[HN Gopher] A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
___________________________________________________________________
A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
Author : nate
Score : 238 points
Date : 2023-04-05 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (census.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (census.dev)
| franky47 wrote:
| A side effect of this technique is that the "obvious next step"
| to fix the broken code left over lives rent-free in my mind until
| I can come back to it.
|
| For some people, leaving things in a broken state when the
| solution is known is an itch begging to be scratched.
| manmal wrote:
| Instead of "// TODO" I just add "TODO" or "asdf", suffixed with a
| short description of the next thing I'd like to tackle. That
| gives a compiler error so I can find the relevant line very
| quickly next time I work on that project.
| DevKoala wrote:
| You'll never be able to exist outside of work if you follow this
| advice. There is a mental burden to leaving things broken; if you
| really care, you'll spend your cycles thinking about what is next
| and how to solve it. From experience, I don't recommend it.
| neura wrote:
| I really think this is a "to each, his own" concept.
|
| May work great for some people. May be terrible for others.
|
| The internet is a wonderful place for the open exchange of
| ideas, if you just treat them as such.
| swayvil wrote:
| That's big.
|
| If you can leave your work broken then you level up. Translate to
| a higher plane. You are, in a way, free.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've been using this "trick" for many years. An old mentor taught
| it to me, but he called it "park facing downhill". The idea is to
| leave the workday with the work in a state where there's an
| obvious and easy task to start the next day with, like parking
| your car facing downhill so that gravity will get you rolling
| before the engine is up to speed.
| augment001 wrote:
| As an engineering director years ago I had the rule that
| engineers hours were 10am-6pm, and I'd walk around the office
| at 6pm and send people home. I'd get complaints that I was
| making people stop when they were in the middle of something,
| and I'd just say, you can carry on with it in the morning.
|
| It worked extremely well. Engineers just wanted to get on with
| their work as soon as they arrived in the morning. We'd have a
| 5 minute literal stand-up that really did only last 5 minutes
| because people were so impatient to get on with what they had
| put down the night before.
|
| The policy had to stop when a new VP was hired who valued
| presenteeism and the appearance of hard work over focus and
| energy.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| William Carlos Williams would do the same thing with his
| writing. He wrote for exactly one hour every morning, and he
| would leave mid-sentence many times. He said it made it much
| easier to get started immediately the next day.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| Or it could be that you had a brilliant idea for the rest
| of the sentence, but the strict rule prevents you from
| writing it down, and next day you can't remember it and
| chase it all day and still be unsatisfied in the end.
| Either because of lost time or because you couldn't
| remember/recreate it, or even both.
|
| I suppose it just goes both ways. Try not to finish sth so
| that you don't have the somewhat hard task to start with
| sth new next day. But at the same time don't stop in the
| middle of sth that's difficult to pick up from. A strict
| timing rule does only help if you are statistically more
| often at a point where it's easy to pick up again. I doubt
| that you are though, so I'd try a more concious approach
| than a clock.
|
| I really like the parking downhill analogy.
| augment001 wrote:
| > A strict timing rule does only help if you are
| statistically more often at a point where it's easy to
| pick up again. I doubt that you are though, so I'd try a
| more concious approach than a clock.
|
| Although I disagree with you when it comes to corporate
| policy, I basically agree with you at a deeper level.
|
| I think that being able to be completely asynchronous
| about how and when you work, while also being unafraid
| and deeply reflective about your process would be more of
| an ideal.
|
| However this isn't realistic in a corporate situation,
| and in such a setting most people are more likely to be
| suffering from meaningless workaholism induced by
| relentless corporate pressure than they are to be
| operating at the highest levels of self-actualization.
| irrational wrote:
| 6pm? Man, I'm so glad I didn't work for you. That is late.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Not if you don't get there until 10 is isn't. But enforcing
| a late start is a lot harder than enforcing an early
| finish. What are you going to do, refuse to let people in
| if they show up early? Besides, sometimes you can't help
| it. When I was taking BART to work, I had to get to the
| station before the parking filled up.
| augment001 wrote:
| Yeah - I couldn't enforce a late start, 9am was too early
| to ask people to come in.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It's still late in absolute terms. Not everything can
| just shift around to an abnormally late work schedule.
|
| This sort of schedule gives you virtually no free time
| with kids. Get home, eat, put kids to bed, wake up early
| because school doesn't start at 10am, send them to
| school, wait a bit, leave for work.
|
| We are lucky that things are more flexible now. I don't
| blame the manager. It was a different time. But it's a
| schedule that doesn't work well for a lot of people.
| neura wrote:
| I seriously think that the specific range of hours was
| not at all the point of the example. Would you disagree?
|
| If you're going to nit-pick, my kid starts school at 9am,
| so I can't start work before 9am. What about remote
| workers and the example of walking around the office?
|
| I'm pretty sure the example was specifically to note that
| cutting off their work hours was a successful tactic with
| respect to leaving them with something to start in the
| morning, vs letting them finish what they're working on
| and then have to figure out what/how to get started on in
| the morning.
|
| Literally the point of the article there, leaving your
| work unfinished or broken, as it were, so you can just
| jump in knowing the next thing you were already going to
| do last night, but forced yourself not to or were forced
| to not finish.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I'm not not picking, I'm disagreeing with the idea that
| the relative end time is all that matters. I specifically
| did not blame the manager in my comment.
| augment001 wrote:
| It's really not clear what you're saying other than that
| 6pm would be too late for you personally.
|
| As I've explained - I picked that time as the _latest_
| people were allowed to work in the office. Before I
| adopted this, people were randomly staying much later.
| augment001 wrote:
| It's true that the team was made up of mostly young,
| unmarried men. I think only one senior person had
| children. I don't recall what his needs were, but I
| wasn't a hard-ass about not leaving early if people were
| productive.
|
| And certainly if the team in general hadn't liked the
| hours, I'd have negotiated. We moved from 9am to 10am for
| that reason.
| [deleted]
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Are you younger than 25? Because working 100 hour weeks
| used to be common in startups. Look up stories from the
| early days of google and Facebook. People lived in the
| office. It was by choice. No one forces you to do it and
| plenty of other companies to work for if you wanted
| balance.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Well working 100 hours is still common in investment
| banking. But why focus on these subsets of jobs?
| augment001 wrote:
| You are actually forced to do it if you choose to work
| for a place like that.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Much older than 25 here. I still do insane hours when I'm
| starting my own business. But I have never, and would
| never, work that sort of schedule for someone else's
| startup (nor would I expect employees of my own startups
| to do so). If I'm going to kill myself like that, it's
| going to be to build my dreams, not someone else's.
| calculated wrote:
| Would love to connect with you. If you're interested
| shoot me an email at me@kmarkov.io
| irrational wrote:
| I'm over 50. I work from home now, but when I did have to
| go into the office, I'd typically show up just before
| 10:30 standup and head out by 4. And I'd take an hour or
| two to workout in the one of the fitness facilities on
| campus in between. My bosses have always been happy with
| my work and output.
| catiopatio wrote:
| With an hour for lunch, that's only 2.5-3.5 hours of work
| a day. Even less factoring in the stand-up.
|
| What role were you able to be successful at while only
| putting in 2.5hrs of work a day?
|
| Posted as an edit, since YC is doing its inexplicable
| rate-limiting on replies to this thread:
|
| > Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to
| sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+
| hours of work. ... I typically start working when I step
| into the shower in the morning. ... I think that all
| counts as work hours.
|
| I work from home, but I do not count my _showers_ as
| working hours. That's patently ludicrous, and frankly,
| 2.5-3.5 hours of "presence" a day is unbelievable.
| Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work,
| period.
|
| My work is in software verification, so it's not as if I
| don't need time to think, but I also put in the actual
| hours required every day to appreciably kick the can
| forward.
|
| I'd be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on)
| someone who considered their shower and commute as
| working hours.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The whole concept of salaried roles is that you're being
| paid to achieve enough to keep your employer happy. If my
| boss feels like he's getting his money's worth based on
| my output, it really shouldn't be anybody's business
| whether I'm achieving that in 3 hours or 12 hours. In
| fact, if I can produce a satisfactory work output in 3
| hours versus somebody else's 8, then I'm not shirking at
| all, I'm simply better at my job.
|
| And as a knowledge worker, I'm being paid to solve
| problems, and have and structure the knowledge to solve
| problems in the future. If I'm solving problems for work
| in the shower, or on my way to lunch, or while making
| coffee in the morning, I'm literally being paid to do my
| job. As a software developer not responsible for
| operations, literally nothing in my job can't wait 30
| minutes. Even if I was at my computer, actively coding,
| it would probably take around that long for me to get to
| an appropriate stopping point to respond to a message.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| Work != presence. In a role in which you don't have to
| sit in front of a computer, 3h presence could mean 8+
| hours of work.
|
| I typically start working when I step into the shower in
| the morning. (I have a typical coder job.) Thinking about
| what to work on today, remembering the problem I left off
| yesterday (having parked downhill), etc. It's a great
| distraction-free environment. Some of the best ideas come
| there. No slack, no email. No CI pipeline that screams at
| me. Sometimes I keep thinking after the shower before
| turning on the laptop. Just sitting on the sofa. By the
| time I log in, I may have already worked for an hour. Or
| perhaps two, if I started thinking about work right after
| waking up. On office days, I typically think work during
| the commute. There mostly, but often even on my way home.
| I think that all counts as work hours.
| rmilk wrote:
| Seconded. My daily walk to Starbucks is my time to
| meditate on my coding issue of the day, free from
| distractions of emails, office visitors, and meetings.
| Many coders I've met say a change of scenery can help you
| solve a problem you were stuck on. Also a chance to say
| hi to the local crows who appear to recognize me nowadays
| and don't fly away when I walk by :)
| catiopatio wrote:
| I work from home, but I do not count my showers as
| working hours. That's patently ludicrous, and frankly,
| 2.5-3.5 hours of "presence" a day is unbelievable.
| Someone putting in so few hours is shirking their work,
| period.
|
| My work is in software verification, so it's not as if I
| don't need time to think, but I also put in the actual
| hours required every day to appreciably kick the can
| forward.
|
| I'd be livid to be stuck working with (and waiting on)
| someone who considered their shower and commute as
| working hours.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Somebody got a case of the Mondays!
| nmat wrote:
| This is big generalisation. In South Europe leaving at 6pm
| is early. Most of the people I know have standup after
| 10h30 and do 1h lunch breaks.
| alana314 wrote:
| Everywhere I've worked has been 9-6, at least this is 10-6
| (the 8 hour day has been a lie my whole life)
| JohnFen wrote:
| I guess I'm lucky! The most restrictive places I've
| worked set the hours at 8-5, so at least it didn't cut
| into precious evening time.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of
| something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the
| metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.
| augment001 wrote:
| > Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's
| difficult to pick up from.
|
| Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for
| them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I'm coding
| myself sometimes.
|
| But I think the of times when it's actually true are vastly
| outnumbered by the times when it's just an illusion, and it
| was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the
| policy worked.
| semireg wrote:
| I pick the kids up from daycare at 4:30. Every few days
| its 4:25, I'm in the middle of something and I'll spend
| 60 seconds writing out simple English sentences or
| bullet-points of what I need to accomplish when I get
| back to my desk. This context switch allows me to
| disengage. Sometimes I'm tempted to try "one more thing"
| a "Hail Mary" but it almost always backfires into a
| future wrong-approach distraction.
| pimlottc wrote:
| > But I think the of times when it's actually true are
| vastly outnumbered by the times when it's just an
| illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy
| level that the policy worked.
|
| I agree, and relates closely to the YAGNI philosophy
| ("You Aren't Gonna Need It"). It's easy to think, "I'm so
| close, it'll be easier just to do it now".
|
| But what's so special about now? Are you really that much
| smarter right now than you will be tomorrow (or next
| week, month, year..)? More knowledgable? More prepared?
| Possibly... but it's more likely to be the opposite: in
| the future, you'll understand the problem better, you'll
| have more data to choose the best path forward, you'll
| realize there's another way to do it, or you'll simply
| have bigger fish to fry.
|
| 0: https://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt
| aequitas wrote:
| Or they could have been stuck driving in circles. A good
| nights sleep often offers a fresh perspective to tackle a
| problem from a different direction.
| gffrd wrote:
| Could, but likely won't: if the things you have to do
| regularly spill beyond the boundary of time set to do them,
| you're not deciding how to approach the things you have to
| do correctly.
|
| Enforcing a constraint for the 90% scenario makes more
| sense than designing around the 10%.
| bradleybuda wrote:
| (author here) "park facing downhill" is an excellent TL;DR -
| I'm definitely stealing this!
| [deleted]
| agentofoblivion wrote:
| Similarly, I find it effective to simply writing down what the
| next step is, and what's interesting/challenging about it in a
| couple sentences. It seems to directly solve the problem that
| this "trick" is indirectly solving, which is reducing the load
| of knowing how to get started next time.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| Excellent advice, just like the article as well.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Leaving a test broken that is going to be straightforward to fix
| does help me pick up the pieces again the next day. A next steps
| text file helps too.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Just introduce a break would work if you want to stop and on a
| dime. Like typing asdf on in a function
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| If I did this I'd spend most of the next day trying to figure out
| what was broken and how to fix it.
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| Never stop until you know what you are going to pick up with
| next.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3021905/hemingways-secret-to-mai...
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Came here to say this, can also be called "leaving a little in
| the tank"
| Dave_TRS wrote:
| "The best way is always to stop when you are going good and
| when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day
| when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is
| the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it."
| - Ernest Hemingway, advice to a young writer in 1935 article in
| Esquire
| ghotli wrote:
| I wanna live in that world vs kids and coworkers yell fire and
| their urgent request isn't actually urgent but now I'm outta
| the zone. Seems like you're describing an idealism.
|
| Ideally, sure I'd fend off these attention suitors and get to
| them once I hit a stopping point. Love my job and my kids but
| this triggered me a lil bit. Somewhere along the line I feel
| like I just became battle hardened into actually accomplishing
| things regardless. Just a lot of picking up the pieces of
| context and ideally I left myself notes (e.g park facing
| downhill, a good mantra)
| Cardinal7167 wrote:
| This is the way. I stop working with tests passing but write a
| context comment on whats to be done next. It's like flushing my
| working memory.
| generic92034 wrote:
| On the other hand it can be helpful, in my experience, to
| stop right in the middle of a very hard problem, where you
| are still searching for a good solution. Come the next
| morning I often know at least a possible solution, without
| having worked on it consciously.
| m463 wrote:
| can't tell you how many great solutions appeared in my head
| in those moments when you're awake before getting out of
| bed.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It's crazy the degree to which the subconscious mind chews
| on problems it's been given. I never even dream about the
| problem in question but pretty consistently sleeping on
| friction points like that will clear them in short order
| the next morning. It's almost kind of spooky, like there's
| a second person in my head burning the midnight oil.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| The risk with this is that you keep procrastinating away
| before getting going again. It's the anticipated pain of
| frustration that prevents you from starting. Not so much if
| your idle time generated a solution to the problem. But if
| it didn't, then you are in trouble.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Well, if it did work, and you have a good solution the
| next morning there will be no reason to procrastinate.
| sublinear wrote:
| This is an underrated comment. Not only this, but there
| are some micromanaged environments that make this
| impossible and you're immediately hit in the face with a
| meeting first thing in the morning that destroys any
| energy you might have had to continue after being asked
| several ways if it's "done yet".
| yonaguska wrote:
| I've been 60 minutes of focused work away from wrapping
| up this current ticket for the past two days. Too
| exhausted to get going in the morning before meetings and
| interruptions kill my productivity for the day. Usually I
| start work two hours before the workday actually starts
| because context switching and meetings drain me, and deep
| work won't get done otherwise. The curse of ADHD.
| sublinear wrote:
| I already know I don't have ADHD, so I can tell you it
| might not be your ADHD. It's not that you're ruminating
| about what they asked, but that they all keep asking you
| because they use you as their syncing mechanism and must
| repeat yourself to several people. Effectively just as
| bad for productivity.
|
| Morning meetings are a deliberate tactic. Middle
| management needs answers for their next meeting which is
| also right after yours in the morning.
|
| The people who get to have meetings at the very end of
| the day are at the top of the hierarchy, and guess what?
| They got their work done!
|
| If there was ever a _real_ example of inequality that
| should be fixed (fuck all that DEI shit) this would be
| it. Work from home actually massively reduced this
| meeting train crap at my workplace, but they just found
| other ways to annoy people. It 's still an improvement
| though.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Yeah, you have to give it a solid effort for this to
| work. On day two if it's not solved yet, you have to give
| another solid effort before resting.
|
| I'm not sure if in this scenario it's an option to solve
| the problem on the first go. Usually when I hit this
| scenario, I am simply unable to do it in the first place,
| but the next day is easy.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| Right. Or you try to break it down into subproblems which
| may be easier to solve. And those are then candidates for
| the downhill parking on-ramp for next day.
| srcreigh wrote:
| In uni there were a few times where I'd spend 12 hours
| solving assignment problems. At EOD I still had maybe half
| unsolved, although I'd tried to solve them all. Next
| morning in the 30 minutes I had before class, I quickly
| solve all the problems before handing it in.
|
| Oh, another time for algorithms assignment, I am up until
| 5am or so. Still had 2/5 problems left unsolved (but again
| I had tried to solve them). I go for coffee at the student
| center, oops it's not 24/7. I take a light nap in the
| student center waiting for the coffee place to open up.
| Full on REM dream problem solving occurs. A couple hours
| later I awake knowing full well how to solve the 2
| remaining problems. I grab my coffee and leave to write up
| the solutions.
|
| Sleep really helps.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's too effective.
|
| I end up sitting at my computer to watch a movie, and end up
| finishing work in the evening. I'm nerd sniping myself, and it's
| not healthy. Then in the morning the madness continues.
|
| I want to make room for other things in my life. I have to Cm+Q
| everything in the evening.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| " Before stepping away, leave the code in a state where it is
| Obviously Broken, but Easy to Fix. ". So purposely introduce a
| break that you can fix would work just as well?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yes, but it's easier to say write a unit test that is failing
| and leave, rather than break something on purpose.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My old colleague Mike Rowe said it this way: "Always leave it
| compiling" meaning, make a change and don't test it, just start
| the build and walk away. So when you returned you had something
| to dig into (didn't build, or did and needs trying).
|
| Also, you had a good feeling that maybe what you just tried will
| fix the problem or whatever. So you don't go home frustrated and
| depressed.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _good feeling_
|
| Hah, for me, these moments are some of the most stressful
| moments of coding! I am about to find out a very important
| piece of information: whether I'm done or not.
|
| It's an intense feeling of anticipation like how you feel while
| hearing, "We, the jury, find the defendant...". I would like to
| avoid stringing that out over a longer period than necessary.
| bufordtwain wrote:
| I use a physical notebook and at the end of each day I write down
| what needs to be done next.
| atentaten wrote:
| I typically use personal "Did do" and "To do" notes to leave
| myself breadcrumbs as to where I left off and where I should
| start again.
| swah wrote:
| Yeah, on VSCode there isn't a good solution for linking to
| tasks to file+lines other than Bookmarks. Or just stick with
| TODOs...
| andorov wrote:
| Hemmingway would leave off writing for the day in the middle of a
| sentence for the same reason.
| inetsee wrote:
| I remember reading this quite a while ago. My elaboration of
| this technique is to write the last sentence in my head, but
| only put the first part down on (paper) the end of the file. If
| I'm lucky, when I come back to it, I can read the first part of
| the last sentence, and memory will tell me how the sentence
| ends, I can just keep going.
| sacrosanct wrote:
| My trick is to get outside my comfort zone when coding, but only
| just enough that's it's tolerable and not overwhelming. Most of
| the time, even as a seasoned coder, I should feel inadequate, yet
| still up to the task at hand. That's what flow is for me: pushing
| myself, but not too far that I end up falling off the proverbial
| cliff.
| gavmor wrote:
| "Go Home Red" is a slogan I've heard tossed around the length of
| my career, meaning "leave a unit test failing overnight." It's
| trivial if you're practicing TDD, since most of your time is
| spent coding against a failing test. A failing test really
| expands your short-term memory, ameliorating interruptions like
| meetings, Slack messages, and having a life.
|
| Regarding open loops "living rent-free in my head," preoccupation
| with work outside work can certainly be a health hazard, but I
| have never found `git push` to reduce those ruminations. If
| engaging hobbies and loving community don't do it for you, maybe
| some mindfulness meditation might help "let it pass."
|
| That being said, I am not super disturbed if even my dreams are
| infiltrated by the dayjob on occasion; I don't bill hourly.
| m463 wrote:
| one thing that helped me with open loops is to have what David
| Allen of GTD calls a "Trusted System"
|
| It's a system you trust to record those ideas bumping around in
| your head. That lets you get them OUT of your head until you
| start working again, and relax.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| No idea if it's true but I've read that Michelangelo was using
| the same technic while sculpting.
|
| At the end of the day, make a big ugly dent somewhere in the
| stone, that makes him want to fix first thing the next morning
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Exiting after hitting a "neat" stopping point - unless the task
| is done, leaving the system / code too clean makes it hard to
| know what to work on next. While it's really tempting to try to
| stick the landing on an internal milestone, it can often be more
| productive on net to stop just short of a neat milestone as an
| onramp to your next coding session.
|
| I have heard novelists talk about similar strategies: end your
| writing day knowing what the next thing you need to write is, but
| not actually writing it. So, the next day, you can sit down and
| get going immediately, and use that momentum to launch you into
| that day's work.
|
| I think I do the opposite. I most often reach a flow state when
| there's something wrong, and I'm trying resolve it. It's
| repairing the broken state that absorbs me. When I get to that
| resolution, the challenge is having enough self-awareness to
| stop: I look up, and afternoon turned into night, my shoulders
| are cramped, my neck hurts, but hey why not keep this going?
|
| Even after resolving the problem, the _overall_ state of the
| application is still "broken", i.e. incomplete, so I always have
| something to bring me back.
|
| The thing for me, as a former-professional programmer, current
| hobbyist, is that it's easier to reach a flow state if you care
| about what you're working on, and get wrapped up in it. If you're
| working on some corner of an application you don't care about
| except for the paycheck, you probably have a harder time getting
| motivated. So, what works for me may not work for everybody.
| DelightOne wrote:
| I usually add a line with a plain "todo" to break the build and
| afterwards a three-line comment describing what is supposed to
| change. At the end of the change I remove the todo-line and move
| the three-line comment to the now-better location as
| documentation for why that code there is the way it is.
|
| When I don't have such comments, its usually back to the
| collection of design documents thinking through the next feature.
| cachvico wrote:
| I just remove a semicolon.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Yep, I use this in writing. Leave that juicy scene until
| tomorrow, so I jump out of bed instead of slithering to the
| coffee machine while building a list of excuses in my head.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| If nothing else I leave a test with a description and an `assert
| false` statement to fail it. Preferable is a test that actually
| fails for the right reason.
| prashp wrote:
| This is good general advice, but there are situations where it
| doesn't always work. Sometimes I've come back the next day,
| finished the thing I was working on within 1 hour and then I get
| stuck for the rest of the day trying but failing to be
| productive. Maybe it would have been better to finish the day
| before and taken the next day off?
| gwambold wrote:
| Leaving a failing test clearly pointing at what to do next has
| been very effective for me.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| This is in TDD by example or refactoring (the Beck chapter).
|
| I definitely read it somewhere.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| This makes sense. But does anyone else have problems with
| disconnecting when I know what needs to be done.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| It makes me feel more at peace about disconnecting, in a
| certain way. Since focus is elusive, when I step away from
| work, I may worry that I'm throwing away an opportunity that I
| may not get again. If I believe I have a way to recover focus
| when I start again, I feel more comfortable about letting go.
| janci wrote:
| Ohhh, this makes sense. I must try that. Up until now I was doing
| the exact opposite - trying to finish the task or at least drive
| it toward some clean state. Mainly to not block others if I am
| close to completion.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| It's exactly why certain games are really addictive.
|
| There's always something more that needs to fixed.
|
| Looking at you Factorio.
| curo wrote:
| Similar to this "leave things broken", I like to start the day
| with some lightweight refactoring. This allows me to pay down
| technical debt while I warm up my brain to the code.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But be critical; I'm currently trying to discourage my
| colleagues from over-engineering fairly simple things (static /
| simple list items in a React app). Refactoring is fine, as long
| as it's not refactoring for shifting code's sake.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Rediscovering the state of things and being in flow are very
| different things.
|
| The author is entirely right about a trick to recover context.
|
| But I'm not sure he's ever experienced flow.
| z3t4 wrote:
| When I'm in a flow and get interrupted I write "I AM HERE", so
| the next time I try to run the software (which can be hours to
| weeks later) I get an error on that row and hopefully remember
| what I was working on.
| rickrollin wrote:
| I actually started doing this thanks to a book called Rest. In
| general it is a really good book.
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