
If you're busy, you're doing something wrong - scott_meade
http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/
======
nhashem
Here's my theory: the blocks of time the elite players spend is non-
negotiable, because it's their "top idea in the mind."[0]

In the past when I've worked with friends on side projects, the conversation
would sometimes go like this.

Me: "Hey, let's try and meet like three evenings a week for two hours to work
on this. Let's start tomorrow?" Them: "Yeah -- wait, I have to meet a friend
for dinner tomorrow. Can you do the day after?" Me: "Sure."

[two days later]

Me: "Hey, we're still meeting up tonight, right?" Them: "Crap, I have to work
late. Let's meet on Saturday and just bang out some work all afternoon."

We're fucked. We're fucked before we've even started. If every "dinner with a
friend" or "I have to work late" is going to sideline you, then how the hell
are you supposed to _do_ anything? Even if we do work for six hours on
Saturday instead of three two-hour sessions during the week, it's just not the
same. We'll have no cadence or rhythm and feel stressed and probably a lot
like the people in the OP's study.

A few years ago I recognized this anti-pattern and so I don't really take on
new projects or goals unless I'm literally willing to prioritize everything
but the bare essentials (ie. family) above it. PG's "Top of Your Mind"
describes what 'mental prioritization' looks like, and I think this study
points describes what 'schedule prioritization' looks like.

I realize that my own conclusions are my projections completely based on own
anecdotes, and I'm sure many people on HN won't hesitate to point out the
logical fallacies for why that's dumb. But look back in your life and think
about the times you've consistently said, "Sorry, I can't make it, I have to
do X first." Did you eventually reach a level of achievement with X? I'm
guessing you probably did.

[0] <http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html>

~~~
rohern
I do not think this is dumb at all. You have stated the problem very clearly.

I would like to ask a question that nags me every time I read an article like
this: Why do we assume that we need "free time"? And to answer this, I have to
ask another that occurred to me while reading the article: What do these elite
players do during their free time?

This is an important questions for programmers and engineers, because we
generally enjoy building things. In the context of the article, I take it as
implicit that the one thing the elite players are not doing in their "free
time" is playing music or that would obviously be a form of practicing.

So, then what is this free time that the elite have and how are they using it?
Are they bumming in the front of the TV? Is the formula for success: work
intensely for two short blocks and then veg?

~~~
j-g-faustus
> Why do we assume that we need "free time"?

Two reasons:

* For better or worse, humans are not machines. We can only keep doing the same thing over and over for so long before we go crazy, somewhat like Chaplin in Modern Times [1]. Creative work is somewhat less tedious than assembly line work, but there's still a limit.

* Because "non-free" time is time you spend making somebody else happy: Your boss, customers, friends or family, or society at large, e.g living up to expectations that you ought to be successful. Somewhere in there you need to make room to make yourself happy as well, it's not possible to live a life merely by attempting to live up to other people's expectations.

> I take it as implicit that the one thing the elite players are not doing in
> their "free time" is playing music or that would obviously be a form of
> practicing.

That doesn't follow. The kind of practice that makes you better is the boring
stuff - playing scales and working on your technique. Doing fun stuff like
playing your favorite tunes may be part of the training, but it's not the kind
of training that improves your skills.

To keep learning, you need to keep pushing yourself into new unfamiliar
territory, and to stay focused on mastering it while you're there. And we
generally can't stay that focused for more than a couple of hours at a time.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wENE7O-Y6ME>

~~~
rohern
I see where you are coming from and your response is of the form that expected
to receive, but I am not convinced by your objections. Part of the problem, I
realized while writing an initial response to you, is the split definitions of
"free time". On the one hand, there is free time that we take because we find
our performance declining, and so we stop our activity for efficiency reasons.
And then there is free time that is really The Time. Free time of this sort is
what life is all about, it is why we work.

My query was intended to refer to the second definition.

Neither of your objections have much to do with the first definition, and they
do not satisfy me with regards to the second form of free time. If you
consider the case of someone like a physicist, for whom their great love is
also their form of achieving "success". For people of this type, and for
ambitious people who discover fulfillment through worldly success, work is
exactly the sort of activity that brings them happiness.

So perhaps that's the split. People of these types concern themselves with
free time for efficiency, and the rest concern themselves with the second sort
of free time. Perhaps this is also the split between the elite players and the
music teachers.

------
ruswick
The methodology used in this study raises some questions (which were
exacerbated by the poor interpretation on the part of the writer) and makes me
quite hesitant. First, the link between leisure time and "eliteness" is
incredibly weak: free time is a product of a myriad things, and tends to be
quite volatile. Moreover, the piece explicitly states that the two groups were
destines for largely divergent career paths. Two people who do two different
but related jobs likely still spend time in very different ways. For whatever
reason, this person seems infatuated with conflating correlation and
causation. Frankly, I just don't see how one can draw any conclusion between
something as nebulous as free time and something as specific as musical
ability. The author doesn't even attempt to prove me wrong.

Second, the author proceeds to extrapolates these results and asserts that
everyone ought to adhere to this method of practice. Why? Is there any
evidence whatsoever that sugests this is universal, or at the very least
common to a few fields? All that is given is this research that is pertinent
only to music students. It seems as though laborious, high-stress situations
might be preferable to a casual but "deliberate" schedule in a lot of
instances. Entrepreneurship and Academics are two domains that come to mind...

This piece is just a very poor interpretation and extrapolation of very
specific correlative data. I don't buy these conclusions.

~~~
dclowd9901
Not only that, but what if the more elite players felt more relaxed because
they grasped new concepts more quickly because they simply had a greater base
level of talent (genetics, brain make-up, et. al.)?

Let me find a study, breathtakingly misinterpret the results and write an
article that has an overly applicative bait-y title and start ringing in the
views. It's apparently that fucking easy.

------
ebbv
This kind of attitude is so insulting to me. Go walk into any minimum wage job
or factory job and say this to people there with a straight face.

This is privileged people mistaking their privilege for the reason for their
success instead of a result of it.

------
nicholassmith
Things like this bug me because it's taken on a small set of people and
immediately categorises them out. In the big, bad real world super smart
people still end up burning the candle at both ends at periods of time because
_they have to_.

Look at our start up folk heroes, super smart geniuses who work 18 hours a
day, network for 2 and sleep for 4. _They're_ busy because _they have to be
busy_. If you're busy it's because you're busy.

~~~
strait
I think you are confusing "super smart geniuses" with elite achievers?

~~~
nicholassmith
I don't think I am, an elite achiever is a super smart genius, and a super
smart genius is (generally) an elite achiever. I'm just being more flippant.

~~~
yakiv
I think strait is right. "Elite achiever" only (directly, anyway) has to do
with performance, not intelligence.

------
humbyvaldes
I dont buy it. Unless your wasting your time on pointless busy work like
trying to decide what color a link should be, hard work has always worked for
me.

~~~
RyanZAG
It depends very much on the type of work you are doing. If you are building a
brick wall, then spreading out the hours isn't going to make much difference -
it takes 100 hours to build that wall or whatever. Music practice is very
different though as simple hours are probably not enough - you'd need to
really engage with and commit the music to muscle memory (I'm no musician,
just guessing).

Something like making a CRUD web app is probably closer to building a wall
than perfectly playing a concerto. If you're trying to build in a brand new
feature into your web app that requires genuine creativity and a difficult
algorithm, then you'll probably find that creating that feature in a single
intense session while still fresh is going to work far better than trying to
patch it together across a day of interruptions.

------
lifeisstillgood
I can see the glimmer of the lesson in here - but it is a slippery bugger.

I suggest that there are concepts and capabilities that the elite have that
average do not. Let's call it complier design or writing prolog.

Writing an enterprises decision engine in Prolog can save time effort energy,
maintenance and be worth a fortune in a competitive Market.

But if you are the Prolog programmer, being able to perform is like being
Yehudi Menuhin out busking. The elite player needs an orchestra and a concert
hall and ticket sales.

Start up founders usually are busy building the concert hall, handing out
flyers and selling tickets. A very rare few also play the violin well. No
major corporation is going to turn up on HN asking for Prolog devs to rewrite
an engine.

------
TheCapn
I'm curious how this would work out if they had studied amateurs taking up a
new craft from scratch instead of jumping into their established lives. Have a
large group take some sort of test to measure starting ability then give them
the journals and a set amount of time to learn.

When time is up (say a few months to year?) have them come back and review the
progress objectively along with their scheduled journals to find patterns
between relative progression and time utilization.

My completely subjective opinion is that in a strongly controlled study you'd
never get such black & white results. There are people who have a better
natural ability to learn certain tasks than others. While I played an
instrument in school I was never phenomenal but I exceeded many kids who
practiced several hours a week to my _maybe_ combined time of an hour weekly.

Gaming is similar: get a group of friends to all pick up a new game and play
it for an eve, judge who got better by the end and there will always be stand-
outs. Some people will have adapted abilities and skills from other
games/tasks to advance; others may pick a important subset of the overall
skills and hone that for the time to develop a depth of knowledge while
possibly lacking a breadth but the skill gap almost always develops and you
can't contribute that to time invested so much as natural ability to adapt.

------
RougeFemme
Someone asked the question "how does this apply to coding?" Yes, how would
"hard practice time" apply to coding. Is that the time when you're actually
head-down writing code? What about the time when you're _not_ head-down, in
your hard work and, for example, mulling how to get past a point where you're
stuck? And is there an analogous activity for musicians - when they are not
"hard practicing" but working through something in their minds?

------
ivanhoe
This is about learning a very specific skill that requires a lot of practice
and building a "muscle memory". To some extent this applies to students and
some top sportsman, too. For the rest of us, however, most of the work related
problems are not about us not being skillful enough, but about the amount of
(fairly simple) things that need to be done. That's what's eating time for
most of us: easy tasks, but lots of them, day after day...

------
scott_meade
On isolation of work from leisure:

"The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day.
The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined
periods."

"This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of
the players’ lives. Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an
hour more per night than the average players."

------
WestCoastJustin
I do believe this, but how did these elite develop this capacity? For me it is
a juggling act right now. I am working full-time, in addition to side projects
that I hope will take off. If I were to graph it, it would probably looks
something like this, ▁▁▃▂███, in terms of hours/effort, in the years
timescale. You start off small, working your 8-4 job, realize you need to
develop this capability to work on side project, there is an uptick in
hours/effort till you can transition to your next gig. Then it tappers off as
you make the transition. I hope it will looks something like this in a couple
years ▁▁▃▂███▃▂▂▂▂. Where you are in life also make a massive difference. If
you have the wherewithal to just transition, and weather the storm, then you
are probably much better off.

I like to race sailboats. It is amazing how mistakes/achievements can snowball
quickly. Your goal is to get the snow ball going to the right direction ;)

~~~
nostrademons
Project selection is pretty key to making this work. Your day job should teach
you something new and give you opportunities for deliberate practice. If it
doesn't, you're wasting 8 hours of your day. Worse, you're tiring yourself out
for those 8 hours so that you can't effectively practice in your side
projects.

A coworker of mine described it as the "monkeybars" approach to career
development: you hold onto the last skill you developed and use that as
leverage to get you a position that will stretch you and teach you new skills.
You're never starting from scratch - you can always provide value to your
employer - but at the same time you're continually stretching your
capabilities.

------
zwieback
1) Violin playing is maybe one of the most extreme examples you can study
because it requires specific talent as well as extremely hard work. How many
of the elite players start out with perfect pitch and perfect hand anatomy?
Maybe the rigid work schedule evolves when you start out with a specific
talent.

2) I've met a couple of kids that took a year off from everything else and
followed a rigorous schedule as described in the article. Their goal was to
see if they can make it as professionals but ultimately decided they just
couldn't keep up with the elite.

I think following a strict practice schedule is necessary but definitely not
sufficient to becoming elite. Probably the non-elites figure out pretty
quickly where they stand and simply opt out of the rat race.

------
abc_lisper
Is it okay, if I am busy setting that right?

It is disgusting to see all these half-baked, half-assed and half-minded
articles that don't see the whole picture paraded as gospel here.

I don't mind what you do with your life.But the blood is on your hands, if
some young kid takes this for advice.

------
rjvin
Cool, but I don't know how this applies to things that aren't as measurable as
musical ability. What about more intangible things like creative or critical
thinking? Also, the violin hasn't changed in hundreds of years, which means
the value of the time you spend getting good at it will never depreciate. How
does that change with something like computer programming?

~~~
RougeFemme
I'm not a music guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think
musical ability is completely measurable. Well, yes the technical ability to
read and play the notes and apply the other notation is measurable. And
teachers can do that well. But I think the elite players go beyond that with
their technique and, where appropriate, _emotion_.

~~~
rjvin
I guess what I was referring to was more that, if you wanted to measure
someone's musical ability, you can look at the hours they practiced as
something that correlates. Which is what the researchers did. For skills like
creativity or critical thinking, what hard number would you look at? I don't
know, and I have a feeling that if you looked at time spent, you wouldn't get
these same results.

------
FollowSteph3
I think a lot of it also has to do with HOW you practice, so much that doing
it in chunks just happens to be the result.

In other words, the focus on improving certain specific things which are
better to do in chunks. Those that just repeat can do it in small bursts. Your
technique of learning determines if your practice will be chunky or not, not
the other way around.

------
polskibus
Good research although in my opinion the researchers stopped digging too soon.
For instance their sleep patterns could've been examined more throroughly (as
per the supermemo sleep article). Another point is that deliberate practice is
good if you aim to be a good "worker", not necessarily a good entrepreneur or
innovator.

------
dvdt
> ... the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average
> players, and the best of the best were the most relaxed of all.

Presumably the best players also KNOW that they are the best--doesn't that
make it easier to relax? How do you control for this?

~~~
thomasilk
Additionally, they are probably more talented and therefore have a higher
progress rate when they practice which leads to less frustation and more
relaxation.

It's easy to be relaxed when you know that as long as you put in some hours
you'll always belong to the best of the best while others are constantly
struggling with trying to become one of those best of the best to be more
successful, get a better paid job (especially in music),...

~~~
simonster
The elite players are also probably more likely to be taking beta blockers:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/music/17tind.html?pag...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/music/17tind.html?pagewanted=all)

------
scott_meade
An interesting tidbit from the abstract of the study: "Many characteristics
once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense
practice extended for a minimum of 10 yrs."

~~~
ryanmolden
Innate talent just seems like a cop out "explanation". Oh so and so is good
because he had an innate talent. One might as well say so and so is good
because he has a frogelmonbal. Very few things are innate in humans and I
highly doubt many of them matter except in comparing across deviations in some
distribution.

Obviously, if you want to play professional basketball you likely better be
pretty tall, and that is out of your control. The other skills necessary are
definitely not innate, they are learned and improved through practice and
competition.

I think people claim some things are innate simply because they don't see the
struggle that went into building up the talent and thus it just seems
inexplicable. That or they are the people with the supposed innate talent and
like the adoration of people thinking they are "blessed by the gods", so to
speak.

------
Zenst
Many people will see the title, realise that if they actual were busy then
they would not be reading about people who are busy. But worth a read though,
just for a time out :).

------
davidw
If you're not busy, you should come look after my kids.

------
Sindrome
Every time I think I'm finally going to stop hearing the term tiger mom, it
shows up again...

------
evolve2k
How might deliberate practice translate into improving as a coder?

~~~
cwp
Could you clarify the question? Are you asking "What does deliberate practice
look like for coders?" or "What would improvement look like for a coder?" or
"How could practice lead to improvement?" or something else?

~~~
evolve2k
Oh probably "What does deliberate practice look like for coders?", as distinct
from just writing code regularly.

~~~
spion
Deliberate practice is all about pushing yourself outside your current comfort
zone. In programming, that might mean things like learning a language such as
Haskell, or making a DSL. Solving problems completely different than the ones
you usually solve or trying completely different methods. Solving problems you
think of as "hard".

Or even better, try to solve problems you think of as tedious in ways that are
not tedious. I always find it strange that so many programmers complain about
boring grunt work. There is a perfect opportunity there to invent tools that
optimize and speed up this boring grunt work. The next level is to make those
tools work in a way that is usable and intuitive for other programmers. The
end result is worth gold (or glory, depending on what you're after)

Good practice is all about doing hard things. Doing the same things that you
can already do perfectly (both in music and programming) leads to no
improvement. Doing things you consider hard leads to amazingly quick
improvement.

Musicians that concentrate on practicing only the hard and unpolished parts of
their performance are more effective than the ones that practice both the easy
and the hard parts. Those musicians that have found a way to "modularize"
their practice and split it to the tiniest most focused bits are the most
successful ones. (This is not easy because beyond a certain point the flow of
the music is lost)

In programming we must do both the easy and the hard parts, but we can turn
the easy parts into hard by writing code to make them even easier or to
completely eliminate them.

