

You Should Waste 50% of Your Time - timf
http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/you-should-waste-50-of-your-time.html

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pmichaud
I thought this was going t be about productivity gains through idle time. It's
actually about spending half your time self promoting. It's directed toward
researchers, but it applies equally to anyone producing output. The point: do
good work, but also promote it or it'll never see the light of day.

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bradfordcross
You are right about the main point.

When I first started looking into this topic, I thought it was that simple.
"You just have to tell the world about your work," I told myself.

Then my friend Ross laid the smack down on me:
[http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2009/12/build-
brands-w...](http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2009/12/build-brands-with-
luck-and-persistence.html)

If you read through Hamming's statements, and my reflections on them, you can
see that it is not as simple as just promoting - it is specific recipes about
how to do so effectively, and how to avoid certain mistakes.

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NathanKP
I would say it is better to spend all your time productively in what ever you
do best. You can get someone else to do the promoting. As a result you spend
100% of your time doing what you do best, programming for example, and someone
else spends 100% of their time promoting, which they perhaps do best.

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strlen
It's not always possible. PR firms are expensive. They also can't promote to a
mostly technical audience. That's why you should give talks about your
research/development, blog/tweet, post on sites like this. I've found that
especially with open source projects, once you get the word out others will be
more than happy to be your projects' "technical evangelists" because they love
using them.

That being said, if you're a company, _can_ afford a PR firm and you have
produced something worth promoting, it usually makes sense to pay others do
promote. The Submarine article by Paul Graham really opened my eyes on this:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html> (ever wonder where feature stories
in mainstream magazines about start-ups, showing happy hackers solving
technical puzzles on white boards come from?)

However, I've also seen companies suffer because they've hired sales,
marketing and PR staff on "easy" VC/parent company money _before_ they had a
working product.

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RKHilbertSpace
You Should Waste 90% of Your Time

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high
enough." -Alan Kay

I think therefore that the expected value of the ratio of time wasted to total
time should be x, where x >= .90

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gvb
The Alan Kay quote does _not_ say you should _waste_ 90% of your time, Kay
says you should _fail_ 90% of the time. It is only wasted time if you don't
learn from your failures.

Further, the quote in the original post from Hamming is that "at least 50% of
the time must go for the presentation." Hamming does _not_ call preparation
and presentation "waste". Reading the Hamming quotes, I find nothing that
indicates he thought being friendly, conforming, making, or giving
presentations was wasted time.

On the contrary, Hamming spent quite a bit of time criticizing his
contemporaries for _wasted effort_ (his words) by ineffectively swinging their
egos rather than working within the system (or judiciously bypassing the
system).

~~~
bradfordcross
@gvb the use of the word waste stems from the fact that many technical people
(previously including myself) make the mistake of thinking that the time
Hamming is talking about spending on presenting your ideas is waste.

Clearly, I am arguing against that in this piece.

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ntoshev
Great references to books and talks, thanks!

