[HN Gopher] A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
___________________________________________________________________
A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
Author : nate
Score : 516 points
Date : 2023-04-05 15:44 UTC (1 days ago)
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| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Additionally add a failing test, start with the test next day.
| 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.
| thatxliner wrote:
| There is actually a similar technique for writing: leave your
| writing halfway, where it's obvious how to continue. That way
| when you come back, you'll continue writing.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I usually just type a couple english words in the source file so
| that it won't compile when I pick back up and immediately draw my
| attention to where I was last typing.
|
| It's basically the simplest possible system, and I find not only
| does it mean I can get started right off when I come back to it,
| I also have no hesitation to start something I won't be able to
| finish before getting up.
| 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.
| Joeri wrote:
| Park facing downhill is a practice that is far broader than
| maintaining programming flow overnight, or even broader than
| programming itself. I use it when working on slide decks for
| presentations, when writing technical documentation, when
| finishing up meetings (setting the stage for the next one),
| when designing architectures. I use it even when managing my
| todo list itself, where I try to always leave myself obvious
| next tasks to do, or add all the info I need to get going
| quickly when entering the todo (or as close to entering it that
| I can find the time). It sounds like a lot of work but it's
| really not because I can be pretty concise writing for an
| audience of one.
| 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.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I'd have quit over that. If the work is interesting and going
| well I'm not stopping because someone likes to exercise
| control over my schedule, I'll build something else instead.
| mock-possum wrote:
| I do get what you're saying on the one hand, I _feel_ the
| same way, but - is your employer compensating you for
| working past 6pm, in this imaginary scenario? I started out
| doing a lot of hourly work earlier in my career, and sure,
| if I was on a roll I could jam for hours, and I was gettin
| paid accordingly.
|
| Lately, in salaried positions, I've basically had to break
| myself of that habit - that's my free time I'm cutting into
| when I stay late. In emergency situations, I'm happy to
| stick around later if possible, with the understanding that
| there's bonus compensation or at least comp time queued up
| for me - but if I'm just feeling engaged when 6pm rolls
| around? Im out, I've got dinner to cook and videogames to
| play.
|
| Work will wait for tomorrow, part of what I'm getting paid
| for in standard work week is developing on a schedule, you
| know?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I'm currently in a team that works pretty much 0800-1600,
| people mostly start logging off 15 minutes before four and
| after four everyone is either at home or packing their stuff.
| (Or playing a game if they're WFH :D )
|
| There's zero pressure to work overtime and leaving on time is
| encouraged. If people work late, we encourage them to leave
| earlier and relax. Not all tasks can be solved with brute
| force head smashing.
| 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.
| ambicapter 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
|
| You really think so? You think you spend the vast
| majority of your time at work doing things that are so
| complex they're hard to pick back up 12 hours later?
| pl90087 wrote:
| That's not how I read the comment. Between the "easy to
| pick up from here" (downhill parking) and "hard to pick
| up from here" (uphill parking) there is the most likely
| most common "indifferent" (parking flat). The main theme
| of this article is to try to always park downhill. So, an
| interruption that is anything than parking downhill is to
| be avoided. The claim is that you spend the vast majority
| of your time at work not facing downhill. Intuitively,
| that makes sense.
| 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.
| pl90087 wrote:
| I like your attitude towards this.
|
| One should try to create a study to investigate the
| effects better.
|
| As alternative to "6pm you guys all go home, period.",
| there is likely a difference between "6pm you all go
| home, but if you really must finish sth, I'll wait until
| 6:30pm to pull the plug" and "go home whenever you want"
| (which may end up being 8pm or 10pm and in a game
| theoretic setting may lead to later and later time).
| The_Colonel 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.
|
| Honestly, forcing people to any particular rhythm is a pretty
| bad idea unless things go out of hand.
|
| Sometimes I'm in the mood to continue on the problem, and
| sometimes I'm too tired and would rather leave by 4pm. Why
| shouldn't I be able to decide?
| 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.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Your problem should not be how early or how late the
| schedule is - your problem should be that it's arbitrary
| across all workers, regardless of circumstance.
|
| We all would prefer to work a particular schedule - we
| all deserve to be able to negotiate our hours based on
| necessary overlap with our coworkers preferences.
|
| "I wake up early so all of you have to wake up early" and
| "I work late so all of you have to work late" are both
| not nice.
| [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!
| lisp-pornstar wrote:
| Some people at a previous job used vscode, passed their
| day clicking at stuff with their mouse, navigating
| directories via a native file explorer, using GUIs to
| commit their changes, using windows with no knowledge
| related to virtual desktop management, automating nothing
| etc... That wasn't no problem at all : they did their job
| and at the end of the day they wrote code. But then, with
| the right tools you could have done what they did in half
| the time, minimizing all the unnecessary micro-movements
| with some keybindings and some editor plugins or some
| really good text editor. Now, if paired with this
| mechanical mastery you have a good ability to pack
| related problems/functionalities to implement and are
| efficient at solving them/implementing them; then you can
| add some multiplier to the mechanical speed explained in
| the previous paragraph. That's some weird way to think
| about this, but let's say the ideal instance of the
| project requires X lines of code; if you work faster,
| then you reach a higher level of expertise on the project
| codebase and by this excess of expertise you gain speed
| relatively to others which in turn makes you more expert
| and so on. Except, working "fullspeed" is more tiring
| than working "normally" and you usually don't want to
| have a tornado in your team that write 50+ -major
| changes- commits a day and that cannot cooperate with
| others because they cannot follow up and are "too slow"
| to even review those changes. You decide to fire "slow"
| workers, but then the tornado must work 9+ hours a day to
| keep up with your expectations and finally burn-out
| leaving a work that every other member of the team fails
| to understand, due to too much litterature to read
| written by some sort of alien. So I'm fine with
| programming 2 to 4 hours a day, since, as an alien-
| tornado, I prefer my code to be read, reviewed, and
| understood by my peers.
| catiopatio wrote:
| Some of us are good at our jobs, use our tools well, and
| work for the hours we're paid to work.
|
| You're not a 10x "alien tornado", you're just a fish in a
| very, very, very tiny pond.
| lisp-pornstar wrote:
| What I am saying is that this conception of work is
| absurd. The truth is you are hired to build stuff, not
| for being at an office during X time. I like fishes,
| that's cute.
| catiopatio wrote:
| I'm hired to spend the time I've been paid for building
| stuff.
|
| If I only dedicate 2.5 hours every day to my work, I'm
| not meeting that obligation.
|
| If I start accounting for my showers and commute as
| working hours, I'm being dishonest with both myself and
| my employer.
| adastra22 wrote:
| He's saying that's the latest. You can presumably leave
| earlier, but you can't stay later.
| 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.
| mike31fr wrote:
| What do you call South Europe? I'm in Toulouse, here 6pm
| is late for some people, "normal" for others but nobody
| would say it's early here.
| 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.
| adave wrote:
| I would work for such a guy. That tell me a lot about
| management caring about talent than any bs marketing
| pitch they give during interviews. Give me cold hard
| facts.
| 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.
| scruple wrote:
| I'm the same way. I have a hard stop every day at 4:45pm
| to pick up my kids. I have an alarm on my phone that goes
| off at 4:40pm and I spend the next few minutes taking
| notes if/when I need to. I might also try to package my
| current state into a commit if/when it makes sense but I
| don't tend to stress about it.
| claaams wrote:
| I think this also creates a culture or at least
| impression of a culture that your boss cares about your
| work life balance, which, honestly, in today's world is
| valuable and can make your org stand out from other
| places where the norm is to work until you're burnt out.
| notnaut wrote:
| Also shows an understanding of the importance of off-hour
| processing with any high thought work. Shower time,
| commuting, cooking dinner, sleeping. All things that give
| your mind time to coast over the things you may have
| struggled with in the day. It's always easier later.
| midasuni wrote:
| I don't do offices, but I worked 2 extra hours last night
| to finish a train of thought. Today I won't start until 3
| hours after normal time and will play villainous with the
| kids (when they emerge)
|
| I don't get paid for presenteeism, I schedule my own
| hours. If someone was telling gme I couldn't work after I
| wake up at 2am with a breakthrough, that's as bad as
| someone saying I couldn't stop work at 2pm because it's a
| lovely afternoon and I fancy a bbq.
| pl90087 wrote:
| If it's predictable, then everybody can prepare for it
| too and ensure they are in a downhill configuration when
| 6pm comes by.
| 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") [0]. 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
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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?_
|
| Obligatory executive dysfunction angle: the special thing
| about now is that I'm doing the thing. Once I stop, it
| will take me anything between 2 hours to 2 days to start
| again.
| rwoerz wrote:
| Or they are on a hard nut to crack and better should sleep
| over it. I know unsolved bugs can make you sleepless
| sometimes but sleeping over them often does the right kind
| of "backtracking" in your mind that leads to the "branch"
| with the solution the next morning.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| In almost every case that I find myself working on
| something "hard" stepping away, losing focus, and then
| thinking periodically about the problem leads to higher
| levels of clarity.
| 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.
| exodust wrote:
| > park facing downhill
|
| I like that expression, but this could also mean leaving things
| not broken, but in a ready state for the next phase.
|
| Personally I don't like logging off with things broken. I like
| logging off with things in a good state so I can jump in next
| time knowing everything up to this point is good.
| yuuuuyu wrote:
| Excellent advice, just like the article as well.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This trick is also known as the Hemmingway rule.
|
| It is a way to fight anxiety by starting with something your
| brain is convinced it can get done easily. And then get the ball
| rolling thanks to the increased self-confidence.
|
| The opposite is finishing your day on something painfully
| difficult and not solved.
| chatmasta wrote:
| When the Hemingway rule doesn't work, maybe because you've
| finished something and don't know what to do, that's when you
| can turn to the Twain rule: eat the frog first. Start with the
| hardest task.
| bhu1st wrote:
| Nice trick.
|
| For me it's little different. I usually divide the work into
| small chunks and tackle one by one. I may work on task 1 and 2
| and leave task 3 untouched for next session. This has worked for
| me pretty well to get started the next session.
| eur0pa wrote:
| Kind reminder that you're on borrowed time here.
| 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]
| fastball wrote:
| This is what I do with writing most of the time. There is a
| tool[1] I've used on occasion that (in a certain mode) forces you
| to write non-stop without being able to look at what you've
| already written, for a certain amount of time. Whenever I need to
| knock out a rough draft for something and am feeling a bit stuck,
| I reach for this.
|
| [1] https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app
| 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.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| The way I do it is I try to stand up as soon as my pomodoro timer
| is done. I do finish the sentence / line of code or write a
| comment how to continue, and then I get up and take a break.
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I wonder how much of it is also about getting out of a
| local maxima... you are pursuing a specific solution, and
| are exploring the end of a long chain of choices you made
| on how to approach it... and starting over again the next
| day clears out all those choices, letting you maybe
| discover a better solution that was on a different branch
| of the decision tree.
| 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.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Another hack I had read about and found out it works for me is to
| write down any distracting thoughts while trying to focus.
|
| Many times, when I try to focus on a particular task, I get ideas
| and questions about tangible or completely irrelevant (we need to
| buy bananas) topics. My primitive brain would drive me to first
| complete these irrelevant tasks first to get some dopamine
| reward.
|
| Now I always have in front of me a small piece of paper, and when
| some distracting thought like that hits me, I just write it down,
| and I reassure my brain I will get back to it once done with the
| main task I am trying to focus on. It is nice to have these
| written down because I can completely empty my brain of them.
|
| I know it is stupid, but it works for me :)
| 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.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| There are quite a few solutions for this. You can do your work
| stuff in a VM that you just turn off and it's gone for the rest
| of the day. You can get a second computer for non-work
| programming. Or if you don't need that much compute in your
| free time, get an iPad. It's great for your evening articles,
| YouTube and Netflix.
| chatmasta wrote:
| The most important part of my evening routine is renewing the
| 24 hour block in SelfControl.app before it expires.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think "failing test in a feature branch with a draft PR and a
| powered off machine" counts as "left broken". I won't even boot
| into the work OS if I'm not working.
| 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.
| tylerc230 wrote:
| If I need to stop in the middle of something, I'll often write
| directly in the source code, at the point where I stopped,
| exactly what I was working on and what to do next. I don't
| comment out these instructions to my future self so when I sit
| down next, the project won't even compile.
| [deleted]
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I don't usually leave notes, I just leave the last thing I
| looked at in whatever arbitrary failure state it was in,
| unsaved, with whatever undo history I stopped at. If the errors
| aren't immediately obvious, a couple cmd-Zs is usually all it
| takes to jog my memory and at least start retracing my steps
| adastra22 wrote:
| What editor configuration are you using that saves undo
| history like that?
| kqbx wrote:
| undo-tree for emacs can do this. I think spacemacs enables
| this by default
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2985050/is-there-any-
| way...
|
| It really saves the whole tree, not just the path that was
| active at the time of exit.
| zxexz wrote:
| I'm not who you're replying to, but I hope my input will be
| helpful.
|
| I just use Jetbrains IDEs on projects with the IdeaVim
| plugin (integrates so well with the IDE, it's pretty much
| my only must-have plugin for any software, beyond uBlock
| Origin), and Vim for external files (scripts, etc., or when
| I want to use a specific plug-in for editing).
|
| By default IntelliJ (PyCharm, GoLand. any Jetbrains IDE...)
| has a pretty large undo history, and that can be extended
| to however long you like. The real killer, however, is the
| extended local history for the file, which is arbitrarily
| (or at least seems to be) long. Combine that with the
| wonderful built-in git history (which can be a separate
| pane/window!), and you'll never worry about changes you've
| made being lost, or overwriting other history, no matter
| how overzealous you were with said changes.
|
| I find IDEA's built-in tools so useful I barely ever even
| think of using git stash or git shelve anymore (or directly
| calling ~30% of git commands for that matter), and those
| are commands for which I still have 20+ aliases for in my
| .bashrc.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Intellij's local history saved my ass a couple of times.
|
| Its git features are also quite comfortable. Very nice
| diff, I like very much the "Show history for Selection",
| live git annotate (with GitToolbox plugin). I don't often
| do rebase, but when I do the interactive rebase is also
| very helpful.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Closing my laptop and leaving it on a charger. Wish I had a
| better answer. I use VSCode and it does restore undo
| history on relaunch for the most part, but I can't remember
| if I configured it for that, and I definitely don't trust
| or rely on it. I know it definitely doesn't work if I
| accidentally invoke "reload".
| amoss wrote:
| uptime 8:26 up 38 days, 9:49, 4 users, load averages: 1.59
| 1.51 1.60
| senbrow wrote:
| Any decent editor if you don't close it/hard power off the
| workstation.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I was assuming he meant something persistent.
| maccard wrote:
| I write C++, so I use `#error start here, implement the FOO`
|
| It works surprisingly well!
| ralferoo wrote:
| Even easier with C-like languages: a bunch of blank lines
| above and below something like `xxxxxxxxx;` at the point I
| planned to continue working. Instant compile fail if I try to
| run and also very obvious on any "git diff".
| zxexz wrote:
| This is the way. The only way I can stop coding and stay
| comfortable when it's getting late, especially if it's
| something even mildly interesting, is to do a borderline
| incoherent mind dump and break the linter/formatter. Just all
| my thoughts, what I was working on, other places I may need to
| change code. I usually end up closing the laptop before I
| describe the _why_ , but the act of writing it all down usually
| makes that come back before I've finished reading the first few
| words the next time I revisit it. I've found this remarkably
| effective to the point I often just do a mind dump the moment I
| feel tired at all, and end up in a better place than if I kept
| pushing.
| nhoughto wrote:
| Yep
|
| Couple of, retrospectively, often almost incoherent sentences
| to capture top of mind state when I give up because it's
| late.
|
| I'll write this gibberish comment here because I'll
| definitely forget what I was doing and if the compile fails I
| probably won't miss it!
| iamthejuan wrote:
| I thought I was the only one doing this. This works!
| nickjj wrote:
| This works well near the end of the day or before a weekend too
| where you spend a few minutes dropping in a brain dump of
| context near the code you're working on so you can pick it up
| the next day and also avoid having to actively think about
| forgetting an important detail. This helps you enjoy your time
| away. A double win.
| barefeg wrote:
| I also write in the code what I was doing so the code doesn't
| compile. My only issue is that I don't trust my computer, for
| me, if it's not pushed in Git then it can disappear at any
| moment. If the work is not too important and I could easily re-
| create it from scratch the next day then I'll leave it in my
| local Git. But if it's important then I also want to push it.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The failures I've experienced in 20 years of spending ~8
| hours a day with one:
|
| - SSD failure within moments of getting started for the day
|
| - backlight failure
|
| - mouse/keyboard failure
|
| - human failure (spilling coffee on the computer)
|
| Each time, I was out of commission until I got a replacement
| or the computer repaired and someone else had to pick up my
| work. If your computer becomes a brick, it doesn't really
| matter what you thought you wanted to do next.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I've had all these plus PSU failure, network adapter
| failure, OS post-update self-destruction and more.
|
| I push code a couple of times a day. If something goes
| horribly wrong I just pick up another computer, pull the
| code, and continue working while I wait for a repair/part
| for the main computer (or for an OS to reinstall).
|
| If your computer becomes a brick, just use a different
| computer.
| withinboredom wrote:
| That assumes you have another computer that isn't a
| brick. I have 6 other computers within this house, yet
| only one other one (my wife's) is currently functioning.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Yeah, true, I'm assuming most people here have old
| machines that still work. It's good to have one, if you
| don't!
|
| My secondary is a 10-year old laptop which gets regularly
| used while sitting in bed in the morning, occasionally
| for actual work. The other backup is an old desktop I
| donated to my wife a few years ago, containing an
| unplugged SSD which is exactly as it was when I last used
| it. Both will still handle most of what I need, just a
| bit slowly.
| pl90087 wrote:
| Either you have been extremely unlucky, or a good time
| investment for you would be to fix a few of the non-
| working ones. That's likely a better use of your time
| than wondering how to leave notes to your future self.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I was actually advocating not to bother leaving notes for
| yourself.
| ozim wrote:
| Still if you worked on something whole day you should have
| commits that someone could pick up.
|
| Let's say that last note of the day does not have to go to
| repo.
|
| But I would expect some commit chain that would be useful
| produced and pushed.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Personally, I very rarely push commits unless I'm about
| to open a PR.
|
| A coworker fell off a ladder and broke both his arms. We
| had to look at his commits to figure out what he had
| gotten done. It was worthless. Absolute trash. His
| finished code was always top notch, but his WIP code ...
| trash.
|
| It was easier to ignore it and start from first
| principles than to try and pick up where he left off.
| pl90087 wrote:
| If your philosophy is to do a PR at least every few days
| then the negative impact of this was likely negligible,
| especially comparing to have a fellow dev being out with
| having broken arms for a few months.
|
| If you do PRs every few weeks then that could be a bigger
| issue. But then this should be a lesson to just not do
| that. Merge small steps often. It has tons of advantages.
| littlelady wrote:
| Why is that a problem? You can create a branch called "in-
| progress" or something like that and push that to remote.
| di456 wrote:
| Draft PR's are nice on these branches to get a quick visual
| of the diff.
|
| I self-review my draft PR's and catch all kinds of weird
| formatting, messy or missing comments, and general
| clunkiness before imposing it on others to review.
| 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.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Compiling is the riskiest time for me, as that's when I'm
| most likely to get distracted by something else. Sometimes
| during a 10 minute rebuild I just force myself to stare at
| it.
| 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...
| stefandesu wrote:
| > leaving the system / code too clean makes it hard to know what
| to work on next
|
| I've heard about the idea in this post often in other contexts
| (e.g. writers stopping in the middle of a sentence), but I've
| always been the type of guy who likes everything to be clean when
| I stop for the day. But that does indeed make it very hard to
| know where to start the next day (or even worse, two weeks later
| when coming back from vacation). Sometimes it takes me days to
| get back into the work and it doesn't feel good.
|
| I will definitely try this out.
| 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.
| butz wrote:
| I like leaving some easy finishing touches at the end of the day,
| so next morning starts with a quick win and morale boost. Or even
| leaving in the evening with no idea how to solve the issue,
| usually solution comes itself until next morning.
| 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.
| lukasb wrote:
| So yeah, good news about that ...
| riemannzeta wrote:
| "Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you
| to start from the nest day - that way, you can write three or
| five words without being "creative" and before you know it,
| you're writing." -- Cory Doctorow
| dybber wrote:
| Also known as Hemingway's hack:
|
| "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
| you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good
| and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to
| write the next day."
|
| - Ernest Hemingway
| 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.
| rendall wrote:
| I thought the consensus was that "flow" isn't actually all that
| great. If you're writing code while juggling multiple difficult
| concepts in your mind at once, your code will be difficult to
| follow. While in flow, you tend not to take the holistic, bird's
| eye view and so work harder, not smarter.
| ideamotor wrote:
| I haven't considered this but it makes perfect sense. If time
| is critical or if you are understaffed, it becomes required,
| however. I've prided myself on my ability to get so much done
| in a solid 8 hour flow state in the past, when it was
| necessary, but now that I have a baby and work at a larger
| company, perhaps I can take some solace in the concept you
| shared.
| [deleted]
| humanpotato wrote:
| I realized this trick a while ago. As an engineer I will
| sometimes leave stuff disassembled on my desk to end the day if I
| was working on it, so the next obvious step in the morning is to
| re-assemble it and keep testing.
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| I just leave myself a note "This is where you stopped" and a
| quick description of the next step. No thinking needed on return.
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, I leave my code with compiler error, so I can come right
| back to it later.
| domh wrote:
| This is exactly what I do! I just came back to a repo I haven't
| worked in for a couple of days, checked out my working branch,
| ran a `git stash pop`, ran the tests and there's a failing test
| case waiting for me to fix. Feels good to know exactly where I
| left off before.
|
| I also often leave a // TODO comment with some rough bullets for
| next steps. Works for me!
| tchock23 wrote:
| This is a variation of the Zeigarnik Effect for anyone interested
| in the why behind it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
| totalhack wrote:
| I don't necessarily do the "broken" part but always leave a note
| or marker for myself about where I left off (with special syntax
| highlighting). I write out thoughts and options as I go in my org
| file notes so it's useful for rehydrating when I come back.
|
| Tangential trick: walk away more often, especially when in the
| more intense problem solving or architectural phases.
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I can follow OP's argument, but it doesn't work precisely that
| way for me. I like to start in the morning with a clean build.
| Then I can set off to make major changes, knowing that everything
| that goes wrong, what I just did had something to do with it. The
| work will inspire new ideas (which I jot down to not forget, but
| stay on track) and I work till I get back to a clean build again.
| I want the complex flow-state in my head to be related to what
| I'm working on in as short a time-span as possible. New ideas can
| wait for a new day.
| justizin wrote:
| i love this, i often try to wrap things up 100% while in flow and
| sometimes end up screwing things up. this makes perfect sense.
| chatmasta wrote:
| This is one of the only weird tricks that actually works. I don't
| remember where I originally got the idea, but as soon as I saw
| someone point out that it works, it seemed so obvious. I've been
| doing this for years.
|
| When I get into a slump, it's usually because I finally finished
| something, and then woke up the next morning not knowing what to
| do.
| 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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| This resonates with me.
|
| For about 18 months I commuted to work through public transport
| and I had to adhere to bus/metro timings or risk reaching home
| couple of hours late and earn the wrath of family. This meant two
| things 1) I drastically cut down on non-productive tasks while at
| office and 2) I often had to get up from desk with solved but
| half-finished work. So when I reached work the next day I didn't
| have to think what to do, I had an extremely well scoped work to
| start the day. It's as if a chef walking into kitchen finds all
| the cutting/dicing done and recipe laid out in front, he just
| needs to start cooking.
|
| The net result being it was perhaps the most productive period of
| my career and it coincided with the hyper growth phase of the
| startup I was working for.
| stanislavb wrote:
| That actually works.
| 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.
| imjonse wrote:
| Maybe off topic, but it's weird to see a post about flow and
| distraction start with a completely unrelated splash image as
| many posts do these days.
|
| Are there studies linking this with better recall/comprehension
| or is it SEO related/purely aesthetic/trendy? It makes the posts
| signal 'I care about this' a bit more than your old school
| livejournal text only content, but I suspect in the vast majority
| of the cases it correlates with superficial and weak content.
| jzwinck wrote:
| The photo of a mountain biker is not unrelated, you just aren't
| aware of how it's related.
|
| Flow is a term used often in mountain biking, and in a similar
| way to programming and other pursuits. Garmin even have a
| metric for it: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/garmin-
| technology/cycling-scien...
| 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.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Ditto; I remember reading somewhere to try and finish the day
| on an accomplishment, so that you've got a pleasant taste in
| your mouth about the project.
|
| Given how long ago it was, though, maybe the article was about
| personal projects instead of work.
| exodust wrote:
| > finish the day on an accomplishment
|
| This is the way. I can't believe people are actually
| endorsing leaving things broken as a positive way to end the
| day. It's a hard disagree from me on that idea.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| It's exactly why certain games are really addictive.
|
| There's always something more that needs to fixed.
|
| Looking at you Factorio.
| jasfi wrote:
| You can have ideas for productivity that only make sense in the
| moment when you're in a state of flow.
| 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.
| trc001 wrote:
| In academic or research work this can be tricky because sometimes
| you put something down and can't come back to it for a
| week/month. At that point, this trick is more of a hindrance than
| anything...
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