
Ask HN: What Habits Are Unequivocally Bad? - madeuptempacct
We talk about productivity and optimization on HN a lot. The more convinced you are something is bad, the less likely you are to do it. So post habits you think EVERYONE would benefit from breaking. Also, post your excuses as to why you &#x2F; people you know haven&#x27;t broken them so we can learn something.
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taprun
Hoping for things without taking action. As pointed out by DC Comics' Blue
Lantern corps, hope without the application of willpower isn't worth much.

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laurentl
Taking the easy choice.

Whenever you have to make a choice and there are an “easy” and a “hard”
options, you should choose the hard option. It’s always the right one.

Why? If the easy option was also the right one, you wouldn’t even be thinking
about it. The hard option is your conscience/instinct telling you to look
beyond the obvious, easy answer.

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projektir
I'm not sure if I'm seeing the logic here. Say I want to develop a game. The
easy option is to use an existing engine. The hard option is to build your own
engine. The latter is quite often the wrong choice.

> If the easy option was also the right one, you wouldn’t even be thinking
> about it.

Ironically, significant cultural pressure to glorify grit and choosing the
hard option often means that the easy option looks automatically bad, in a
"too good to be true" kind of way, and you may have to go back and convince
yourself that it's OK to take the easy option. This is compounded by the fact
that availability of easier options may often be very random and "unfair".

~~~
laurentl
It’s hard to articulate, and my post was probably too pithy. I’m referring to
the fact that we make most decisions in “self-driving” mode, without thinking
too much about it. But sometimes you run into a situation where you find
yourself thinking “well, I could just do this, but...”. In other words,
there’s something bugging you about the obvious solution and a suggestion of a
harder, more difficult decision hiding behind the “but”. In that case, in my
experience the difficult solution is the right one. If you _consciously_
notice you’re about to cut corners, that means that something (conscience,
instinct, whatever) is trying really hard to warn you about it.

Getting back to your example, there’s no “but” attached to choosing an
existing engine, so you probably wouldn’t have a nagging thought pushing you
to look at building your own.

So I guess what I’m really saying is “don’t cut corners”. You know you’re
about to cut one when the little angel pops up on your shoulder and whispers
“are you sure about this?”

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uptownfunk
Give up bad attitudes, be nice.

Sleep 6+ hours a night.

Focus / pay attention, Don’t get distracted/distract the team.

Control / eliminate substance use (caffeine, alcohol, smoking, not-doctor-
prescribed adderall etc)

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madeuptempacct
I will start with the obvious:

1\. "Microbreaks" from work - grabbing a snack, browsing random things,
checking the news/stocks/how far below $4000 BTC fell, etc. This is mainly
harmful because it keeps you from doing work fast. The, arguably, worse part
of it is that you get nothing done in a long time and then feel like you
"worked all day" for nothing. So you waste time doing something that isn't
pleasurable, but you get far reduced benefit, making it seems like the
productive task wasn't worthwhile at all. The excuse is that it breaks you out
of being stuck in a rut - a lot of the time while coding, I will stare at some
problem endlessly, when I should have stepped back and changed my approach.
Herein lies the conflict between "deep work" and "stepping away to get
perspective" for me. It seems both have merit, and it takes experience to know
when to do which. With that said, switching context constantly does NOT give
your mind that break it needs, because the mind becomes engaged with something
else, rather than continuing to work on the problem.

2\. Sleep 7+ (preferrably 8) hours. At this point it's well known that sleep
is essential to memorization, concentration, testosterone production, and
athletic recovery. "Working hard" by avoiding sleep undercuts your efficiency
and quickly starts to have negative effects.

3\. Eating sugar. Rots teeth, makes you fat, spikes blood pressure and
increases the likelihood of heart disease
([https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/eating-too-much-added-
su...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/eating-too-much-added-sugar-
increases-the-risk-of-dying-with-heart-disease-201402067021)). All for no
nutritional value. The twist here is that "it makes you feel good" and "gives
you energy". The "makes you feel good" part is definitely a habit that can be
broken. The "gives you energy" part. Well, that's something that I actually
think happens. If I drink a KickStart, I can stay awake through sprint
planning, which is quite a feat. I haven't found the blood sugar spike & drop
to be true in my experience, which makes this a difficult habit to fully break
for me.

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gota
On sugar and 'gives you energy': I'm not an expert but it seems this is
extremely over-hyped, and I've noticed more people believe in this if they
were raised in a place where parents believe in the 'sugar rush'. I still
remember the first time I heard about 'sugar rush', already an adult. It's
just folklore in some western and richer countries [1]:

> "In 1995, a meta analysis of the 23 most reliable studies was
> published(...). Sugar simply had no discernible effect on the children's
> behaviour in these studies."

If you erase that notion it becomes pretty obvious that sugar does little (if
something at all) to keep you 'on', at least compared to caffeine (or, you
know, harder stuff).

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2014/fe...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2014/feb/25/do-
children-really-get-sugar-rush-hyperactivity)

~~~
madeuptempacct
Interesting, thanks. I will look into this more.

