Two i's
37signals.com
37signals.com
On even days I ask "What can I do today that advances my work as much as possible?" and work long hours with little breaks and no frivolous web browsing, etc.
On odd days I ask "What seems like the most interesting and anxiety reducing things I can do?" and allow any music and frivolous web browsing I want.
Some of the benefits I find with this approach are (1) it weens you off of habitual web browsing, so even when you allow web browsing it's moderate and (2) I find even on my "off" days I end up usually being productive, though at a lower stress level, since luckily much of my work is genuinely interesting.
This post rang very true in that light. It's all very nice to only do deeply logical and important things, but it drains the brain dry because you arrive in a headspace where you are incapable of surprising yourself. Sure, you make a lot of progress - but only on existing, known problems. Those solutions you build are often useless once you get a new set of problems or the entire domain shifts and your very concept of what a problem is, in itself, is shaken. And, of course, sometimes you need to develop solutions to problems that aren't even seen as problems in the first place.
Usually, I do my best work whenever I act on a hunch, compelled by curiosity.
Screw all the tricks about how to get yourself "into the flow" and the whining about productivity. If you need motivation, do something that is interesting. Usually, it's so incredibly compelling that your brain doesn't even work in the "motivated vs. not motivated" dichotomy anymore.
And finally: If you need to do something that is not interesting, work hard on finding a part of it that is, first. That might be your entrance to finding it interesting again (or at least you get that part solved).
If you can't find anything like that, try redefining your entire approach (like "I should try to write code that in turn writes my program" or "I am now forced to code this in LOLscript"). It might end up seeming as just technological wanking (the usual "engineer takes 12 hours to program software that solves a problem he could have done by hand in 3"), but, heck, I'd rather do that than bore myself out of my mind.
I guess at some point one needs some discipline... but that's not very fun.
Mind your p's and q's.
That's your mistake: You're looking for consistent rules, instead of looking for what communicates.
In the "Two i's" title, if you leave out the apostrophe, all you're left with is capitalization. So you can try:
Two is
Two Is
Two IS
All of those are clearly wrong; they beg the question [1], "Two is what?"
The problem is, "is" is already a word. You can't possibly use it as a plural of "I", because there's no way in the world that anyone could tell that that's what you meant.
So, you have to use the apostrophe here.
It's really fairly simple if you forget about looking for consistent rules.
Of course, this is not important, but with any luck it's interesting.
[1] This applies to "beg the question" too. Forget the rules, and instead communicate with people the way they do in the real world.
redefining "beg the question" creates a communication problem, by introducing ambiguity.
Inventing new words like "blog" is progress. Confusing existing words is like solar flares flipping bits in RAM, causing unrecoverable damage to our shared system.