Generally speaking, when it comes to advice, context is ever important. In one context advice may be spot on, but your context may not be my context and that can matter.
For example I often hear good advice about useing SQL. A lot of it is contradictory, which can be confusing. But it turns out that the "right thing to do" is enormously affected by context - are you deploying one DB for one customer, or one each for 1000 customers? Is there a full-time DBA or is your program its own DBA?
It's the same with personal/life advice. How old are you? What kind of job do you have? Are you cash-rich or time-rich? Are there outside stress factors?
For example I don't use an alarm clock on a day to day basis. I let myself sleep till I wake up. That works because I have no morning commitments or responsibilities and flexible work hours. It only works because of my context. Clearly it's useless advice to most people.
When giving advice try and bring context into play. If your context is too different to mine, my advice may be harmful.
When receiving advice dig into the context. If it's too different to yours that advice may be moot, or even harmful.
What works for a bootstrap company does not apply to a VC startup. And very much vice versa.
(question is, is this comment useful if you don't know _my_ context though? :)
As someone who's 3 year old wakes up and dives into bed next to us somewhere around 6-7am. About 3 hours after the 2 month old has woken for a feed I'm very jealous!
Projects are different, clients are different, teams are different. What works for you may not work for me. Heck, what worked in my last project may not work in this one!
Which is ever absent from all and any Hacker News entry.
I wake up feeling stiff and every morning repeat the "story" that I'm starting to feel old. However, I often ask my 83 year old dad if he experiences the same and he always says no.
Then last week my dad said, "you know I might, but I don't think about it". So this past week I just wake up and start moving and try not be aware of the minor pain from stiffness. It goes away quickly and I avoid telling myself "I am feeling old".
Why focus on something that doesn't serve you if you can tune it out.
Today I'm 52 and I still watch and think about how people move around. I understand that a 70 year old falling is different than a 10 year old, but I find myself seeing if I can go up or down the stairs four at a time. I have noticed that my flexibility and balance isn't what it used to be and I'm trying to work on that. I know I can only slow my physical decline, but it's worth doing.
Because you don't necessarily know if it serves you.
You could wake up stiff because you overdid your workout. That's a pretty valuable signal telling you to take it easy with those particular muscle groups.
You could wake up stiff because you have an injury. (E.g. a torn meniscus). That's a great signal to go see a doctor.
You could wake up stiff because you have a shitty mattress. That's a good signal to buy a better mattress.
You could wake up stiff because you spent yet another 12 hours sitting in front of the computer - that makes a great signal to both stretch and put a few more breaks into your workday.
Or you might indeed be stiff if it's low-grade systemic inflammation (a.k.a "being old"), and even then it might be a signal that maybe you can fix your nutrition.
Yes, you can just power through most of these, but... why would you? It does serve you. Just in an indirect way, signalling you what is not going well. The key point here is that in many cases, you can reframe the story from "I'm old" to "something is suboptimal, and I can improve it", moving from a passive to an active participant.
No, of course that's not always possible. There are many reasons why we could feel bad and we don't have agency at all - but I'd always suggest at least getting to the root of "why do I feel this way" before ignoring it.
Great point. This would apply to all potentially negative stuff and the noise out there in general. For instance, I have recently try to tune out the political noise around me. Stop watching news, limiting news sites to couple of times a day etc. And it really helped a lot. Less stress due to factors that are beyond my reach.
"It is what it is" applies to so many modern world 'stresses'. Certainly makes life far easier to deal with and when the energy one does have is spent wisely, individual growth also trends upwards. Win win.
Yoga/Tai-Chi may help with that. I used to feel stiff until I started exercising regularly. Muscles and sinews need some stretching and contraction to stay healthy.
Mere stiffness you can walk away. Severe arthritis is a different story.
Bad mood can be dispelled. Severe depression of the kind where people actually commit suicide to escape the torment is a different story.
It is possible that depression is overrated on the Internet as of today. But I won't forget a 16th century "black book" entry from rural Czechia, which concerned investigation of a random peasant boy who hanged himself in a barn. The way that the witnesses described his behavior prior to the deed was textbook depression as we know it today, even though the very word didn't exist yet and the incident was considered work of the Devil.
> There is only one formula for healthy and refreshing sleep: Go to sleep only when you are very tired. Not earlier. Not later. Wake up naturally without an alarm clock.
[0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Formula_for_good_sleep:_free_run...
Well, that explains things!
> 7-7.5 hrs is actually good spot. Mostly 8 hrs is recommended.
That is correct. The goal is to find ur best. Not defining a number and going backwards to justify it.
Glorifying sleeplessness is extremely bad. The author might be in sleep debt himself. Also we need to consider the throughput as the performance varies. When I was tired I would not be able to code as efficient.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-We-Sleep-Science-Dreams/dp/0141...
I agree. You have to sleep late when you can. Then all your bad days will end.
i cannot agree with this enough. there are so many people in my life (work and nonwork) that make vague statements (whether about proportions, predictions, or population) that are more directional than precise. this leads you to commit to actions than you then later backrationalize.
forcing yourself to make fermi estimates and upper/lower bounds helps you understand when your assumptions are wrong and change on a dime, avoiding sunk cost/commitment fallacy. but people are very uncomfortable when you make them put confidence intervals around their predictions.
Like hey I might be able to increase my revenue by 10% next month but I definitely can’t increase it by 1000%. It’s surprisingly powerful.
It threw me off the whole article as well, it's hard to take it seriously when it hits me with "don't sleep too much" in the beginning, especially since I've always been somewhat of an insomniac and I'm intimately familiar with the impact of sleep deprivation across all aspects of one's life.
Sleep is like diet, it’s different for everyone. I’ve trained myself to lucid dream to try to make the most of the days when I oversleep but it still sucks. The point seems more like maximise for time when you’re actually accomplishing things. What’s healthy for each person is different.
Because author of this blog works at Palantir, lol.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Extremes fuck up a lot of shit, to the point of causing irreversible damage. Drinking is fine, but 10 beers a day? Yeah nah and so the list goes on.
^^ I had myself believing this "flawed" belief. I like this excerpt.
- see my friends more
- go on walks instead of working
- go on vacation more often
- take care of my 2 kids
- play more music
- strop trying to be more productive
I wish more journalism was like this.
There is more power to this than meets the eye. Also, don't tell stories to yourself that you would not be telling a friend. We are usually too hard with ourselves, hence a lot of "should bes" and "should have nots".
1e9 * 10 / 1e5 = 1e5 transactions per second
Maybe the author needs to apply their advice and start to "think in numbers" \o/
Jokes aside and apart from the really dangerous idea of sleeping less, I really liked the article!
The one that I would disagree with is the sleeping one. I think sleep is SO important, and people don't do enough to optimise for it. For example eating/looking at screens before bed. Sleep is extremely important, there's so many studies to back this up, and I don't think that it's ever wasted time.
Getting stuff done is a boost. It can compound but not infinitely. A 10 hour day of programming will take a toll on most people and is jot sustainable. 10h of various stuff including programming maybe!
