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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

My most productive periods in life was before I moved in with my girlfriend.

We'd live together on weekends, but not the weekdays. So I'd work on problems all week, and then go visit her, bringing no computer or anything like that.

I always came up with a bunch of solutions to hard problems I'd been working on during those weekends away from the keyboard. They'd just appear in my head one by one, throughout the weekend. All of my most inspired ideas came out of that period. It's as though working activley on a problem spawns a bunch of threads that, without serious time away from the problem, continuously get interrupted and never resolve.

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Wake and sleep, workout and rest, prospers in balance. But this also means you can't just hang out in the showers and expect solutions. You have to work on it, then rest.

YES, exactly this.

My method in college ended up being explicit balance. Study, read, ingest as much knowledge on the topic as I could until I felt I was at either the point of diminishing returns or having sufficiently covered the subject, taking some, but not copious notes. Then just start doing idle things, specifically letting the "background processing" happen in my brain, things like running/hiking, going to dinner, etc. Mostly just waiting for the ideas to form and appear. At that point, I just started rapidly scribbling draft shards, in whatever order the ideas appeared. When that slowed down, it was time to wrangle the shards into a properly organized paper, which usually also included finding a smaller number of new connections among the shards.

The whole key was first feeding selected info in, then allowing — and trusting — my unconscious brain the space to work on it.

FWIW, I tend to find that it doesn't have to be a full brain idle. Some active component seems to be helpful, but I think it needs to be easy to pause and that there's a sweet spot on the amount of engagement.

Reading actual books or other longform documents is usually pretty fertile/generative. Watching youtube or a movie or listening to a podcast doesn't do the trick. Writing and editing are both also pretty good.

Walks are good, but biking/running/swimming don't seem to be.

Programming can be good in the sense that it regularly reveals missing tools/libraries, but I don't find the work itself all that generative.

My most productive time was when I was alone in my mid twenties. I did so much cool stuff that I look back fondly on between 10p and 2a. Once I found a wife and had a kid I have almost no productivity outside of work but I honestly don’t care. Life is good.

Early mornings can still be a possibility.

As well as breaking productivity of the past into really small steps.

How did you manage remembering or recording ideas and inspiration such that you could recall them sufficiently when getting back to work?

For me just jotting down four words in any notes app or email draft contains enough information to pick it back up later.

I eventually settled on a shortcut on my phone's home screen that opened up an email to my work email. So all I had to do was press that shortcut, write the note and send it. Then come Monday I would have a couple notes from my self waiting in my inbox.

I'm not the parent commenter, but no computer doesn't mean no access to writing implements, and writing something down physically can render it mentally ‘sticky’ in a way I've never been able to replicate in software.

I just write it down somewhere. Usually the solution is much smaller than the problem, so a 1-2 line note and a sketch goes a long way.

In general I make a habit of writing down anything I think I should do. It's easy to think you'll remember, but those types of thoughts are extremely fleeting, and you almost never remember then when it's time to get to work. Such note-taking is pretty much the backlog for my life and a principal key to getting a lot of shit done.

I send myself a message on slack with a reminder usually

Most of the ideas that came to me in similar times as OPs are like “actually we don’t need that new database at all, the data is already in the main db”-kind of ideas. So, notes are not really needed.

This makes me wonder what problem this was a solution to

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When information grows unprofitable, sleep.”

Time away from the keyboard is as valuable, if not more as time at the keyboard.

Many such cases.

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