1. Set your standards (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUck-umj2WI, yes it is him, but it is good.)
2. If plausible, release something shit / half done. You will feel embarrassed and want to fix it up.
3. Just get started. Do a minute. Soon you will be in work mode, and forcing yourself to no to do it, so you can sleep at an appropriate time!
4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.
5. Habits are very powerful. Your brush your teeth, right?
I'm not entirely with you about gyms in particular. Weights might just not be your thing as an individual, but "going to the gym is not fun" is often about the logistical problems of timing around gyms (peak hours, January rushes especially) and not necessarily that it's an inherently bad experience. If you're going when it's dead, it can actually be pretty great.
If you're doing it now, then yeah, it's a bad idea (and there's a separate ramble on that), but it doesn't have to be.
Broadly though, I agree with you. You'll never find me on a treadmill, but will find me on a DDR cab.
Hard stuff is not until it becomes a habit. Then you begin to enjoy the details of it and get in the zone.
Great points!
I wasn't being hyperbolic in my use of the term "80/20." The aim, fire, scan article truly only represents about 20% of the tools/techniques I swear by.
You'd be surprised. For some, brushing teeth is an explicit act of will every day, that never seems to habituate. ADHD perhaps?
Since Channing mentions interstitial journaling, I want to share my interstitial journaling app called Interstitch at https://Interstitch.app
I shared it here on HN and PH and got 2 upvotes and zero people checking it out. But I realized half the problem is most people don’t know what interstitial journaling is. Many people understandly confuse it for a journaling app. But it’s closer to a time tracking app but more for individual performance than invoicing. But I assumed I was the only person who finds this useful, which was ok since I’ve been using it to set “deep work” daily goals and summarize how I spent my week so at least I use it.
Then the CEO of Medium somehow sees the HN post and emails me that he coined the term, but I probably heard it from Ness Labs founder that Channing links to. So then I email her and she adds me to her newsletter which has like 100k subscribers and about 100 people are now using it which is cool. Good lesson in reaching the right audience.
Out of curiosity, do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?
Literally considering writing a book on extended mind theoretic ideas. Highly recommend Andy Clark's "Supersizing the Mind" (2010).
> do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?
Both. At first (~10 years ago) it was about managing deficiencies, but before long I was performing far above the average neurotypical knowledge worker.
Spoilers: Nobody is that special. Even the greats in history stand out only due to a complex combination of talent, dedication, position, and opportunity.
> Most people think that accomplishments like [those of geniuses] require "talents" or "gifts" that cannot be explained… [but] I suspect that genius needs… unusually effective ways to learn. It’s not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of “higher-order” expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657...
Observe, Overreact, Deny, Apologise?
[Edit]. Just kidding. OODA is foundational.
"As a rule with few exceptions, you want to move forward through iteration loops, not backward. (Too often, moving backward is a sign of problems with doing, not problems with planning.)"
What does that mean? a short example here would help. How do I know if reprioritizing is going backwards or a problem of doing vs. what was advised up above?
Some cool points made in this article thanks for sharing. It’s a bit broad and formulaic to be directly actionable in my opinion but that can be seen as good/bad depending on the reader
Logically, we want a Plan to move towards our Goal. As Engineers we often suffer from Analysis Paralysis: lots of paths to the goal with no clear winner. We also slow down from Impostor Syndrome: surely a smarter/more talented person knows the one true Plan forward to the goal.
> I make a plan, then do the plan, then learn from my efforts by reviewing my progress. I do this every day of the year, going on half a decade now. [At many time scales: three hour cycles going up to three-month cycles.]
I believe OP would agree that the Plan should be low quality, at least at the beginning. This encourages forward movement, and learning, vs just planning in circles and without using real-world data.
Source: writing a book on Feedback Loops
OP emphatically agrees. Overplanning is arrogance in a world with so many unknown unknowns.
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." —Bruce Lee
If you put down hours in a mindful way towards your objective, you will progress, regardless if you want to learn to play piano, discover a revolutionary drug or get rich.
Keeping it simple is probably a good policy for most people most of the time. But for those who want to break through the plateaus that simple solutions will inevitably lead to, they can look to posts like this one.
