sunny3

My $0.02: "You are complicating this" is an accusation of the recipient. In my opinion, offering the alternative you see as simpler can make the dialogue more productive, e.g., have you considered y? It's simpler because abc... and also achieves the same objective. How did you arrive at this solution? This also saves your own face if/when it turns out things are indeed more complicated than you originally thought.

Unfortunately, I found that Hide My Email complicates unsubscribing. I tried unsubscribing from Jumba Juice many times unsuccessfully, only to realize that the email that I entered was my actual email, and I should enter the email that was shared to Jumba Juice instead.

The conversation starter needs to be chosen carefully though. If it's a question about a project, it may be easily construed as dissatisfaction on the progress of the project, when the manager is neutrally curious.

Sorry I just noticed your question when I'm browsing through my comments.

I haven't used note-taking apps extensively, I use Google Docs to write things done (not exactly 'note-taking') most of the time. What I've noticed is that I frequently need to link to other docs when I'm only mentioning a high-level overview in my current doc. Some examples: * When I'm writing a design doc, I need to reference docs that record the severity and symptoms of the problems that I'm solving with my design, docs in the past that tried solving the same problems, etc. * When I'm writing an overview for other readers or just for personal organization, it goes without saying that I'll make references to existing docs.

Digest/Reminder: I think it'll be a killer feature of any card/snippet-based note-taking app! Too often, brief notes are jot down and left to rot. Some notes are intended for that - I wrote it down just to get it out of my immediate working memory, not that I intend to do it in the near future. But for some notes, I do actually want to be reminded to organize (i.e., create a personal and internal structure over) them, esp. for reading notes. WeChat isn't frequently used outside of Asia(?), but a thoughtful and automated digest sent through email or phone notification could achieve something similar.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis, by Richard Courant and Fritz John. This book clearly explained many of the motivating examples of the concepts in Calculus, which was important to me as a beginning student. Too many times I read math textbooks that simply present a list of definitions, theorems, corollaries, and whatnot, failing to guide readers from one point to another. I agree that for advanced level of math, there're probably no good motivations or 'storyline' that weave these constructs together (they're purely symbolic); however, for a layman level, I feel it's crucial to at least make the readers understand why and how these concepts come to be, so that they can grasp at least a little bit of the 'logic' of math.

Similarly, Analysis I by Terence Tao has a 'Why do analysis' that has made me actually enjoy analysis.

This book broke down a hard and mysterious topic (operating systems) for a new CS student like me into everyday analogies, which almost eradicated my fear of the subject matter. It had the appropriate amount of technical details to be usefully informative for a college class while also inspiring a more in-depth read of other material that are much more boring. The book is the reason why I love operating system so much, and I continued to take more CS classes as a math major.

Nice! Some observations:

* Good job integrating with WeChat, which significantly lowers the inertia of note-taking for many Chinese users.

* Google Keep is similar but it doesn't have digest/reminder and link-to-other-notes, which are only accessible in the flomo PRO tier.

I remember I read in HN somewhere that, people _want_ to feel useful in code reviews and one way is to leave comments. So one strategy is to send stuff out early with some small imperfections so that people who want to feel useful can pick on them. IMO, following this spirit, and in this case, an efficient but not necessarily personally beneficial strategy would be send out a PR early (so that you're not investing in too much time and not too emotionally invested in defending your solution later), then get them to suggest solutions, and implement in their way. This takes away pretty much all of the pleasure of creation in coding and deprives one of the sense of accomplishment, but it's far less frustrating and mentally straining than having to argue and defend which solution to adopt, to me, when working with that kind of people.

I'm of the opinion that happiness shouldn't be a goal of my life, for different reasons.

Perhaps I don't fully understand the word "happiness", but I've always considered it to be a rather transient state of mind: it's always on the order of hours for me, which means I don't feel happy for most of my waking hours (although one can certainly argue that one only needs e.g., 2 hours of a day of happiness, to be "happy"). Combined with the hedonistic treadmill, happiness is more like golden nuggets that one stumble upon on a path to somewhere rather than the path or destination itself.

The problem with this view though, I've found, is that it's difficult to find goals and meanings elsewhere. The vast, vast majority of people are after happiness, which makes much of the social construct centered around obtaining it and conditions me for that goal as well. It's very difficult to find alternative an alternative goal (I do believe it's easier to live life if there's a goal, not that there should be one).

My experience with the book and its patterns has been that there's an issue and some developers recognize that it could be best resolved with x, y, or z pattern. Then the developers go to extreme length to make sure the implementation adhere to the the 'principles' or 'spirits' of those patterns, so much so that it creates unnecessary complexity (e.g., unneeded layers of abstraction) and friction in other components (to accommodate the 'purity' of that implementation). What's worse, it's very difficult to challenge such implementation in code reviews, since it's originated by GOF, which automatically makes it legitimate. The worst part, though, is that you have to maintain the implementation, any deviation from those patterns is seen as corner-cutting.

Seriously, I feel you should write a blog post about this types of reporting strategies that describe the work that are both accurate and palatable to management (and perhaps most importantly avoid despise from other developers).

I think I'm in a similar situation and try to find out how to cope with it. The strategy I'm thinking about is - realizing what's happening (as you have articulated wonderfully), anchoring my self-worth else where (writing code / designing original solutions -> pushing what ever that's being discussed by those 3 people to an executable conclusion), finishing and delivering this project asap.

I guess the next step for me is to figure out how to avoid going into such situations (I entered the situation because I was joining a team in an area that I wasn't familiar with and decided to work on an existing project whose owner has a very strong presence and I didn't clarify the specific work item / boundaries clearly in the beginning).

> with no motivation to do anything

Do you have some sort of goal in mind? I guess if you're asking this question, probably not? Then set some, just for the heck of it. Last year, I was in a similar situation, and somehow I began setting goals for each week: these goals are not result-oriented but process-oriented (I call it a success as long as I spend x amount of time on it); I'd also have a single goal that I'll target to achieve at any reasonable cost. I think the artificial feedback loop (simple goal, goal that I force myself to achieve at any cost, journaling down) made me feel good about myself, probably trained my goal-setting/motivation muscle that has long atrophied.

Another thing I want to mention is that in the book Mindset, the author mentioned that what separates the academic outcomes of students with mild depression is whether they continued with their daily routine or not. I've found this to be profoundly influential for me personally: I'd force myself to complete the actions that I normally did when I'm at better states, and when I feel happy and accomplished, I'd write down what I did, which has served as a tremendously useful source of energy (mostly for self-affirmation) and benchmark when I'm sad.

Finally, it's best that one never enters into such a rut state and it's worse if one stays in it for a long time (since I recall there are many studies showing that long-term stress causes physiological damages that are hard to repair). Therefore, I'd try to self-monitor for the behavioral changes that might signal I'm about to enter into rut, and kick off the prevention strategies.

Thanks for this sharing this article! Much of it is really about alternative framing to take away the moral connotation of particular actions, which is I believe is helpful for self-conscious individuals, including men.

I've had very similar thoughts and feelings - before wfh started, some people in my cube would always say good morning etc when they arrive, and I started panicking that I didn't say hi to others, or in a group meeting where I really didn't have anything to say and stayed silent and smiling.

Then I began to think how would I feel had I acted like X and X who initiated the interaction and participated in the conversation? My answer to that is, I would probably be clueless on how to carry on the conversation and feel awkward not knowing how to stop / concluding the small talk of the morning. That's when I realized I don't enjoy initiating such interactions. Later, I realized that the real reason is that I fear I'll be perceived as less cool or less cheerful than others, but is this an actual problem, though? I've concluded that it's not, for me - I'm in a team that thankfully doesn't push everyone to have the same temperament and I just need to socialize in a way that's comfortable to myself: I might not want to greet everyone everyday, but I could hold private conversations that's a little deeper than small talk which might make slightly stronger bounds.

BTW, Quiet is a great book that I highly recommend.