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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

Calling this the “10-Minute Rule” is pure clickbait. The “one weird trick” here is to go for a walk when you’re stuck on an intellectual problem. That’s it. It is indeed a valuable solution, we’ve know this for a long time, but it has nothing to do with 10 minutes. You don’t need to wait exactly/more/fewer than 10 minutes before going for a walk nor do you need to walk exactly/more/fewer than 10 minutes, it’s an arbitrary point.

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Thank you. I feel like you've saved me from being rickrolled.

Withholding my individual clicks has zero impact on the clickbait economy, but I still feel a twinge of humiliation whenever I'm duped into clicking through.

Pro-tip: Drink water at your desk. The frequent trips to the toilet will trigger eureka moments right as you finish at the urinal. I've had my best ideas at the urinal, and not specifically at the toilet because I don't use my phone when I'm standing.

That would be good for more than just thinking.

Both long periods of sitting at your regular desk or standing at a standing desk are not good for you. For computer work what is best from a health standpoint is to work at a desk with a chain, monitor, keyboard, and mouse that have all been placed and adjusted for good ergonomics, and every 20-30 minutes stand up and move around for a few minutes. See [1].

The moving around doesn't have to be vigorous exercise. Just walking around is good enough, such as one of your trips to the toilet.

I find it interesting that taking a break for a few minutes every 20-30 minutes fits in with the "Pomodoro" system of time management. In that system you split your work day into 25 minute segments where you actively work, separated by short breaks.

I've not seen anything on why they picked 25 minutes for Pomodoro. I wonder if it is just a coincidence that it is close to how often you should take breaks for physical health reasons.

[1] https://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html

> chain

It took me a while to parse this correctly, for a second there I envisioned something else.

> Pomodoro

I agree, though I find that it has to be unconscious breaks for me. Having a timer to tell me when to stop focusing is a no-no.

What I used to do back in the '80s and '90s, before internet music streaming was a thing and before our computers had enough disk space to store our music collections, was bring a CD case full of my CDs to work.

I'd put on a CD and go to work on something. Unlike a timer going off the CD finishing wasn't really an interruption, but I would be aware of it enough to decide if should just put on another CD and keep going (which I could do well enough on autopilot to do without losing focus) or if I was actually near a good point to take a break.

We did a lot of contract work writing firmware for hardware makers, and I was supposed to track how much time I spend on each project so we could bill appropriately. That fit in well with the CD system. I just had to put all the CDs I used while working on a given project into a pile for that project, and at the end of the day add up the runtimes of them all to get the time spent on that project.

The article is written for normal people who understand the idea of a rule of thumb, not for programmers whose years of working with computers have made them overly literal.

> It is indeed a valuable solution, we’ve know this for a long time,

The number of times I've had to practically kidnap some brilliant engineer and take them to an arcade or a bowling alley or someplace like that to make them stop sitting all day at their desk trying to think past some hard problem they were stuck on suggests that it is not as well known as it should be.

> The article is written for normal people

You think “normal people” can’t understand “go for a walk” as a rule? Non-programmers aren’t dunces. You don’t need to be overly literal to understand click bait.

> it is not as well known

I didn’t mean it in the sense of “everyone knows this” but as “the body of evidence for the claim is strong”.

I hate bullshit clickbait articles because they train everyone to skip the article and read the comments, which makes discourse worse and everyone dumber.

often I find the comments more interesting than the article, and even more often I decide whether I should read the article based on the comments.

This is how i use hn. Comments first.

Yeah, no different than the misinterpretation - and parrotting - of the 10,000 hours rule. That is, 10k hrs isn't a guarantee for anything. It says that if you hope to gain mastery, expect to put in at least 10k hrs.

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