Become a 10x Programmer by Managing Your Time Better | Hacker News Reader

Become a 10x Programmer by Managing Your Time Better

nickjanetakis.com

113 pointsnickjj37 comments

Lately I find it difficult to enjoy playing games but I don’t think it’s because I grew up. I’m pretty sure that no one really grows up. In my case, whenever I try to crack open a game and play it, I feel guilty.

This guilt stems from thinking “damn it Nick, you should be working on xyz instead of slaying monsters in Path of Exile – you didn’t do enough today!”.

I was not enjoying gaming as much as I used to and had basically quit playing them entirely. The "I don't have time" excuse was present for me as well.

I generally agree with him. Schedules are great for managing your time. But I think he missed another important aspect, especially when it comes to whether you "deserve" to play video games or whatever other way you reward yourself: A schedule can help you see just how much you accomplished.

When I started writing down what I was going to do and checking off that I had done it, it helped me realize just how much I was actually getting done. It was more than my brain was crediting me with. Seeing it written down made the "guilt" of playing video games (in my case, severely reduced enjoyment) go away.

Biggest difference I found was having a fast Dev loop while programming. Using watchers to auto-build and run.

Having a good ide with intellisense made a big difference. My brain could be engaged for hours on a problem.

I still end up slacking if something takes more than 5 seconds. The brains on a whole level of train thought.

> It’s easy to fall into habits like slacking off with Youtube, HackerNews and other social platforms – but have you ever stepped back to think how destructive it is?

> I call it the “social loop of death” where you make your rounds on various sites and before you know it, 3.5 hours have past and you haven’t gotten anything done.

> You end up getting 60 minutes worth of actual work done in an 8 hour day.

I feel like someone installed cameras in my home. This is exactly me. What's even worse, I know that I have this problem and nothing seems to help. Scheduling, website blocking, working out of home all failed after some brief time. Any other suggestions?

Change your browser? There is research (I'd have to find it) that says addictive behavior is strongly attached to your environment.

The example I heard is that soldiers who got addicted to drugs overseas have a much better time at home if they quit before coming back - then the addiction is associated purely with where they served overseas, and not at all at home. We're talking an order of magnitude more successful.

Sadly, I don't remember many details - so take the above with a grain of salt. I think the above was in relation to vietnam, but I'm not sure.

Edit: You could probably do a lot with this - you could change your broswer theme, get a plugin that applies a theme to websites, switch up your desk layout, move your desk area, etc.

Unfortunately I'm a web developer and I have and frequently use all major browsers :).

I added

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.gizmodo.com 0.0.0.0 gizmodo.com 0.0.0.0 www.drudgereport.com 0.0.0.0 www.reddit.com 0.0.0.0 news.ycombinator.com 0.0.0.0 lobste.rs

to my hostfiles.

Sure, I can remove them if I want, but the extra effort keeps me from doing it. I left messenger.facebook.com open so that I can talk with people.

I did this as well and, surprisingly, it has been effective at keeping me off of Facebook + Reddit (I'm find with Hacker News).

Yes, HN's built-in anti-procrastination features make it so that I don't mind having it out of this hostfile.

I recently found out about messenger.com and I've been using it over facebook.com.

Result? I don't use facebook anymore, it's just a colossal waste of time.

If you have difficulty concentrating, are easily distracted, impulsive (i.e. checks Hacker News a lot), are irritable, etc, you might look into whether you have ADD/ADHD.

I had all of those symptoms, but never considered I might have ADD until a few months ago. My doctor had me try Adderall, and the difference has been like night and day.

I'm not saying you have ADD or ADHD. I'm not a doctor. But just based off of what you said, I wanted to mention it, because I wish someone had mentioned it to me like 10 years ago.

The web has been crafted to pray on our most basic instincts to keep us coming back for more, more, more. Being addicted to the internet is more indicative of the good work by 'engagement engineers' then of a need for amphetamines.

This is literally me. I might need to go to the doctor. It's especially telling that I miss appointments frequently and have had work issues with completing people's sentences or not allowing someone to finish talking before I say something. A lot of people also tell me I'm not listening to them talk.

>completing people's sentences or not allowing someone to finish talking before I say something

That used to be me too. After I started taking medication, I was a little surprised to notice I became a lot more patient with people. Specifically, I didn't feel the need to hurry social interactions along, etc.

The only solution is to be more self-disciplined, and there is no magic trick for that. Discipline takes time and effort to develop, and you'll be disappointed with yourself plenty of times along the way. The only secret is to keep trying.

To brag slightly, but maybe add some perspective, for many years I wanted to learn to speak Spanish. Now, I'm at the point where I can read the news in Spanish with hardly any difficulty, have read a few high-school level books, and can hold conversations, even on engineering topics, without too many mistakes.

For years it was just something I kind of wanted and put off, but at some point I wanted it bad enough, that I committed, and followed through, with spending a few hours every day studying. Sure, sometimes things just came up and I missed a day or so, other times I fell into my old patterns of playing video games after work and was disappointed in myself, but everyone gets disappointed in themselves sometimes (otherwise you must have no shame whatsoever). The important thing is to just try again tomorrow.

Anyways, I didn't really mean for this to sound braggy, but I did want to answer your post. Things like working from home and organizing and/or coming up with a scheduling system helps some people, it may even help you, but you won't develop more discipline overnight. In my opinion, the only secret to becoming more productive with your time is not never give up trying to be more productive with your time.

Pomodoro. It trains you to stay on task for 25 minutes at a time, and evaluate how you did during the last cycle, both from a distraction standpoint and a chasing-your-tail standpoint.

Over time you build up to 4.5-6 hours of solid, head-down coding a day.

I gotta admit, this sounds awful. Adding more mental overhead to your everyday habits sounds like it'd just make things worse.

on the contrary, you just point at the countdown timer and half your problems go away, literally.

The pomodoro technique helped me enormously. I don't follow it strictly, I just set the timer and focused on one task until timer is done. I never worked the duration up, I still just do 25 minutes or less. I even put websurfing in a 25 min bucket, then stop.

I ended up learning how infrequent real emergencies pop up. Which in turn, got me to stop looking at my phone at red lights.

If you don't have to work from home, pair programming or just working next to someone with an agreement to keep each other honest could help a lot. Also (again if you're in an office with others), put your back to the door so passers-by can see your screen and tell when you're slacking off. Make your shame/guilt work for you.

I recently started using a website blocker for Mac called self control app https://selfcontrolapp.com to great success. I've increased my productivity 10x.

I liked the general idea of this post, but for it to feel a little bit more impactful to me - it would have been great to expand on what you mean by 'schedule your days.' Maybe an example of how you are currently scheduling your life or even just a picture of a schedule that you have followed.

Hi (author here),

I have a separate post on the "how to" aspect of it scheduled to be released later this week.

On second thought, I've added a PDF to the bottom of the post which contains a detailed guide on how to create a schedule.

Kind of wish I added this initially, but live and learn!

I have a standing desk. So my monitor is visible to everyone in the area. Discourages me from doing anything other than work when I'm at work.

It's not like someone is going to comment that I've been looking at Facebook at work, but it helps trick me into not doing anything unproductive.

How do you stand people walking behind you all day? That would drive me nuts. Also, I work remotely, but I have been thinking about live streaming my desktop as a similar discouragement from slacking during work hours.

You get used to working in a dense workspace after a while. I think companies mainly like dense workspaces because it costs less, while justifying it as increasing collaboration. I don't need much collaboration at my job.

Working remotely takes a lot of discipline that I don't think I have. I do work from home once in a while, but it's a lot tougher to motivate yourself everyday.

Another advantage of a standing desk is that.. you're standing, not relaxing. Once at my desk, I don't want to procrastinate - I'm here to work.

I see others asking for advice. I am skeptical and embarassed to ask here, but I feel like many like-minded lurkers are here. So I think this follow-up on M4v3R's inquiry is worth a shot.

I have multiple study interests. Many of them are beyond my comfort zone, by design and with intent, and I have no way of knowing when or if I can absorb them with a timetable. How do you schedule?

I am currently enrolled in a few Coursera courses:

Algorithms Crypto I Scala

They all have deadlines. I am 1-3 weeks behind in each, respectively. I have been an off and on again convert to programming and open source. I desire to really get back to computing, after a kind of numbing support career. I love the machines, but I cannot force their theory to love me.

I can watch lectures over and over and take notes. This takes time. But when it comes to assignments, I cannot connect the dots.

Solutions:

- Review the material AGAIN

- Switch up assignments to reduce load; all of them are equally rigorous, so this backfires, it still takes time

- I try reading supporting material (the Crypto101 book for Crytpo I for example, and it might be helping as of this week), but this takes time, and my choices can be invested wisely or unsound

This is not to mention wanting to study for more infosec certs, building a lab to strengthen that effort, and move to working on personal projects in a more focused way by building VM and containers using all the cool kid tools, boosting career prospects and increasing discipline.

I lost a lot of weight, and maintain with exercise (sometimes twice a day now) to stave off depression. I have lot of very dramatic personal drama with a relationship that consumes my spare cycles.

Someone, give me advice! I burn out frequently, watching TV streaming when I can, and reading sites like this.

This would not bother me so bad if NOT for HN. I procrastinate with you all, for sure, but this website exposes me to a very unique subset of computing culture and counterpoints I need as I live abroad with limited community engagement. You all fill me with rage and jealousy, as there are so many brilliant programmers exposing me to great people pushing the bounds of their curiosity.

What if HN backfires? It pushes on me, but without that push, where the hell does the inspiration come from?

Don't schedule 100% of your time, schedule more like 60%. Much easier and more motivating to keep up with that, and you will have time for detox from the web dead loop - time for sports, reading a real book, meeting people etc.

I have time for that: I exercise, I read.

The problem is I cannot schedule in the stuff that is hard where I need progress.

Let's say I must understand Shannon's perfect secrecy, which I do abstractly, but these 3 quiz questions I do not get.

10 minutes passes, I have no answers.

20 minutes passes, I am not closer.

Two days later, do I need to go back and review the notes from the whole lecture to steer this ship back on course?

My point is context switching to topics I need to advance in, not the ones I know I can advance within parameters, consume time but with variable estimates of duration AND worse any success at all.

What are people in this spot doing? Just chugging along? I am going to not take these courses for credit, but I do not spend some time daily for the last week dropping one or all and admit I will never be the programmer I said I would be like 5-10 years ago! Haha.

UPDATE: To be clear, after those 20, I procstinate a little, and maybe come back. Or I move to a different class, or something else. Point being I have no way of knowing if it will click, and when. So scheduling these things adds another level of failure, where I miss deadlines I impose, and I start cussing myself out for not reaching my own desired accomplishment for the day.

Replace "programmer" with any other job title, advice still applies. Managing your time better is simply a key factor to success in any area.

Stop. Fucking. Talking. About. 10x. Programmers.

Seriously.

Just stop. Fucking stop.

a.k.a. rockstar developers.

It's not doing anyone any favours, I agree.

I recently started scheduling my days using a paper and pen but this time with the 'bullet journal' system. I've tried many todo lists online that never stick and I've got stacks of notepads that I scribble notes in but never read again.

With my bullet journal I now have a system for reviewing tasks that, so far, actually seems to work for me.

Thanks for the recommendation - I'm trying out bullet journalling in the workplace as a result. Feels like it's a good system thus far, although I'll have to wait until the honeymoon period dies off to really know.

tldr; a schedule helps you better manage your time.

fantastic.

helped my girlfriend and I to really understand where the systemic problems of productivity stem from. So simple. Thanks Nick.

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