
30 minutes a day - mrschwabe
http://mindfolder.com/blog/30-minutes-day/
======
espeed
See Rich Hickey's talk on Hammock Driven Development
(<http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586>).

Rich talks about how thinking about something transfers the idea from your
conscious mind to your unconscious mind (your big brain) where the real
horsepower is. In another talk he mentions that he has been able to spend a
year doing this three times in his life: one was for Clojure, one was Datomic,
and one other yet-to-be-named project.

John Cleese also talks about this in his lecture on creativity
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg>).

~~~
swalsh
That's a really great clip!

This is the best part of having a dog for me, especially one like mine who is
perfectly happy strolling along smelling the flowers. It's always an excuse to
go out, mostly at night when it's quiet, and mull over ideas.

~~~
rmckayfleming
True say, I've found walking the dog to be a great time to think. Not only is
it time to yourself, it gets the blood flowing and of course the fresh air is
great.

------
frownie
Just my own experience here. I commute every day, it's a 1 hour train trip in
both directions. So I get 2 hours a day just for me. There I work on a side
project. It means 8 hours a week. That's not much and a lot at the same time.
The intersting thing is that I had to get used to it. Now I just do those two
hours no matter what happens. It has become a routine and it's not that
exhausting. Also, since 2 hours a day is not much, I have become _very_ picky
about my tools. In a one hour trip, I cannot aford to have my Eclipse to be up
and running in 3 minutes => I changed editors. I cannot afford to spend 10
minutes trying to understand code I've written months ago, therefore I write
my comments as I should, I write things as simple as I can. Since I only have
one hour on a trip, it means I must solve my problems in that hour (if not,
the time to start the task becomes too long). Therefore I choose my problems
before getting in the train and I use a lot of "BUG", "FIXME" notes to put
aside non urgent matters. I also don't have any web access in the train =>
impossible to get distracted (but then I need very good documentation to help
me out when I need some information). The biggest hurdle to me is that moving
from prototype to production-level takes a huge amount of time => sometimes a
I set to work in the week end in order to have say 2-3 hours in a row to solve
issues spanning across the whole code.

About choosing tools. I've selected ruby first, but ruby + Qt is not stable
enough (I cannot afford to look for a strange bug in a C++ binding). So I
moved to Python where things are better in that regard. I started with Eclipse
(because it had a good and free Python IDE) but it takes too long to boot =>
now I'm in emacs. So although I prefer Eclipse or Ruby, I've deliberately
chosen other tools to shave a few minutes here and there. (3 minutes is 5% of
the time I have so that's important)

my ten eurocents

------
tferris
Couldn't upvote this more.

The post addresses the biggest problem when starting side projects. After a
idea is born, a prototype is built in one or two intensive days, usually at
the weekend. Afterwards it's so hard to carry on, your main jobs (which is a
welcome excuse to not work on your side project) takes too much time and
suddenly ten days passed and you haven't worked one minute on your side
project—it dies. It's difficult to pursue multiple opportunities, I usually
focus on one big project and I know it's wrong.

~~~
leoedin
I recently made a list of partially-done side projects. It's long. I set a
target to not start any new projects. Unfortunately, the fun part is the first
part. Taking something that works 90% and dealing with edge cases and
polishing it is (for me anyway) far less exciting than hacking together
prototypes.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I'm not alone?

<https://ajf.me/stuff/ihavewaytoomanyprojects.gif>

Guess how many of those are finished.

Edit: And that isn't even including the ones from this year!

~~~
EvilTerran
Hey, me too! Half-finished game concepts, crappy little tools I never ironed
the bugs out of, random ideas that never even got as far as _compiling_...

You've got way more unfinished projects than me, but they sure do pile up
quicker than you think.

------
leoedin
If you want to write a novel, most of the advice I've seen is essentially "do
it". Almost any project will benefit a great deal from dedication.
Procrastination is the real cause of most things that don't happen.

Saying that, I take real offense at the equation given in the article.
"Focused energy + xx minutes + once per day = idea manifestation"?

Should it not be (focused energy + xx minutes) * once per day... Or perhaps
even focused energy * xx minutes * once per day.

If you set any of those variables to 0, the outcome is 0. It's clearly a
multiplication problem.

~~~
mrschwabe
Nice call, equation updated. I'm a designer not a programmer :)

Regarding your point, I completely agree. And is why I shared this little
strategy. I suppose its a form of scheduled anti-procrastination.

~~~
leoedin
I think years of math classes has made me a little bit too analytical...

Otherwise a great post. The real challenge is actually doing it in practice!

------
PaperclipTaken
I particularly like the comment about discipline. I've read the arguments that
we are in a current period of technological stagnation, and if that is
actually the case I think one of the big detractors is our lower levels of
discipline compared to people in the 20th century.

Over the last 30 years or so, the media has gotten much more effective at
making us slaves. We are more compelled to watch mind-numbing programs on TV,
and now today play mind-numbing apps, and view mind-numbing content on the
internet.

Even 'thoughtful' content like that on HN has the effect of scattering our
minds and making it harder to focus on a particular task.

I think times like these 30 minutes, where you buckle down with no
distractions can be very beneficial to overall productivity.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Discipline is something I lack and need to force upon myself.

I tell myself I do programming in my free time. I tell myself that.

But then I look at my free time, and I realise I spend it all browsing
HN/Reddit (occasionally)/BBC News/Forums. I don't do much programming at all.
Because I get distracted far, far too easily. Sometimes I'll look back on the
past week and realise I've done absolutely nothing of any value.

I've set myself 30 minutes tomorrow to work on something. Perhaps I'll finally
learn Lisp and venture into functional programming, after all. Maybe I'll
improve my programming skill again.

------
hnhg
Instinctively, I'd agree with this kind of stuff but after reading through I
want to say, "Where's the evidence?" If you're claiming this stuff, tell me
how it's worked for you and others in terms of reaching success, and don't cop
out and say it's "perfectly logical" - there's nothing logical about being
human.

~~~
mtrimpe
I used to play around with these kinds of hacks all the time. They didn't get
me all that much ahead though.

It wasn't until I learned to push myself to give my day job a top notch
performance and eke out four more hours of coding at night, that things really
started to take off.

It is similar to losing weight for me, in that all the mind tricks and fancy
diets didn't do a thing until I learned to accept the hunger that comes with
actually losing weight.

~~~
mailshanx
Can you elaborate?

~~~
lusr
Can't speak for the parent but I think I understand where he's coming from.
For me, it was reading the section on procrastination (which requires reading
the preceding sections on dysfunctional thought patterns) in David Burns'
"Feeling Good" that did the job.

Once you see all the possible reasons people procrastinate listed in front of
you, and a plan of action for each scenario, it's pretty difficult to
procrastinate because every time you find yourself in a potential
procrastination scenario your brain goes "oh hang on, I know what I'm doing,
it's X from _Feeling Good_ ". At that point you can execute the anti-
procrastination plan, or, as in my present case, I don't even bother any more
because I've done it enough to know I'll invariably end up getting to work and
so I just go right ahead and do it.

The key thing here is you need to (a) be committed to change and (b) you need
to study the book and do the exercises. Refreshing my procrastination pattern
matching memory from time to time by rereading the section is critical. Many
people aren't ready to stop procrastinating because they're not ready to take
action. But just like debugging code, you just have to follow the chain of
dependencies until you deal with successive root causes. Prochaska's "Changing
for Good" put me on the path of awareness in this regard. Once you know what
your brain is doing it's pretty difficult _not_ to make progress.

------
ww520
It sounds good on the surface but I don't know how feasible it is on practice.
Creative work is not something you can turn on and off on command. You tend to
think long and hard about a problem throughout the day. You think about it in
shower, while driving, and during eating. There are fair amount of ramp up
time to get back into a project. The things you have done, the tools you use,
the libraries for the project, the API, all those need time to refresh in your
mind. Context switch into a project 30 minutes a day would be difficult. If
you can do it, that's great!

~~~
adrianhoward
_Creative work is not something you can turn on and off on command_

Actually - it is. Or at least it's often something you can often train to a
reasonable facsimile of working that way.

You're right - of course - that those moments when you're not working on the
project explicitly and mulling everything over are often the most important
ones. But I think you often train yourself to get into the right working
context very quickly.

As a scriptwriting friend of mine says "No write. No money." ;-) My musician
friends - at least the ones who take it seriously - sit down and do that
couple of hours of focused practice each day no matter how they feel.

I find the more often you put yourself in a situation that you need to do
_something_ , the easier it is to do something. You find ways to optimise your
workflow and approach (e.g. I have a my project WIP in a vagrant VM and I
write code TDD - so I spin up the VM, open the editor, see the failing test I
left yesterday and _boom_ I know what I'm doing).

If I sit around wait for inspiration - shit never get done.

~~~
ww520
Let me clarify creative work on new or multiple ideas is not easy to turn on
and off on command. It tends to take a while to build up the domain knowledge,
project specific tools, project specific API to be creative on the project.
That's consistent with your emphasis on practicing day in day out.

The example you gave is for the main project you are working on day in day
out. Yes, you can easily resume work the next day. What the OP advocating is
working on multiple different projects for 30 minutes a day. It's just more
difficult to context switch into multiple projects with such a short amount of
time.

------
luxpir
You're right. Just put in the hours regularly and so much can be done. I think
the problem for most, me at least, is the _regularly_ part.

I recently started _Project Persist_ , involving an hour of side-project work
per working day. It has gone reasonably well, with some decent strides made,
but as soon as priority work emerges, often for days at a time, the side-
projects wait again. Solo-founder issue, maybe.

But it's good to see others trying to buckle down, work systematically on
creating something of value to all concerned. It's tough. But rewarding
results don't come easy, I guess.

Edit: Forgot to mention, I appreciate your blog design. I'm no designer, but
that's no ordinary minimalist design to my untrained eye.

------
zygen
Related is a great site I found through HN recently: <http://chains.cc>. It
helps you track doing things daily and allows you to see your progress

~~~
neilkelty
That's an absolutely fantastic idea.

------
bho
I upvoted this, because I think it's definitely a good way to stay focused
(and I should be doing a better job of it, too). but the issue with his
analogy is that brushing your teeth is fairly routine. you go about it at
pretty much the same time every day, and you don't have to think about it.

working on your idea, however, is different each and every day. some days, the
challenges are greater. some days you may need more than 30 minutes.

point taken though, and I'll be trying harder to stick to it.

~~~
mrschwabe
Exactly man - great point on the analogy, your dream project is certainly no
routine thing.

Yet you can make it more 'routine'; engraved into your daily schedule. By not
approaching the specific challenges, but rather - just the minimum amount of
time you have agreed with yourself is appropriate to invest. Anyone can
convince themselves to do that much. And the funny thing is - the challenges
then seem to work out themselves.

------
dgregd
So in the time it takes to brush teeth, take shower, roughly 30 min daily, it
is possible to build a dream project, a business?

It takes 15 min to fully focus again on work, which was interrupted by a phone
call, colleague question. That's our reality.

I would suggest to spend these 30 min on some physical activity and you'll
much happier.

------
SonicSoul
good read. reminds me of this article on staying focused:
<http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/how-to-focus>

------
swixmix
I tried the equation. It's 113/watts per 30 minutes of idea manifestation. My
notes are at <http://pastebin.com/MG0z5u6M>

Corrections are welcome.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
I love this as ultimately it shows what nonsense the equation really is.

I detest people doing "science-y, maths-y" things to try and give credibility
to an idea. The idea here is fine, the equation utter bilge.

For me it goes back to hearing Jeff Dachis of Razorfish doing a talk in which
he mentions boolean postulates which left me in little doubt that he knew
precisely as much about mathematics as you'd expect from someone with a
bachelor’s degree in dance.

BTW - On the last line you mention "watts per half hour". This makes no sense
here - a watt is a measure of energy over time, watts per half hour would be a
measure of energy over time over time, or more neatly change in power.

------
dave1619
Helpful post. It highlights how fragile an idea is and how much energy and
focus is needed to advance the idea forward. I face this often, and it's
helpful to work in a group/team of people. There's something about a team that
naturally progresses ideas forward if the leader of the group keeps the idea
is discussion.

------
wslh
I found that even 10 minutes are enough if you are oscillating between
different ideas all the time.

------
adrianhoward
I have _exactly_ this pattern. I have a bunch of

    
    
        @Daily      30m: [Something or other] 
    

tasks in my todo.txt to make sure that I actually do _something_ on those
projects every day.

------
arvinjoar
30 minutes is not efficient at all, it takes time to internalize something
complex, and get into "the flow", pg talks about this in his essay about "The
Maker's schedule".

------
keva161
Flaws in the equation aside.. pretty inspiration stuff

------
par
This is great, and is true for so many things in life.

------
yashchandra
Brilliant. I am having a tough time focussing on _a few_ of my ideas. Even if
I get a good 30 min day, I will be so happy.

