It’s never chugging along at a consistent marathon pace. It’s always a series of sprints.
Of course, there are always five other things you know that need to get done besides the problem in front of you, but it can be a challenge to find the correct level of engagement, versus just sitting and 'marinating' in the problem in front of you.
I think the paradox is that if I spend all day doing nothing but reading documentation and farting around on Hacker News, nobody really notices. Not in the same way they notice if I spend a day on 'the wrong thing' (because I know for certain what needs to be done on this other thing). It's seen as wasting resources, because certainly I could have put that energy into the 'right thing'.
The 6 days (not always 6 - maybe more, maybe less) let me come up with and throw out stupid ideas before i've coded them. By the time I come to build something it's a carefully considered thing that'll actually be useful most of the time.
It's not just feature ideas either, it's code design, data design, anything that might be complicated enough that I used to spend multiple days experimenting. It doesn't always work out, but when it doesn't, i've thought it through enough that I have a head start on coming up with a better design.
As someone who has inattentive-subtype ADHD, I must say that this sort of pattern can result in a great deal of loneliness. It is far better to watch the course "learning how to learn" and use something like the Pomodoro technique to explicitly decide whether to be in
- focused mode
- exploratory mode
- actually relaxing and paying attention to your relationships mode
Essentially, what is your 'reward model'? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYylPRX6z4Q
Test-Driven-Development is one example of this.
My sprint is not now, my sprint starts later.
The sprint toward my spirit starts now. Reading this comment, reflecting this thought. And another is below.
Upvote the comments that you can relate to and see what bubbles up
Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit.
Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?
As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads standpoint, our users are saying exactly what they want to see every morning.
Then, it'd be nice to know how I could tweak the algorithm and its config values, so it would find such articles, thereafter.
And to dry-run the algorithm to verify that now it does indeed find that article.
(You don't have a website yet?)
I have an MVP and real userbase which I spent time growing. Now I have a platform to experiment with the grander idea here.
That being said, I'm not willing to link to this yet because it's tied to my public persona and not yet my full time job.
Mind you, there's a lot of people (myself included) who want to keep up to date on what others find interesting at the moment.
The popular/news sections of Reddit are also more heavily based on non-vote signals, like FB.
I also think that allowing the user to track the changes made to this algorithm along with some metrics ( like how much time user spent on topics, time wasted etc) would provide a helpful feedback loop.
edit: and i'll typically run through those scenarios while doing seemingly unrelated stuff, like shitposting on reddit or sitting in a blacked out room.
Of course if you try three ways to get the right way, you've "wasted" time on trying to two wrong things.
E.g. when selecting a library it's often hard to find the one case that breaks, just from reading documentation, instead playing around with the library can get you there faster.
1. Never becoming confident enough in the problem to start solving it.
2. Never getting the rubber-duck collaborator to help you even imagine how you would solve it.
Do I find the non-stop inexplicable US politics fascinating? Yes. Is it helpful to my business? Nope.
Every week i have to revisit my goals, decide whats important, and remind myself that I don't need to learn everything, be all things to all people. It's okay to choose and to say 'no' to distractions, information sources and people.
We all have had conversations with coworkers about some manager who just doesn't 'get it' and is out of touch. One way or another they are filtering out a bit of reality that it turns out is very important to us, or someone in the chain of command is filtering it out before they ever hear about it.
I wonder if the right solution is to 'audit' the information. Spend most of the time in your information bubble, with brief excursions in alternating 'directions' just to make sure that you aren't overfitting. Regular sanity checks where you turn on the firehose for a moment to see what comes out.
Because I mean, realize how big Twitter is. Its much larger than the Twitter that you are generally aware of. The popular stuff for your language and interests is a tiny fraction of the total number of tweets.
Likewise, every subculture has thousands if not millions of web pages or whatever. Every city, state, country has their own news.
Depending on what you are interested in, there may be decades or even centuries of interesting things to study or play with just in that area. For example, if you are into C64, there are thousands and thousands of games, applications, demos, magazines, etc. You could literally spend 20 years exploring it if you were motivated. That is just one subculture.
If you are interested in world history then there could be thousands of years of documents and artifacts to study. Or maybe to understand some ancient literature you need to become fluent in written Latin. You could easily spend five years learning Latin to a high level.
I just feel that if you were to really give all of the interesting stuff that's out there a chance, it is many many lifetimes worth of information.
Which is to say that the number of potential distractions is actually effectively infinite.
i have worked these hours in the past, plus my colleagues, and when there is so much pressure the least we wanted to do, and the least we did, was spending time on news sites because we were constantly tired and would rather choose to spend half an hour more on sleep
HN is hit or miss. If you believe everything said here you’d reach the conclusion that only today in 2020 can we finally build websites all thanks to microservices, kubernetes, react and rust.
This is so important and not discussed very often. It's so easy to get caught up with the insane amount of information distractions. It is pivotal to narrow down your focus and attention on the really important things (deep work). Eliminate and minimize the pointless information hysteria.
I've worked with people who claim they 'work 12-16 hour days'. Yet, watching them work, they spend most of the day reading news articles and on Twitter. It is easy to get caught up in all of this, and it gives an illusion that one is "working" as it is very stimulating to your brain.
The only answer I've found to remaining positive about the world and staying productive has been to ignore >90% of the information out there. Very little news. No social media. I even ignore most of the things people say, unless I know that they are knowledgeable on the topic. But I guess this is what HN is for... One of the only places for decent information.