for .js for example)
- The thing that will break is not how you initially thought it would go. Avoid premature optimization unless it's really obvious (example: front page optimizations).
You might not even need code at first. MVP your thing.
It's really difficult advice to follow because, very often, the thing you don't need is actually quite fun to work on. You start out wanting to work on it, so the hypothesis becomes flipped: "why shouldn't I build this", or, "If I can build this, I should".
Focusing on the category of things that fall under 'optimizations', the key here is that the problems they solve are not the problems you have when you launch something, and you will only have them at all if your thing is a significant success. They're nice problems to have. I wrote a short blog post on this theme recently: https://davnicwil.com/if-its-a-nice-problem-to-have-dont-sol...
They also force me to stay focused while I'm listening, versus how my mind tends to wander while I'm reading a print book (where I realize I've been on the same page for five minutes).
For non fiction, I'd probably agree with your 80% number. I generally prefer print in those cases, where I can easily highlight important sections and take notes.
It allows you to maintain leverage in your field because once they're successful, you both already have a relationship and it becomes a lot easier to network and strike deals.
It has a huge upside with almost no risk - all it takes is a Twitter follow.
That click of understanding the basics and being able to develop problem-fitted solutions although not perfect/professional is a game changers for most of the people. Specially people with jobs outside IT.
Like in manufacturing, the leverage of technology comes mainly from automating and scaling the repetitive. It's a shame most tools aimed at regular computer users de-emphasize, or fail to recognize entirely, the concept of batch processing.
I don't see it this way at all.
- In MS Word, OSX TextEdit, and most other editors/word processors, search and replace is front and center. Heck, search itself (both within local files and search engines) is the ultimate example of automating and scaling the repetitive, and it's everywhere.
- In OS X Finder, you can batch-rename files by highlighting them, right-clicking, and clicking "Rename [N] Files..."
- Mail merging has been a thing in MS Word and other processors for a long time.
- In Excel, all kinds of repetitive, menial tasks are immediately discoverable to even a complete beginner: highlight more than one numeric cell and the status bar instantly displays the average, count, and sum. Conditional formatting, number formatting, sorting, filtering, and all kinds of data-reshaping tasks are baked into the UI.
What about batch S&R in multiple files? What about S&R by regular expressions? What about both? There are entire dimensions of basic automation that aren't covered, except in editors used by programmers.
> In OS X Finder, you can batch-rename files by highlighting them, right-clicking, and clicking "Rename [N] Files..."
Didn't know that. I have only seen "batch rename" in Windows Explorer, and it's pretty basic (and not even advertised - whether you select one or multiple files, the option is always called just "Rename"). So if you want to turn "foo.exe" and "foo.dll" into "bar.exe" and "bar.dll", that'll work. If you want to turn a bunch of files into "foo1", "foo2", "foo3", I'm not sure if you can do that.
> In Excel, all kinds of repetitive, menial tasks are immediately discoverable to even a complete beginner
Agreed. On top of that, working with Excel is essentially programming (FRP at that), just not advertised as such. Altogether, this makes Excel one of the best pieces of software written in the history of mankind. But it's an exception that proves the rule.
* not sure how they figure out “best” but the articles are general good.
bash or any substitute.
Knowledge of a scripting language and general idea of what libraries are available for use.
Relationships with non-toxic people.
Ability to defer rewards and pleasure sometimes if needed to achieve goals on a different time scale.
Getting clues early by learning from the mistakes of others. Making your own mistakes leads to strong learning but sometimes the cost is very high and a lot of time is lost.
For instance, I’m currently trying to understand how UNO works, I have a chapter I’m writing:
https://chris-sherlock.gitbook.io/inside-libreoffice/univers...
The other thing - very programming specific - is to understand a long confusing function I found extracting if, while and for constructs to their own functions with decent names suddenly explained what was going on far more clearly.
Teaching some of these can dramatically reduce downtime.
I have been looking through both sites but could not find one actual force multiplier for my life or work, even though I would love to automate workflows. Would you have suggestions for someone doing a PhD project and communicates with a few colleagues and the occasional student?
To create any sort of impact it takes effort. Effort is your input, and impact is output.
Prioritize impact/effort first. Automate and delegate things that take effort but don’t have much impact.
Easier said then done, but incrementally moving in the direction of where the puck’s going to be makes all the difference in the long term.
Not for short regular expressions, but if you need to write longer ones you probably would want to use it.
If you take 30-60 minutes a day to be sure that little things that are easy to take care of are actually complete, over time your coworkers will think you're 5x as productive as you are now. I have to work at this; I instinctively bury myself in 1 problem and put every single other thing aside.
It's really the same trade-off as working hard on a low priority issue, but being careful not to neglect the smaller, easier, but more important issues as they come up.
These tools are not force multipliers. Adding in concepts like "compound interest" or "sunk cost fallacy" stretches that meaning even further. Just stop.
Learning how to use a good dictionary instead of just banging something into Google / Bing / DDG.
However, a good butterfly is a bad worm.
Is there a better term for this?
We have "life hacks", but this isn't that.
Leverage magnifies gains and magnifies losses. It increases risk. If the housing market tanks or rental prices drop too far below mortgage payments + upkeep then you're fucked. The more you did this, the more you're fucked.
> The expected size increase required to have the same effectiveness without that advantage is the multiplication factor. For example, if a certain technology like GPS enables a force to accomplish the same results of a force five times as large but without GPS, then the multiplier is five.
I am asking about concepts or tools that hackers have in their back pockets which 5x or 10x or 1000x their effectiveness in life or work.
This is more specific than something useful that most people don't know, though it does fall under that umbrella.
For example, "how to take apart your laptop to clean the fan and replace thermal paste" is something useful that most people don't know, but that knowledge is not much of a force multiplier.