
The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill - ingve
https://azeria-labs.com/the-importance-of-deep-work-the-30-hour-method-for-learning-a-new-skill/
======
jonathanfoster
The author references Cal Newport's Deep Work [1]. I recently read this book
and I can't recommend it enough. It's not just a productivity fluff piece
about the importance of focus. He brings an academic rigor to the debate and
backs up his claims with legitimate evidence. Best of all, the book is not
just theory, it's 100% actionable.

I used Newport's recommendations to reclaim 4+ solid hours of deep focus and
it's had a tremendous impact on my productivity and general quality of life.

Here are a few strategies I found successful:

* Create a TODO list each day and separate tasks into shallow and deep categories

* Block off each hour of the day and and fill it with one of the TODO items

* Restrict shallow work to 2 hours (after 2 hours, say no to everything shallow)

* Create a scorecard and track the number of deep hours each day (this number should increase)

* Experiment with Newport's recommendations for two weeks and see which ones increase your deep hours

* Become comfortable saying no

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-
Distracted/...](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-
Distracted/dp/1455586692/)

~~~
BeetleB
>Block off each hour of the day and and fill it with one of the TODO items

Generally agree with the points but I'd like to note that this point is the
most likely failure point in the method. Organizing the day by hours doesn't
work for a lot of people. Most productivity books in the old days (60's)
recommended it. They generally don't anymore due to the low success rate. That
was one of the first things I tried as a student and it didn't work.

I find time and productivity management similar to dieting. It's not about
which one is theoretically or objectively the best. It's about which method
you personally can stick to. What works for one person will not for the next
guy.

~~~
bitexploder
This is addressed in Cal's book. He acknowledges no plan will survive the day
perfectly. Basically, you just re-prioritize your blocks throughout the day.
The goal is not to break the day into hour long blocks as much as it is to
always have a priority and to maintain focus on that priority. Things happen
and no plan survives contact with reality. I have found this method to work
well and fit with a modern knowledge worker's work patterns for the most part.

~~~
ViperPilot
+1

"No plan survives contact with the enemy." \- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Some clarification for readers: this generally doesn't mean that a plan is
scrapped entirely; it means that changes are normal and anticipated (i.e. NOT
an automatic sign of failure) that as new information comes to light and
circumstances shift, those executing a plan should be adaptable enough to make
adjustments where prudent. In fact, decentralized command was developed in
order to allow highly-functioning teams to actively exploit unforeseen
advantages which develop as a battle/campaign unfolds.

Although these concepts were forged on the battlefield, they are 100% relevant
to civilian 'battles' as well - in this case, time management.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Fwiw I prefer Mike Tyson's:

"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth."

Or something like that. Life and work are random and sometimes chaotic. That's
never going to change. Plans __and (personal) expectations__ should be
recalibrated to align with reality.

------
mlthoughts2018
One thing I cannot understand is why we have both:

(a) a long history of research proving to us that principles like "High-
Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)" are accurate and
highly related to extracting the most economically valuable outputs from
knowledge workers.

(b) open plan offices.

Maybe the tech industry is daunting for newcomers because we cram people into
a sardine can, give them a ping pong paddle and a craft beer, and say "don't
go home tonight until you've Disrupted Everything."

~~~
tomtimtall
I’ve worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is
that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but
overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not
everything is about your personal productivity and it’s all too common to see
separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the
joined work much much less than the sum of the parts.

~~~
B-Con
I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office.

As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a
mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them.
I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that
just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something
pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their
feedback or expertise.

The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure
information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It
certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well.

Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just
doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc.

There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm
sympathetic to them.

A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no
isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are
essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me
in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an
open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can
"share space" with the people relevant to them.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing
> that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments

I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience
point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open-
plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid
impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in
the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion,
they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away
from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible.

Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant
distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect
anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc.

It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen
asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call,
or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant,
real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing,
this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers
actually work.

~~~
B-Con
> I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience
> point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

I'm not saying my experience generalizes, I doubt every environment would see
the same benefit. My point is that even though I started exclusively
preferring one side, I can see value on the other side.

> It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen
> asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video
> call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

Far from shallow. Technically anything can be communicated in any environment,
that's not very interesting. What's interesting is how pragmatically an
environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
But an open-plan office layout assumes that all communication happens most
effectively with only _one_ possible type of communication: real-time,
constantly preemptible audio streams.

It’s shallow to say that “information sharing” happens this way, since for
many people it obviously impedes or completely prevents information sharing.

> “What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and
> what it's real life pros/cons are.”

I agree on this, which is why it only requires such a short analysis to see
that open-plan offices fail so one-sidedly. They are empirically shown to be
widely disliked, to lower morale, to lower producivity (both individually and
overall), to lead to more superficial interaction and less deep communication,
to lead to more defects in knowledge work outputs, to increase communicable
disease transmission and negatively affect sick time and vacation time habits,
all while entirely discounting the most pragmatic working styles of at least
one huge group of people (introverts) and, when all is said and done, they
don’t even save money except in the shallowest, short-term sense, and often
companies spend on opulent luxury features in order for the workers to appear
essentially as decorative office furniture for when investors or upper
management walk by.

It is more than fair to call this phenomenon shallow.

------
auntad
I really like his example at the end - step-by-step deep dive into a specific
topic. 30 hours of learning, direct links to resources, come out the other end
as informed and aware of the topic at hand.

I usually find it difficult to wade through the mountains of possible (often
outdated) resources on a topic I'm unfamiliar with - At one point I was
thinking it'd be useful to crowdsource those kind of step-by-step guides
across a variety of verticals. Kind of like an online class, except pulling
from the best up to date blog posts and specific resources from around the
internet, instead of relying on a singular POV of the guy who made some videos
and called it a course.

Anyone know of anything like that? How do you approach deep diving into
unfamiliar spaces?

~~~
sampl
I'm building this right now actually. Superclass [1] is a place to submit
online learning resources by topic, then upvote/comment on the most helpful
ones.

The goal is eventually something just like you described, kind of a crowd-
sourced curriculum builder.

This version is rough and buggy, but would love everyone's thoughts/feedback
(sam@directedworks.com)

[https://superclass.co/](https://superclass.co/)

Edit: sign up for occasional email updates here:
[http://eepurl.com/dwgBnP](http://eepurl.com/dwgBnP)

~~~
evanlivingston
Hey, I just checked your project out and it's awesome. One thing id like to
see is a way to filter submission types. Specifically it would be nice to
filter out products likes apps and books.

~~~
sampl
That's a great idea, I definitely plan on doing this soon. Thanks for the
feedback!

------
massens
One of the big challenges that I've always had is creating this habits. I
recently discovered an interesting thing:

* I use email everyday. It's important that it is clean and not full of shit. I _care_ about it.

* At my startup (Happy Scribe), we recently implemented a small feature where the tech team gets emailed/called/sms every 10m if there's any user with a problem, or for wired 5xx request (Stripe style [1]).

* With this simple conditioning, because no one wants to have a bloated inbox, we solved 95% of the issues our customers had in the past 3 months in just a week.

With this observation, we thought it had potential, and we abstracted the
concept. It would be great to add to ourselves arbitrary recurrent tasks,
where you're forced to do them. Much like if you were a computer doing CRON
jobs.

So that's what we did. We built a super simple prototype at
[https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/](https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/) where:

* You can add tasks with recurrence (CRON style)

* It has an Email interface that integrates with our actual workflow.
    
    
       * You get emailed once per task with a link to take action
    
       * If you don't take action, 3h later you start to get emailed/sms/called every 10m.
    

And so far I've sticked to daily jorunaling, and planning the day in the
morning, for 2 months. The journaling also has been pretty interesting, as I'm
using google forms, and I have a couple of scalar parameters (like ranking the
day 1-5) that I can correlate to the most used words. If anyone is interested
in trying it out feel free to create an account and send feedback :)

[1]
[https://youtu.be/nnllRegL_NI?t=14m29s](https://youtu.be/nnllRegL_NI?t=14m29s)

~~~
gwillen
BEWARE. This app is severely insecure. Nothing against the creators but they
clearly don't have much familiarity with web security. I can list things that
are obviously wrong with it that they haven't spotted, but even if they fix
those, they still are not qualified to store sensitive data, and you should
not put sensitive data into this app.

Now, most obviously: go to
[https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/activities](https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/activities)
and go ahead and view every activity that is active, by any user of the site.
It appears you can also delete or edit them without authentication, though I
didn't try.

Again, to the creators of the site: It's a cool idea, I have nothing against
you, but you're clearly not qualified to work with other people's data, and I
recommend that you stop at once.

------
RobertoG
It makes an interesting reading but I have problems with a few things.

I don't think that "to be good at something", through practice, it's
conceptually the same that understanding something new. The article doesn't
make a clear difference.

About flow state: it seems that the reason flow state is difficult to achieve
is (and I believe Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explain it in its book) because the
task have to be in the proper level of difficulty.

Too easy and it's a boring task, too hard it's a frustrating one.

When we are leaning something new, it's very difficult to find a practice that
it's just at the proper level. In fact, I would say that it's one of the most
important things a mentor can do for his/her pupils: to find the perfect
practice for the level of the trainee.

~~~
GogoAkira
because it's a given that without the effort of practice you will not come to
understand the unknown thing to you as you will not seek to understand it,
effort must be put first then the understanding comes after one two three many
repetitions, this article is just explaining a more finite path of reaching
that knowledge by turning off outside distractions and deep concentration, by
concentration i mean centering the attention to the subject in question. If
you are a fighting a battle with a katana, the first time you hold it would
probably be just like any stick in your hand, then with practice you would
come to understand many subtleties that improve on perfecting it, like that
you hold it with two smallest fingers on hand, how to put your torso, how to
set your eyes, and other things i don't remember from the Book of Rings by
Mysashi Miyamoto. When it comes to intellect, mathematics or so, you still
just keep at it and it comes. But as someone here explained that frustrating
helped him to understand the formula he tried to understand, it helped him
focus, because of him now I understand a quote by i think Al-ghazali "there is
no gaining knowledge without discomfort" , and the article helped also,
meaning mindless efortless comfortable repetitive tasks just keep you at the
same level. So pretty much this article is like a teacher, and the guy who
wrote it is also like a teacher and it helps, but you must not instinctively
just argue the opposites but rather try to understand it. Now how do human
beings come to understanding of new things, meaning how do we gain knowledge,
of course you will not find this in this article as this is beyond our limits
of intellect, but you may seek to try to understand, for instance how is it
that humans recognize the letter A, and i don't mean the shape, i mean the
contrast between the brightness, and the limit of the edges where the day and
night meet, black and white in this case, and this edge goes around the letter
and the shape of it and we understand it as a letter A. All I know that
knowledge comes from Allah, One source, He teaches humans the language, the
writing, now as for how that happens I don't think we're capable of knowing as
we don't even know how is it we learn to recognize symbols, I mean the
workings of the mind, sure we can take a brain scan and learn about neurons
and as the article mentions repetitive tasks become almost imprinted and easy
to do, like driving, but we don't get better at driving we just drive the rest
of our lives the way we drive, most of the times, because we don't focus on
learning to drive, we just focus on driving to work and smoking a cigarette or
eating a burger. Now driving a car would be like learning a mathematical
formula and knowing to implement it without actually understanding what it
does, while you still can pass the test and not understand the workings of it,
so yes surely practicing singing and sword fighting is different as practicing
something intellectual which you have to understand, but even with many
intellectual things we just have to learn how to implement it and not actually
what it does, we know a high level process and not the processes below it.
.... so like what article was talking about is that there is no natural
talent, and word naturae meaning in-born, or by-birth, aka genetic, while
there are those that are born with say eye sight and others are blind, but
regardless, if you're born with a slightly better working brain you still have
to put the effort, that deep concentration to understand the new thing and if
that new thing is say part of a bigger thing, learning a new formula you
become better at math, learning a new stance you get better at holding a
sword.... so it is the same thing, to be good at something and to learn a new
thing, because you had to learn it first to become good at it, and possibly
udnerstand it also, only now we take it for granted as we are at this level,
that's why the article doesn't differentiate that, learning two different
things is still learning and learning to understand two totally different
concepts, in the end it's one same process in our mind, learning a new thing
regardless if one is playing soccer and the other physics. So being good at
something is actually knowing understanding and learning more and new things
about it, only linguistically your mind might play a trick and make you
believe this is somehow different. Now if you want to pursuit and seek
knowledge of how humans acquire knowledge, how do they learn, and how do we
learn how to walk,and how is it possible for us to retain information, hacker
news will not teach you these things you must seek this elswhere, key word
being seek, just like in the article is 'work' or they call it deep work, both
the key word is action. You know that sensation when learning something new
and it finally just comes in your head and you now understand it, it's nice
isn't it, well learning it might be more important that knowing how it
actually happened, although it wouldn't be bad to know how, only today you
might do a google search 'how humans recognize symbols' or something, and you
will see that we know as much about the subject as we know about how monkeys
do the same thing.

------
keyle
Having a baby will really flip this on its head. I used to "geek out" like my
wife would say for a few hours on the weekend, sometimes an entire day,
uninterrupted. This is all over now. I barely get 3 hours block at best, once
or twice a week (rarely).

Thing is, there is hope, I can still get some really big things done. I
realise now how much time was wasted in the past, clicking around the web,
diverging. When you're on a deadline of productive time, focus goes up 300%.

Because you'll come to hate that feeling of being forced to stop as you were
just getting into it.

~~~
GordonS
> focus goes up 300%

I agree with everything you said, except perhaps this - every day is an early
morning with young kids, and often I'm so tired that when I get the
opportunity to work on side projects in the evenings, I just can't focus at
all :(

~~~
keyle
It gets better as they get older.

------
jfaucett
I'm amazed at how much this person's philosophy for learning mirrors my own.
Even down to the details, building habits, pushing yourself to the edge
always, deep focused flow based work.

What I would add is you should feel a little bit of stress from the difficulty
of the task. As an example, recently, I did research and in an unknown field
both for the first time. I was a little tense, it forced me to focus every
minute. If I didn't know what a formula or term meant in a paper I had to
figure it out, because I had to be able to evaluate and possibly implement it.

I had to look at papers and evaluate them on their quality b/c I was using
those to mold my own. I made many,many mistakes and failed hard many times. It
was often very unpleasant (like running when you're fit but still not quite
getting enough air on the last leg). But I kept pushing through. At the end, I
learned more on this project than I had in a very long time.

Anyways, hope my experience can help someone else to push through and see the
light on their project.

~~~
valdezm
yeah, it's not really that special, I suspect a lot of people share this
knowledge from innate sources. I always looked up derivations in Discrete
Mathematics(again, innately as my primary-mode of understanding) and to this
day... Anyways, not very special at all.. I bet you too love office hours to
discuss the professor's dissertations and enjoy long distance running too?

------
theonething
Pomodoro helps me to stay focused when i'm trying to sustain concentration. I
recently discovered this "group pomodoro" virtual study hall [0]. Somehow,
committing to doing pomos in a virtual room with strangers committed to the
same often gives me just that extra little bit of motivation/accountability I
need to stick with the current task and not let myself get distracted.

Disclaimer: No affiliation with Complice nor Less Wrong.

[0] [https://complice.co/room/lesswrong](https://complice.co/room/lesswrong)

------
adamnemecek
I agree one hundred percent with this. I quit my job a while back to hack on a
project and it’s insane how much shit you can accomplish in a good week. I
recommend it to anyone questioning their current employment situation. Hit me
up (email is in my profile) if you want to explore this life style.

The crazy thing is that even if you fail, you’ll be ten times the programmer
as when you left.

~~~
cgb223
I’d love to do something like this, but without any kind of income I’d
probably be homeless in a few months

How do you bring in money while hacking on your passion?

~~~
JaredMcFey
I’d call it investment. If you invest time into a new skill that you can use
to switch jobs or get promoted, it’s very worth putting in the time even if it
has no direct monetary value at first

~~~
adamnemecek
I agree one hundred percent. There isn’t really a failure mode to this. Worst
case you lose some money, but like when you rejoin the workforce you’ll be
somewhere else. Right now I’m like 20x the programmer I was when I quit.

------
csomar
This is delusional. And to be honest I thought I need the same deep and in the
zone kind of work/situation. Until I took this Course which is based on real
science: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

You can get stuff done, learn very sophisticated topics on a highly
distractive environment (though you'll probably need short periods of
concentrations here and there).

The trick is not to force yourself to work on something, close doors and stop
calling anyone. The tricks is simple boring repetition, zooming in and out of
complexity of the subject, occasionally jumping through chapters.

You can do it in multiple ways. Say you are learning Crypto. You can be
reading a book at home, doing an Online course at school, reading HN related
crypto topics while on transportation, coding on some lang/crypto library
while on Starbucks, etc... and achieve great levels of mastery.

And boring repetition/testing is the most important here. If you are
interested on why this works, check the course.

~~~
dmak
For me, the whole point of college was learning how to learn. Everyone is
forced to learn through traditional academic models and everyone tries their
best to efficiently digest everything for exams. That said, I sucked at
learning in an academic environment, but I learned what did not work for me.

~~~
csomar
You didn’t suck at learning in an academic environment. You just realized that
what your friends are doing is not learning.

------
chiefalchemist
> "The problem most of us, especially newcomers, encounter is that we don’t
> know what to focus on. Even when we find a topic to focus on, we seem to get
> stuck in the vast pool of resources that are available to us."

Very true. But deep work does not address the din of "Am I learning the right
thing? The right way?", as well as "If I ask a question on a forum am I going
to get assaulted and insulted?"

Fear is the opposite of learning. Fear will also demotivate. While it's true
that we all have access to extreme amounts of information, and that deep
learning is a great hack, there is still fear. How can that be mitigated?

------
pacaro
Be very cautious with some of these approaches in a corporate environment.
Shallow work can be much easier to measure than deep work. It’s easy to be
burned if you push the “monastic” approach too hard and neglect the shallow

~~~
daxfohl
Yeah a couple of things. They try to map their equation to productivity, but
really it's just level of effort. In corp theyd prefer to see max results with
min effort, so this intensity times time is not the thing you want to
maximize. Alignment with the end goal is more important than intensity. And
ultimately this article is about training. Corp is about execution.

------
daddosi
I created a formula that i havent used since i was 13 but worked amazingly
well. (Talk about hard to believe stuff eh?)

The trick was to use sleepyness as a resource.(even more hard to believe!)

You simply focus as hard as you can on the thing you wanted to
learn/study/memorize. You dont actually focus on the work but you focus in
general. As if pointing the eyes at the self. Make large eyes, keep some
muscle tense like your jaw. Breath heavily. The idea is to wear yourself out
in 20-30 min. Then go to bed and sleep 20-30 min. And repeat!

I dont know how it works but information is proccesed during the powernap.

After doing some 20-30 cycles of this you are starting to mis out on actual
sleep and some trance like state with laser like focus activates. It seems the
body gets used to using up all the powernap energy as fast as possible.

The blob of memories becomes self referential by lack of other activities.

The partially parsed modules are organized further when you finnish of with 8
hours of proper sleep.

I think the formula skips the 30 min you normally need to get into something
and it consumes just the good part of the 3-4 hours that one can normally
focus during a day.

------
nubb
this article really hit home for me. With all of the
cbt/lynda/udemy/YouTube/blablabla content out there, I'm usually exhausted
after the info gathering phase. Putting a time constraint on that is smart.

Like another commenter said, finding the perfect difficulty level to attack is
really the hard part. I've finished info gathering just to get bored or
frustrated by said info.

------
amelius
I don't understand where people in the security industry find the motivation
to learn about exploits. It seems to me that those exploits are something
highly transient, and not of fundamental value.

~~~
3pt14159
It's about training your brain to spot the type of systemic holes. You can
understand the general concept of, say, a side-channel attack but still fail
to see a new opportunity to use it in a domain you're highly familiar with if
you don't pour over the details of an attack like Spectre.

------
deepGem
I have been following learning to learn on Coursera. The course instructors
lay a strong emphasis on deep work, but teach you how to learn. Prior to
taking this course, I was getting into periods of deep work on and off but
didn’t learn anything substantial. What I mean by learn is that I couldn’t
transfer the learned skills easily.

Now, I spend a lot more time learning a topic, and follow the course
methodology of chunking. 2 days in and I can already notice the differences. I
woke up this morning realising there is a bug in my queue implementation.

------
georgewsinger
An underrated phenomenon to explore in productivity research: so called
"supertaskers", or the ~2.5% of the population who are able to multitask
without cognitive impairment:
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/PBR.17.4.479](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/PBR.17.4.479)

------
vit05
There is any relationship between Pomodoro Technique[1] and Deep Work? Using a
tracker to force you to concentrate on the specific task could help to archive
the goal?

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique)

~~~
el_cid
I have been using the Pomodoro Technique with good results for a while now.
What it helps me with is to get started. I noticed that my reluctance to get
started increases proportionally with the complexity/difficulty of the task.
However knowing that all I have to do is just spend half an hour on TRYING to
make progress makes a big difference. This concept of trying instead of the
pressure of solving the problem outright made a big difference in my
motivation.

------
anant90
I recently reviewed the Deep Work book myself here: [https://anantja.in/deep-
work-c4a1b7232482](https://anantja.in/deep-work-c4a1b7232482)

The post has a collection of some of my favorite observations and quotes.

Can't recommend the book enough!

------
hajderr
There's no references to the statement that we have a finite amount of
willpower per day. This is unfortunate to read as it has been discussed before
that the willpower is something that's fluctuating and can be triggered by
different things.

------
tnorthcutt
Josh Kaufman’s book The First 20 Hours seems relevant here:
[https://first20hours.com/](https://first20hours.com/)

(You May recognize Josh as the author of The Personal MBA, which is an
excellent book.)

------
dkural
" dedicate a few consecutive days (like weekends, or a Sunday, for example)"
\- who's parenting the kids? Note that about 86% of adults end up having kids.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
In the grand scheme of life, if you have 2-3 kids on a typical age
distribution, the years in which at least one needs to be taken care of the
majority of the time is 10-15 years. You'll likely have 2-4x as much time
where you're both lucid and not responsible for childcare.

Incidentally, that ~decade will likely be the most precious of your life;
don't miss it. [1]

1\. [https://avc.com/2010/06/being-present/](https://avc.com/2010/06/being-
present/)

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eric24234
The advocates of open offices are always non coding managers.

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thematrjx
What a post. Really very inspiring and very useful in a college student's
life.

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rs86
Click bait.

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taeric
I'm worried this is nothing more than intellectuals showing pretty severe
selection bias.

Take the archetypes listed. There are non famous failures in each. Selecting
the successes is a bit of a sleight. Worse, the logic of, "if it isn't working
for you, you should try a different method. It is you that is incompatible,
not the methods."

I mean, I want to think that Poirot's "little grey cells" are a thing. And I
know I have solved problems by thinking about them. The same problems
colleagues were busy trying to solve.

I also know my colleagues have probably done more busily solving things than I
have thinking about solutions. More, I know they also think. It is not an
either or.

So what is to be learned? Keep trying? Change strategies. But stay away from
goto statements. There is not true way, but your way is probably wrong. Or at
least, you are wrong for that way? :(

~~~
the_seraphim
I think what they are trying to convey is that mindless practice simply
reinforces current skills.

We've all been in that state of high performance where suddenly its 2am and
you think "ok 5 more minutes" then its suddenly 4am.

I would liken a lot of what he is saying there to a kind of trance state,
similar to self hypnosis, where there is only the work in front of you.

I get into this state most often when I sit down to produce any kind of art, I
spit and spat around starting but then after a while settle into it and can
spend hours working on something, its a whole different feeling to just
regular doodling, its all encompassing.

~~~
taeric
I get that they want to convey that. But prove it. There have been some
studies into this, I am sure. Show some of the replications. (Specifically, do
not show the initial studies.)

Appeal to the times I've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of the
times I did the same and produced _nothing_. Not only produced nothing, but
consumed nothing, as well. Both have happened. I do not keep a solid journal
to say that one happens more than the other. One certainly made me happy, so I
can remember it better. But that is the definition of selection bias.

~~~
coldtea
> _Appeal to the times I 've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of
> the times I did the same and produced nothing._

Were you really focused then? Not having distractions but still staring
blankly at a screen, is not the same as focusing.

Worst case, even if you try 100 things and none of those works, you know that
these 100 things are not the solutions to the problem -- something that you
didn't before. And you didn't just reject 100 random things, but 100 things
that you legitimately could consider as solutions.

I've never not had at least partial results when I have been focused. I've had
nothing too many times when I was distracted.

~~~
taeric
This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though. I have been plenty focused
before and not accomplished anything of note.

More, I've had plenty of brief diversions into a topic that produced more
learning than some deliberate attempts I have made.

~~~
coldtea
> _This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though_

I think the "true Scotsman fallacy" is often used as a way to dismiss actual
classification mistakes.

What one calls focused might not actually be focused -- humans are easy to
deceive themselves.

Besides, I don't see what other possibility would there be. That being focused
is not important? That people can just as well achieve the same (or even more)
things when unfocused vs when focused? That we need special statistical
studies to be able to tell that working focused on that work is better? None
of these look plausible to me.

If what you're saying is that sometimes non-deliberate attempts can work too,
that might be so, but by definition those are non-deliberate, happy accidents.

You can't program these. What you can program is actual work -- and that
better be focused, than, "I'll fool around for weeks with other things until
inspiration strikes".

~~~
taeric
So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy accidents,"
as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the result of
deliberate focused work.

So, why then don't we encourage more practices that encourage happy accidents?

I accept that the one argument is more appealing to emotional logic. I am
highly suspicious of arguments that speak to that form of plausibility.

~~~
coldtea
> _So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy
> accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the
> result of deliberate focused work._

Then I'm arguing that you're an outlier in that.

And I'll add that for most people, even those happy accidents come when
they're engaged in focused work -- not when they're having distractions all
the time. Do you really get happy accidents while some colleague annoys you
with questions every few minutes, or while checking your Twitter and Facebook
and not doing anything specific?

~~~
taeric
Most of my happy accidents are while I'm biking. When playing with things.
When jumping quickly through all the details with a co-worker.

(Twitter and Facebook? Yeah, not so much.)

Do, could I be an outlier? Certainly possible. But I don't think it is a safe
thought. More likely, I am a near average person. Which is why I would love
studies actually demonstrating this.

