I'm biased, being a musician, but my experience and many of my colleagues is that musicians are often excellent coders, and I credit this to the fact that you need to master your attention to become a good musician. There is no other way than getting good at putting yourself alone in a room with no distractions and practicing in a focused manner. I remember when I hired a friend of mine (pro bass player) as a junior coder and it was so obvious watching him learn.
Personally my top tips for getting better at attention management would be:
- Take up an instrument or some other hobby involving regular, quiet, uninterrupted, solo deliberate practice. Do it daily. It becomes your rinse cycle.
- Adopt the pomorodoro or other similar technique of doing 20-30 minutes of completely focused, uninterrupted work at a time and then taking a real break for a few minutes. This is both how I work and practice.
- Read a lot, on paper.
- Run - IMHO way better than lifting for overall mental effects and mental focus
- Get enough sleep, religiously
my two cents Canadian. :-)
I now have an issue(addiction) with competitive multiplayer games. I get really good at them very quickly, I even won tournaments before it became a career option. However, I realized these are causing massive anxiety in my life, hurt my ability to concentrate, hurt my ability to stick to a project and destroyed my sleeping schedule. One of the worst games was Rocket League. I uninstalled multiple times and like an addict told myself I will be responsible this time and reinstalled it.....to end up where I began...angry at 3 AM....at a dumb video game. Since then, I completely uninstalled it but Warzone has filled that void....I have to stop playing that too as it is too addicting for me.
Single player games are not an issue and are actually calming as it seems that it is the competitive aspect that keeps me engaged.
Reading books also helps me significantly and has improvement my attention span.
I've been addicted to video games in the past, but these days I only play console games and ones that are suited to casual play. And I only have Mac computers so I can't play most games anyways even if I was tempted. I also save money on expensive gaming PC rigs
It’s a super power. I’ve also noticed musicians are usually terrific coders.
A big part of being a great musician is years of learning HOW to practice. Glad to see others interested in the space.
Learning an instrument isn't going to make you a better programmer; applying pedological techniques you used to learn an instrument to learning programming might.
While I have no doubt attention is important (much like a luck stat, it affects everything you do), it might be a bit premature to declare it the most valuable asset without additional evidence than personal anecdote!
[1]: Or some other phone giant -- I keep misplacing this citation so if someone knows what I'm talking about please hand me a reference.
I’d posit that attention and communication are both secondary to core competency in software development. My guess is that information synthesis and lateral thinking are the core competencies of great engineers. I don’t think you can get the information you need or as much lateral thinking without attention and communication, but that doesn’t mean they are the core competency.
Forcing the second kind to communicate more wont make him better, it will make him worse. He will need to build up his technical skills before communicating more actually helps.
In my personal experience and opinion, pairing makes sense for knowledge distribution and figuring out something hard together. Or onboarding, getting a project newbie up to speed for a couple of weeks.
But when overdone, it simply slows you and binds expensive developer resources that otherwise could be working on a parallel thing. Especially in the remote environment during Corona times. I basically HAVE TO have an always-on Zoom/Teams call with mic and camera.
Half the team seems to really love that mode of working, but I for one am rather puzzled how you are supposed to focus and really think things through this way. Always having to articulate every single little thing and then switching control just throws your flow completely out of the water.
And one other bad side-effect I observed is that reviews are now taken much less seriously. No need to do reviews, since a PAIR already worked on it, right?
Not in my opinion - I think that reviews and subsequent communication are a much better way of knowledge sharing anyway and pairing is often just a management oversight excuse rather than a helpful technique/mechanism. Some devs also seem rather desperate to have others help them do simple tasks. It feels like those people in school who tag onto your project because they know that you and that other girl will do all of the work.
If you're in the team for 3 years I would expect you to be able to read some code and understand what it does. Or read docs of some framework. But nope, some people just NEED others to tell them how it is done and by next week they already forgot it anyways. And when I want to read some docs? Enjoy those eyes and intermittent verbal injections from that Zoom call.
Uff - I am rather frustrated, but as mentioned early in my comment, I do see some real benefits of pairing. Just not 100% of the time all the time with always-on Zoom cams.
A lot of people just jump right into developing without asking the right questions first. Especially when given ambiguous orders.
At a previous client I got a ticket that would mean rewriting a large part of the application, to the tune of €10k. Something didn’t sit right with me and I started sleuthing around the org chart, asking relevant people questions. The €10k ticket became €0.5k in research and two-line css fix + different copy in the UI
Maybe I've missed an important corner case. Maybe my coworker has worked on something similar or relevant and has some code or technique I could use. Maybe I've been overthinking it and a stop-gap is better until we can make a more informed decision.
Sometimes just a tweak can make a significant difference, other times I end up going a completely different route.
I'll also email or phone customers if I sense a X/Y problem, or if I don't fully get their feature request or bug description. I'm not a domain expert and it's good to have context.
All in all, indeed it's usually a good idea to not jump straight into it. Mull it over, talk a bit with someone.
Xerox repair techs' secret weapon was the morning pre-dispatch coffee session, where war stories were swapped.
A similar later reference noted information transfer (or lack) between techs and phone operators --- physically separating the two cut down on the operators' knowledge and effectiveness.
The TL;DR is, Bell Labs was designed to balance casual, collaborative conversations with solo deep work.
1. Instead of having a computer science building, a physics building, etc, they put every discipline in the same building. They had shared areas for eating & discussing which pushed people to run into each other, and have highly cross-domain conversations.
2. Inside the building, the offices were a hub and spoke model. Individual researchers had quiet individual offices for deep thinking they could retreat to AFTER they've bumped into someone at lunch from a different field.
In most open offices today, we've forgotten about the deep work spaces and ONLY kept the collaboration spaces.
[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
It strikes me from working in tech that in practice, perceived productivity is often simply "communicated productivity" rather than actual productivity. I'm curious to see what the proxies for productivity would be used in studies such as this.
They're definitely not a magic pill, but I'm not constantly battling with my brain just to stay focussed on the task at hand.
I haven't been formally diagnosed with ADHD but I do have certain symptoms that align with it. I'd be curious to get your personal experience and feedback with what I've been working on
The details in this article are great, I'm a productivity geek despite never really getting to a point where I "always feel productive" - and each point here is definitely relevant specifically for focus as a software developer. I'm a manager so minimizing meetings is out of the question to some degree, but my "OS minimalism" is much more extreme so maybe that balances out.
Ultimately this article is great from the POV of a software dev, but the point of it applies to everything in life.
I’ve found productivity maximized when I make time to work on an interesting project every day or two. Making progress on enjoyable tasks gets me started with the momentum to tackle the nasty, boring ones.
My conclusion is ironic in that I’m the CEO of Amplenote, a note taking/todo list app built to ensure “urgent” or “important” tasks get scheduled to the calendar. I consider myself more disciplined than the average bear, but I’ll be damned if I can focus my attention for more than half the day on tedious tasks.
Meanwhile, when running down a feature or bug fix that will directly help me as a user, I can often focus for 12 hours of programming. I think dogfooding is central to the best products because it begets genuine interest, thus attention, from its developer/users.
Don't get me wrong... It's an alpha exercise and you feel amazing doing it. But the only physical reward you get from deadlifting is the ability to deadlift more and alongside it have a severely higher risk of injury.
If you want a correlation between sitting at a desk and building strength to offset that, look at squats in all it's forms, and hamstring and quad dominant exercises. Your lower body is in much more trouble than your lower back from sitting at a computer.
Hipflexer stretches with resistance bands will also do you wonders.
Trust me folks. Doing deadlifts because you see the gym-bros on youtube doing them is a big mistake. Take a book out of Eddie Hall's playbook who says the exact same thing... And he's literally the strongest man in the world.
However, I’m not sure how we arrived at a situation where people are recommending deadlifts as the go-to exercise for people who want to maintain fitness. Experienced weightlifters and coaches generally won’t recommend that beginners focus on deadlifts, like you said.
We shouldn’t be making fitness sound so complicated or setting the bar so high. No one needs to be doing deadlifts to get into shape. Frankly, most sedentary people need to focus on small, achievable, and enjoyable fitness goals to start. Simply going for a 15-minute walk every day is a step in the right direction for beginners. Going to the gym is great if that’s your thing, but doing a handful of push-ups and stretches at home is also great for someone looking to get started.
The Internet has been great for disseminating fitness information and generating enthusiasm for exercise, but this trend of recommending advanced exercises and over the top workout programs like CrossFit to beginners has probably done just as much harm as good. We shouldn’t be making fitness sound like some complicated, difficult goal.
It is that, but that’s all. I’ve realised lately that it really isn’t enough.
Until earlier this year I was cycling about 15kms a day in the natural course of going to work, and climbing perhaps 30 flights of stairs a day in the natural course of living on the 3rd floor. Then I moved house, and I no longer do either.
I do, however, still walk a decent amount on the flat. My phone says I average about 7km/day (near enough 10,000 steps).
It’s not enough. It’s taken me a while to realise it, but I’m pretty sure that my current lower back issues are basically a result of stopping the cycling & stairs. I can’t prove it of course, but it makes a lot of sense. All of my glute/hamstring strength has just gone.
Starting tomorrow I’m forcing myself to ride about 15kms a day (~5 days/week), with some sort of an incline in there. I’m lucky that I enjoy this; I was luckier when it just happened as part of my day without me thinking about it. Making myself do it is going to be a lot harder. I need to figure out a way to “science the shit out of it” so I can at least gain motivation from the fact that it works (assuming that it does).
Most important is to find something you can make into a lasting habit (for years). Otherwise you will end like most people with dieting do.
I like low-bar squats, but I was never very strong in them(~1/2 my DL weight), they hurt my knees, and I've tweaked my back several times doing them.
I freaking love DLs. They feel amazing, they actually seem to fix my back pain, and I'm just downright strong in them(compared to my maxes in nearly every other exercise).
Now, I also have to say that as a 45 year old who has now gone through shoulder surgery, and gave up anything beyond farmers carries( * ) when it comes to weightlifting, that most people should just stick to cardio. I feel so much better now that I'm doing crazy hikes again and not carrying around a bunch of useless muscle. I'm better in bed, I feel less pain, I have more energy, and I'm not spending all day worrying about protein targets. To each their own. Weightlifting was fun and being big is kinda satisfying, but it's not something I will recommend anymore.
* - I'll probably get a bar and some plates to resume lower weight(275 or less), higher rep DLs once I move out of the bay area and have the space.
But deadlifts I seem naturally good at. I did a 200kg deadlift (2.5x bodyweight) which I'm proud of, but honestly I think I could go much heavier if I really wanted to train it. But I decided to leave it there as the risk of injury becomes too high after that. Nowadays I don't train it regularly but find I can still deadlift 160kg (2x bodyweight) at any time. It really helps my back and my shoulders.
Well, kind of. Squats have different limitations than DLs. But even a kid can squat (and their knees do go past their toes so cut the BS about that)
But low-bar squats are more similar to DLs than high-bar squats in movement requirements and activations.
I’ve been lifting for 2 years and have not experienced any long lasting pain and have not been injured. My progress is slow, 330/225/360 S/BP/DL at 220 BW (gained 30lbs) but I’m not in a hurry. I’ve been doing round back deadlifts for a while now (my spine has completely lost it’s natural lordosis due to a lifetime of sitting, my lower back has a slight rounding that I just can’t force into extension, my discs are completely fine and I have gained 2 inches to my height since I’ve started training) and have never experienced any back pain.
People start obsessing over their progress and start doing too much, either load or sets.
My well-being improved by a lot. Sitting for 8+ hours a day stopped being an issue and all the weird pains I had before disappeared.
This advice comes from myself who in the past dove into numerous exercises after watching 1 video, had crappy form, and had pain as a result. Slow and steady with proper form is definitely the name of the game.
Plus the mental clarity is great and the general calmness.
The hardest part (for me) is not to get too much into the culture. In the end as a middle aged man, I’m not going pro, I’m looking to feel great though.
Nice progress btw, I too am 2 years in.
Trying to add 5 pounds per workout and grinding through 5x5s after years of sedentary lifestyle is what gets people hurt.
Robert Oberst, another WSM competitor also says the same thing and talks about it on the Joe Rogan podcast (#1321 I believe). To quote:
"I went from football to strongman, and in football we never did deadlifts. It was all hang cleans and power cleans, which by the way, quick little tip: if you’re deadlifting to be a better deadlifter fine. If you’re not, (you’re) doing that for deadlift’s sake, don’t fucking do it. The risk to reward ratio is a joke."
"A lot of people are not going to like that I’m saying that. (…) If you go to any NFL gym, any college football gym, any athletics where people are actually getting paid and it matters what they’re doing, they’re not deadlifting. They’re hang cleaning and power cleaning."
For any pro athlete, consistent work is far more important than any one workout, hence avoiding injury is instrumental in success. The same holds true for hobbyists as well, of course, but the topic doesn't get as much focus there since many are self-taught. For consistent progress, work volume is much more crucial than work weight [0], hence doing an exercise with high risk and low volume isn't the best option.
They’re also great for boxing. Help you generate more power on your punche. Uppercuts especially.
The trick is to not lift for hypertrophy. Lift for power and speed and neuromuscular activation. If you’re sore the next day you went too hard.
Deadlifts as the exercise it purely is, is less likely to give you the strength for running you desire. Having been in the atmosphere of "Train as efficiently as possible", I can attest that deadlifts are far from a great choice for physical health. My 75 y/o coach would tear me a new one if he saw me wasting time training them.
I'm not surprised deadlifts have helped you gain a strong back, but having also trained for a marathon I can tell you there is a plethora of other benefits you will miss out on by training your lower back instead of your legs and overall cardio fitness.
Leg blasters are significantly better and have a lower risk of injury.
I once was a gym bro who believed that deadlift and barbell squats where like the only thing you should do in the gym.
Until i blew my back really hard, doing squats following the 5x5 strong lift program. I really regret that now because it ruined so much for me. I now have constant pain in my back and i cannot do the sports that i truly love doing (boxing and bjj) like i used to.
Now i have a much different view on the gym. I use machines to a greater extent and i focus more on training for health than lifting heavy barbells.
>Ex-professional weightlifter of about 10 years here
This implies a number of things:
1. First and foremost, it implies the use of much higher weights and workloads than what a typical non-professional stronglifts or starting strength type lifter might be using. This is related to the next two factors: potential use of performance-enhancing drugs, and potential obesity. Without these two factors, you'd plateau at lower and safer weight, close to your natural limit.
2. It implies the potential use of performance-enhancing drugs. Performance-enhancer use is incredibly pervasive in today's professional athletic world. Their use will push you beyond your limits; the limits of strength, and the limits of what's safe and healthy.
3. It implies potential obesity: competitive lifting requires massive amounts of food in order to fully recover and continue lifting as much as possible. Teamed with performance enhancers, one might achieve a strength level, body weight, and muscle mass far higher than one's bones and ligaments evolved to handle.
So if you're using good form, not eating inordinate amounts of food, and not using performance-enhancers, you can safely and healthily deadlift. You will move less weight than the professional, but it will be weight that your body is more naturally capable of handling.
We've had deadlift scaremongering for decades with yet any solid proof to be produced against its use in general, non-PED using populations, as part of a general strength training and conditioning program.
I don't care what Hall or Oberall say - most of us are lightyears away from their numbers or from those kinds of environments. (I'm also asking for proof on Hall's negative stance on deadlifts, since I can't find anything about it)
To add, the best strength training programs I've tried use submaximal loading most if not all of the time, adding a further layer of safety: not only are you not pushing yourself past your limits with PEDs or insane training tonnage, you're purposefully staying below your natural limits.
Keep deadlifting with exquisite form and reap the benefits!
This is anecdotal evidence I know, but I can think of two friends that have gotten slipped disks from doing deadlifts in 2019, and this was during personal training sessions from "ex-Olympians" that cost $100s an hour.
A lof of gymnast / psycisian's advice I've read says the opposite. That deadlifts are a great exercize, and should not be restrained to the weight lifting / body builder types.
Great exercise != absolutely necessary or useful towards a specific goal
Maybe increase weight slowly if you're really starting quite low but at some and at a perhaps rather early point compared to what you see powerlifters pulling...Stop increasing the weight. It's tempting to keep going. To chase progress but....it's probably bad in that case.
You can train your muscles. You can't train your spine and you especially can't train your spine out of an injury. You should try to be helping your back with that exercise. I don't think you need it to try and looked ripped. There's other lower risk exercises for that.
However... Deadlifts as the exercise it is? Almost not worth doing in the scheme of things. Want to win a deadlift competition? Sure. But for any other reason I could strongly argue that there are many, many better suited exercises for your health than a Deadlift.
it's a somewhat similar story across some of my friends who i deadlift with.
a number of of powerlifters we follow on instagram are on regular cbd oil therapy. i'm on lyrica and a truckload of painkillers every day. we still go out and do it. grit your teeth and grind through the pain.
i don't do it as much anymore after i realized that i'm killing my future quality of life for absolutely no financial gain - i'm not selling instagram views, not selling training or equipment and things. but for a long time it was all vanity. none of it is necessary for sitting properly at a desk.
I'm not sure how much value there is to just state "Build physical strength" and the main take away is to do deadlifts. I think there isn't any doubt from a health perspective that doing weightlifting has benefits for overall health but the program someone should go on is dependent on so many factors. Also, why can't it just be "Stay physically active". I would say that has further greater benefits than even weightlifting. Doing half an hour to an hour of moderate cardio activity every day or a few times a week is great.
My recommendation for someone wanting to seriously get into weight lifting is to do your research. There is definitely a lot of "bro science" out there but fortunately there is also a great set of resources out there that is firmly in the realm of solid science.
Here is some Youtube channels that are very solid on approaching weightlifting grounded in real practice and science: Jeff Nippard, mountaindog1 (John Meadows), Greg Doucette, VitruvianPhysique and Renaissance Periodization.
A good book is: https://www.amazon.ca/Science-Development-Muscle-Hypertrophy...
What I have personally found is that for me there is two primary focus points: reducing the risk of injury and keeping consistent with the program. Reducing risk of injury comes down to knowing your own limits for what exercises are comfortable and not going hard with attempting to do max reps all the time. Personally, I don't do any traditional squats and for deadlifts I use a trap bar. Being consistent is much harder. Making a schedule to be in the gym three to four times a week is really hard.
So, yeah, if you want to get started with weightlifting, spend a few hours with those Youtube channels. Picking a class of exercises as a one size fits all is definitely not the way to go.
I'd add Mark Rippetoe (Starting Strength on Youtube) and Alan Thrall to that list.
I would personally recommend almost anything else -- running, swimming, natural weight exercises (ie. when you are in unstable position lifting your own weight), that train a lot of different muscle at the same time and help keep things in balance.
I was a college football player, 60 lbs. heavier than now. When I met my current martial arts teacher he told me flat out, "it's going to take me 20 years to fix what you did to your body." He was right. I'm still fighting to heal tha damage that intense weightlifting over many years did to my body.
Strength is nothing without balance, relaxation, and control. Weight lifting is generally about isolating the muscles, when you should be working on integrating them.
Don't base your decisions on what has been written in this thread. Most information here is anecdotal, garbage, or both.
Went to a personal trainer for a year or so - expensive as hell (like €75 per 30 minute session), but I had the money at the time and was lacking in many ways.
I couldn't do push-ups at first, because my wrists hurt too much from RSI. I couldn't really do deadlifts at a proper weight either, because my hands weren't strong enough. But after just a few sessions (using wrist straps), my grip strength increased a lot, and my RSI complaints went away. TL;DR, deadlifts helped me beat RSI. They're back now though, haven't been to a gym this year and before that it was sporadic at best.
Squats, I had trouble with those as well; the trainer identified the cause pretty quickly, pointing out ankle flexibility. Another one to consider. Gave me a specific exercise to sort that one out.
We did a lot of the hip flexor ones as well, split squats I believe they were called? I was so bad at those at first, complete lack of balance and control. I mean even after a year they were still uncomfortable to do, but it was a big improvement.
Part of me would like to go for PT again because I lack intrinsic motivation so I need some other guy telling me what to do, but I can't really afford it anymore.
Any outdoorsy activity is vastly superior to it due to exposure to fresh air and sunlight. It also tends to be less boring and monotonous than lifting heavy things for some inexplicable reason.
Personally I got religion on weight lifting after reading a book on aging. Losing bone and muscle mass is inevitable with age but if you have a good base you’ve got more to lose. If you keep on weight lifting you lose it much slower. I never got serious about it. I’ve never broken 100kg for a squat and I’m perfectly ok with staying there forever. But I’m going to get weak slower than those who only do cardio and I aim to able to sit up unassisted for as long as possible, and to avoid breaking a hip too.
This is false and shortsighted. Here are some benefits of strength training:
- Muscle mass and bone density maintenance and acquisition, which translates to better overall health. Many physical ailments in old age are related to the degradation of lean body tissues and strength training mitigates that. There is a massive change in trends where even general fitness, health-oriented programs for older trainees now incorporate a substantial resistance-training component.
- Strength acquisition causes performance gains in pretty much every sport with an anaerobic component. Even sports where strength training has been historically ignored like soccer (which I follow closely) are seeing a change of trend, as it has become obvious that stronger is better, and that significant strength gains do not have to come at the expense of other athletic attributes such as agility or speed.
- Strength training fixes posture and mobility issues. For untrained individuals, squatting under a light load (or even bodyweight) will likely reveal a host of problems issuing from the modern sedentary life, such as a lack of strength and mobility in key parts of the body, such as the abs or the hip flexors. Training for strength requires addressing these imbalances and helps greatly in the process too.
> Any outdoorsy activity is vastly superior to it due to exposure to fresh air and sunlight
This is in fact ignorant advice, and false, for the following reasons:
- Few "outdoorsy" activities are close to providing the benefits listed above
- You can train for strength outdoors: with your bodyweight, resistance bands, kettlebells or even a barbell setup. This is a false dichotomy that's being put forward.
It is absolutely fine if you want the bulk of your physical activity to be long walks in nature, but do know that the weight of scientific and practical evidence is overwhelming: you won't be optimizing for general health unless you incorporate some degree of resistance training into your physical activity routine.
> Any outdoorsy activity is vastly superior to it due to exposure to fresh air and sunlight.
Citation needed.
> It also tends to be less boring and monotonous than lifting heavy things for some inexplicable reason.
You're approaching this with the wrong mindset. Its the minimum viable test case for improvement. Many less variables than 'outside in fresh air and sunlight'. I also think you'll find that many people do lift outside, maybe you're stereotyping based on planet fitnessesque gyms that you've frequented.
I tried to simulate these feelings with other activities (soccer, running, bike, even calisthenics). No success. Not the way that barbell stuff do to me. And I'm not even a very strong guy (101kg bench, 130kg squat, 150kg deadlift @ 73kg).
After different types of exercise I believe what matters most is keeping the blood flowing and stimulating blood flow.
Strength is nice but when acids still build up it does you no good.
There are also no shortcuts. Exercise takes at least half an hour a day.
In my experience walking half an hour a day can be as good as lifting weights.
I'm quite fond of loaded carries. So, if I may pester you, do you have an opinion on loaded carries regarding correcting bad posture and back problems?
Deadlifting as an exercise is actually one of the three main lifts in powerlifting. What makes the best powerlifters is a high total weight combination of Bench/Squat/Deadlift which is generally how it's judged in most competitions these days.
I think there's a small line between deadlifting and what weightlifters like us would call cleaning. A deadlift is a lower-back dominant exercise, to build power and strength there. A clean is a similar movement of getting weight off the ground and into the air, but is completely leg and upper-body dominant, with many, many other accessory movements in-between. This is why we see Crossfit athletes implement weightlifting into their training and why it is so popular today- because of the rewarding "total body" strength gains and cardiovascular fitness.
I don't mean to undermine your experience tho!
Strongman is a bit different, partially because WSM isn’t drug tested.
Am I supposed to mainly feel glute, rather than ham, soreness in a DL?
Please only answer if you really know, mainly asking deviation.
What's that?
Also, squats are harder to learn, require good shoulder mobility (which a lot of desk jockeys don't have), and, at a minimum, require a squat rack, which you're unlikely to have at home. Better yet, I'd advise to use a power rack, which will catch the barbell if you fuck up your balance and fall forward.
TL;DR: while I agree that squat is a better overall exercise, and one that the author of the article should be doing if they don't have the time to do anything else, it requires a lot more gear and training than a deadlift. It is, therefore, not very practical to do barbell squats at home. And if the choice is between a deadlift and no lifting at all, it's deadlift all the way. It hits the posterior chain and core pretty well, and all you need is a barbell and a set of cheap-ass plates.
One way to not overdo it out of the gate is to not use straps on the barbell - you'll be limited by grip strength which is pretty slow to build. You also get to build a truly crushing handshake that way, for when we're back to handshakes. :-)
Cal Newport is a classic example of modern "authors" who take 20 of their most popular blogposts and combine them into a barely-coherent rambling mess and publish it. Then they appear on Joe Rogan, Rich Roll, Tim Ferriss and every other podcast they can manage, and talk at length about 'paradigm-shifts' and other nonsense. On their website, they beg you to subscribe to their newsletter. They might start their _own_ shitty podcast. Through it all, very little in the way of insight is provided, and the little that exists is padded to within an inch of its life in the name of weekly 'content'.
Ryan Holiday, Seth Godin, Mark Manson, Tim Ferriss himself are other perpetrators of this stuff and I fucking hate all of it. The internet is shittier because of this trend, and has caused me to largely forego reading things on it.
To the OP, if you want a good book on attention, Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' is my recommendation. It is written with clarity and vision. He gets to the heart of the matter by focussing on two things: neuroplasticity and 'how the medium is the message'. His argument is presented logically, cogently and convincingly.
I still agree with the title, I give my attention to as much as I can handle, and no more. I have (restricted) notifications turned on, I try have interesting things around me, I tackle as many problems as reasonable at the same time, but slowly because I find the best solutions are where I've had a while to think about while in the shower for example, and how they interact with other problems.
PS: if you're trying to learn something, disregard everything I said, focus is so important when learning
What I found to my surprise is that to increase my attention, noise-cancelling headphones are extremely helpful, even when I'm working with no other people around me.
I find talking to people really helpful in pinning down the first step: defining the problem.
I have noticed that most of my time is spent finding what to do, get their opinion about new projects from my team members (who are nice people I enjoy working with), and most of the time I find that I am not the person qualified for the job and the problem can be solved in a way that does not involve data work.
Finding what to do and how to minimize the effort in implementing a solution is 90% of my job.
There are days I write SQL as well and those day I am very focused. The days I am not focused it's mostly because There is no go from A to B job to do.
In that sense, I sort of want to congratulate you to only have encountered productive, collaborative work environments, and not backstabbing, infighting, untrusting ones.
Important and Not Urgent tasks ... Also included are building relationships with others and planning ahead.
Not Important and Urgent tasks ... and over-talkative coworkers.
> Not Important and Urgent tasks are nasty attention thieves. They shout out to you in immediacy, but offer little value in return.
Nothing about co-workers.
In many religions/practices, a very big part of the path to enlightenment is to "take back control" of your attention, so you can consciously direct it to "what matters".
I also believe that what we eat strongly affects our lives. For myself, I avoid processed foods. I simply suggest paying attention to what you eat and how you feel, and act accordingly.
I also think that taking many short work breaks during the day helps productivity, especially if you are stuck on something. I live a 90 second walk from a trailhead leading to national forest land. Amazing how 15 minutes in nature will bust through solving technical problems. Five minute breaks to play ping pong or racket ball on an Oculus Quest is also a good way for me to pause work and sometimes return with new ideas of perspectives.
The last 5 months have been extremely difficult to maintain focus because, for me at least, it's really difficult for my brain to not check tropical forecasts every time I look at my phone.
I've noticed that my productivity triples when there are no storms in the gulf due to the fact that it's much easier to maintain my attention on engineering tasks. I've thought of setting up a second phone that I have with ONLY ping on it, but I feel that it's the stress driving me to check the tropics, and if I took the time to create a 'just ping' device my mind would find another way to compulsively check.
On one hand the auther uses a lot of "my" language to convey what works best for him. That's great and I am happy to read what works best for others, but what makes it a bit short-sighted is the shift in language from:
>The more attention I can devote, the more cycles I can complete, and the more productive I am.
to:
>Make your place of work boring and tidy.
>Make your smart phone dumb.
>Be an OS minimalist.
etc.
This shift from "here's what works best for me" to "here's what will work best for you" is quite imposing and presumptuous.
Narrative and anecdotal writing allows one to take from it what you like, as trying things out works better for some than understanding it all to begin with and it shouldn't be discounted just because it may not work for all.
Conversely, it might be worth considering the importance of the reader to learn to extract what's good for them out of any reading and not expect everything to be curated just for them.
Getting hung up on how a piece of writing is not perfectly catered for acceptance by the reader is likely going to leave a lot of nuggets, value and insights missed.
The comment above could be taken as merely a counteract of pushing another interpretation of it being imposing and presumptuous. Still there's many folks who don't take this writing style as imposing and presumptuous.
On my work computer, to do a simple task it often requires logging in to myriad services that need to be finagled in concert. Each with a different password that expires regularly, but of course also MFA. Often more “work” than the “work” itself.
And that’s often the happy path rather than multiple attempts to the same service, vpn woes, etc.
Oh you just updated your computer? Now re-log in to your vpn, atlassian, GitLab, slack, zoom, outlook, aws, and others. Want to watch a slack recording? You’re logged into the desktop application but now enter your credentials, again, this time in the browser.. it never ends.
It’s quite cathartic to save out my tabs into topic-based sessions, close everything, then reopen just one session on whatever I want to focus on after an exploratory phase.
I’m still surprised that many find this offensive when I make this request of them; or when they disregard my request and I’m forced to ignore their calls until they text.
I have one client who would called me anywhere from 1 to 10+ times a day with small tasks I needed to do , which were much more efficiently communicated over text. (Things such as “check access point of unit 302 of the Westside building , user can’t connect”). The phone calls would never be less than five minutes in length, each, and of mostly small talk and other irrelevant info to the original purpose of the call. I strongly considered stopping work for this client, but for the fact that I so much enjoyed the work he brought me. This work was all remote/from behind my computer (not onsite work).
Think of all the 'productivity' we've had in the past 100 years, that's +5 years when you're already old and finished.
Great. Can we do the math on how we've nearly blown ourselves up many times over, are destroying the environment, working 40+ hours/week and so on?
Worth it for everyone to be 'productive' for a collective increase of 1 or 2 years within your lifetime, assuming we don't destroy the planet or blow ourselves up?
You decide, keep your productivity if you wish, I'm going for a walk and enjoying my life :)
I included the assumption "sustainable productivity is desired".
You did not meet that condition, and should have stopped reading ;)
That aside, I find pretty much all of his advice pretty useful and a lot of it I already at least try to follow. Good to know it doesn't work just for me.
On OS X you can set it so no icons appear on your Desktop.
For me at least, having that "new laptop" clean slate at all times helps me maintain focus :)
- bought a really good office chair. Herman Miller Aeron. Incredibly expensive but also no regrets at all. I sit in this thing for 10+ hours a day with zero issues.
- bought a pull-up bar. Great for either an exercise regime, or just for something to do when you're pondering a work related issue.
Can you please give a link where you bought , what model? Thank you!
a "BALANCED" approach(philosophy) is the best in all things health. For long term vitality(fitness-function). Ignore short-term gains (fitness function) from "extreme views" or choices - they either don't last or is not sustainable.
I see a lot of anecdotes and recommendations for health and exercise regime etc. Allow me to cite my own experience and armchair-opinions.
I'm in no way an expert or special(physiology) - although my mom thinks I'm super !
I think many of the HN community can relate to my experience.
I'm 38 male generally healthy (minus some sport/exercise injuries). CompSci and BioChem background+education
I'm sort of an extremest in all things and especially health ! This include taking a "somewhat" extreme view (and implementation) where I will usually for a few months focus on one thing exclusively as the new gospel.
This Includes The following:
-Supplementation(vitamins,fish/krill oils, minerals, timing,brands, protocols etc)
-Diets(all sorts) --keto --elimination, --lowcarb,high-card --Paleo --Carnivore --Vegetarian(this one really sucked for me)
-Diet Regimes --Fasting --OMAD --Juicing --monotone (eat the same meals most days)
-Nootropics(What a rabbit-hole ! - Too many to list)
-Exercise --P90x --Crossfit --Cardio --Strength --kettle bells --BodyCombat(like Tae Bo but with better music and prettier girls) --Hiking
-Life --Mediation --Relationships --Business --Sleep
Most of the items on the list had some sort of short-term benefit, but it either didn't last or was really not sustainable.
a Balanced approach to diet(a little of everything that is considered not terrible, meat,fish,veggies,chocolate,carbs etc)
a Balanced approach to exercise ( strength + cardio + Lots of REST) I can't stress rest enough. I went from working out 5 days a week, to 3 days a week and I feel better !
Less injuries, my two big health issues and 5 operations over a decade was because of exercise injuries. Maybe I'm just getting older or my DNA is not correct for too many physiology stresses. Or hell maybe I'm just doing all the exercises wrong !? (I don't think I am though)
YMMV :)
No no no. This is terrible for your self-esteem over a long period. I understand being in a tidy workspace but having things bare is demoralising.
Funishings have their place in any office. I have some nice art on the wall and I have a hifi setup with podcasts / music on.
Also whenever someone complains about something being materialistic that automatically sets off my BS detector.
Build physical strength. The damage done by sitting 8+ hours a day is underrated. - Right, also being folded up in a sitting position affects your organs (chi). Certainly go for a walk for at least a mile per day. Deadlifts, dunno about that specifically.
Make your place of work boring and tidy. - Yes, I use a dedicated desk with almost no clutter.
Make your smart phone dumb. - I use a Blackberry 8700g which has no current apps, so no distractions. 2 week standby battery.
Be an OS minimalist. - NA.
Other - I should use more terminal windows to have different apps open at the same time (editor, SQL client, etc.) but I usually don't.
I discovered that habit independently after moving to SV, since the weather is almost always good enough for a walk.
Plus walking alone after finishing a feature lets your subconscious queue up the next priority.
