
Focus Hard. In Reasonable Bursts. One Day at a Time. - pw
http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/08/20/focus-hard-in-reasonable-bursts-one-day-at-a-time/
======
benatkin
"Once there I’d get my Chai tea, open up my laptop and set my alarm for one
hour, I worked diligently for at least one hour each day, I could go longer
but at a minimum I had to put in one hour of thesis work each day."

I like this rule. I think that having a whole day off doesn't make as much
sense for knowledge workers as it did for factory or farm workers. I think
working an eight hour day is extremely exhausting for a programmer, unless
we're _really_ enjoying what we're doing. On the other hand, problems tend to
simmer in our heads on weekends and sometimes are forgotten by the time Monday
rolls around. For me, a little work each day beats trying to work a full day
five days a week.

Edit: Oh, and if I didn't have to commute 45 minutes each way, 8 hours might
be easier. That's a whole other issue, though.

~~~
dkersten
Yeah, I find it draining when working too long on the same thing and get
distracted. I can (and do) work for long periods of time, but I feel it after
and it makes me less efficient overall. I think working for many short bursts
throughout the day lets me get a lot more done (and this is how I work on my
own projects, eg during weekends: work for 1 to 4 hours (depending on the
task), 1-3 hours off, 1-4 hours on etc and at the end of the day, I'll have
racked up 5 or 6 hours of good, highly productive, efficient work. If I do 8
hours straight, I'm guessing only about 2 are actually efficient. When I was
in uni, I often leave my assignments until the last day (BUT think about them
before hand) and then sit down for maybe four blocks of 1.5 hours and get them
done in 6 hours of work - compared to people trying to sit down for full days
and spending a lot lot longer on them..

I agree - commuting means I'm tired before I even start. (Being a night person
means I'm tired when I get up for the day job in the morning too, but thats
another matter).

The full day off is important to me, but probably a lot less if I didn't get
drained from doing 8 hour days.

PS: forgive my bad comment structure, its Friday, long and busy week, I'm
pretty drained right now.. see above..

------
pwk
One of the comments reads

 _Historically I’ve approached big projects with the nonstrategy of “let them
overwhelm you in your head, then put them off till moment when the fear of not
finishing exceeds the fear of starting.”_

This is well put, and exactly how I handled all of college. It worked OK there
because project size was generally reasonably bounded.

The "fear of starting" is pretty insidious. A project often looks hugely
different on either side of "started working" line -- it can be a really quick
change from "I'm not really sure how this is going to work" to "I'm in a
groove, this is going great!"

~~~
steveklabnik
I had this exact conversation with a girl one time. She was the standard "work
and work and work and work and work and you'll do well" kind of person, and I
was more like you.

We were both in the lab, and she was working on finishing her assignment up
for our class later in the day. I was reading Reddit and working on a side
project at the time, and she asked how my assignment went. I replied that I
wasn't yet finished, and she seemed horrified. I told her I had only about
half an hour's worth of work yet, and I just simply didn't feel like doing it.
My project was more interesting. She asked why I didn't just finish it and
then I could "screw around" with the remainder of the time, because then I'd
know I was done, and I couldn't really give her a better answer.

I started twenty minutes before it was due, and finished the work in ten.

------
10ren
I've found that I only have about 2-3 hours of "genius" (for me) level work in
me per day. That's when things are clear, and I see new connections
(inspirations). If I try to push beyond that, I start to go backwards, and/or
I am exhausted the next day.

Of course, there's lots of other work to do in a day that doesn't require
"genius" level.

------
cubix
This is interesting also (linked from the article):
[http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/10/15/monday-master-class-
ho...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/10/15/monday-master-class-how-to-
schedule-your-writing-like-a-professional-writer/)

I liked this comment:

 _If you sit down at your specified time and are drawing a blank, get a new
document/piece of paper and freewrite. Write ANYTHING, even if you just write
“I have no idea what to say” over and over. Ignore spelling and grammer. Write
stream of consciousness. Just get something on the page. Eventually something
will click and you will start to come up with ideas that are more useful. But
staring at a blank page is intimidating. You can always delete/throw out what
you wrote later but you have to start somewhere._

I'm not sure there's a programming equivalent though. Playing on the REPL?

~~~
dtf
_Ignore spelling and grammer_

Alas, our REPLs and compilers won't. Computers are demanding creatures.

~~~
gdickie
I will often do this when I am drawing a blank. Write psuedo-code, or code
that is how you would _like_ it to be, if your language / macros / libraries
supported it. Then you can worry later about making your language support what
you just wrote. This eliminates a whole set of mental blocks to writing code.

------
alanthonyc
Good advice.

I read Stephen King's book on writing earlier this year. There's similar
advice in there as well (and this author references the fact that most writers
work in a similar manner).

What I've found is that I've recently slipped into a habit of doing this same
exact thing, unintentionally. Every night after dinner, I start up the laptop
and shoot to get _X, Y and Z_ done before going to sleep. (...on my
programming project...)

