Ask HN: What Habits Are Unequivocally Bad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Habits Are Unequivocally Bad?

We talk about productivity and optimization on HN a lot. The more convinced you are something is bad, the less likely you are to do it. So post habits you think EVERYONE would benefit from breaking. Also, post your excuses as to why you / people you know haven't broken them so we can learn something.

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Hoping for things without taking action. As pointed out by DC Comics' Blue Lantern corps, hope without the application of willpower isn't worth much.

Taking the easy choice.

Whenever you have to make a choice and there are an “easy” and a “hard” options, you should choose the hard option. It’s always the right one.

Why? If the easy option was also the right one, you wouldn’t even be thinking about it. The hard option is your conscience/instinct telling you to look beyond the obvious, easy answer.

I'm not sure if I'm seeing the logic here. Say I want to develop a game. The easy option is to use an existing engine. The hard option is to build your own engine. The latter is quite often the wrong choice.

> If the easy option was also the right one, you wouldn’t even be thinking about it.

Ironically, significant cultural pressure to glorify grit and choosing the hard option often means that the easy option looks automatically bad, in a "too good to be true" kind of way, and you may have to go back and convince yourself that it's OK to take the easy option. This is compounded by the fact that availability of easier options may often be very random and "unfair".

It’s hard to articulate, and my post was probably too pithy. I’m referring to the fact that we make most decisions in “self-driving” mode, without thinking too much about it. But sometimes you run into a situation where you find yourself thinking “well, I could just do this, but...”. In other words, there’s something bugging you about the obvious solution and a suggestion of a harder, more difficult decision hiding behind the “but”. In that case, in my experience the difficult solution is the right one. If you consciously notice you’re about to cut corners, that means that something (conscience, instinct, whatever) is trying really hard to warn you about it.

Getting back to your example, there’s no “but” attached to choosing an existing engine, so you probably wouldn’t have a nagging thought pushing you to look at building your own.

So I guess what I’m really saying is “don’t cut corners”. You know you’re about to cut one when the little angel pops up on your shoulder and whispers “are you sure about this?”

Give up bad attitudes, be nice.

Sleep 6+ hours a night.

Focus / pay attention, Don’t get distracted/distract the team.

Control / eliminate substance use (caffeine, alcohol, smoking, not-doctor-prescribed adderall etc)

I will start with the obvious:

1. "Microbreaks" from work - grabbing a snack, browsing random things, checking the news/stocks/how far below $4000 BTC fell, etc. This is mainly harmful because it keeps you from doing work fast. The, arguably, worse part of it is that you get nothing done in a long time and then feel like you "worked all day" for nothing. So you waste time doing something that isn't pleasurable, but you get far reduced benefit, making it seems like the productive task wasn't worthwhile at all. The excuse is that it breaks you out of being stuck in a rut - a lot of the time while coding, I will stare at some problem endlessly, when I should have stepped back and changed my approach. Herein lies the conflict between "deep work" and "stepping away to get perspective" for me. It seems both have merit, and it takes experience to know when to do which. With that said, switching context constantly does NOT give your mind that break it needs, because the mind becomes engaged with something else, rather than continuing to work on the problem.

2. Sleep 7+ (preferrably 8) hours. At this point it's well known that sleep is essential to memorization, concentration, testosterone production, and athletic recovery. "Working hard" by avoiding sleep undercuts your efficiency and quickly starts to have negative effects.

3. Eating sugar. Rots teeth, makes you fat, spikes blood pressure and increases the likelihood of heart disease (https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/eating-too-much-added-su...). All for no nutritional value. The twist here is that "it makes you feel good" and "gives you energy". The "makes you feel good" part is definitely a habit that can be broken. The "gives you energy" part. Well, that's something that I actually think happens. If I drink a KickStart, I can stay awake through sprint planning, which is quite a feat. I haven't found the blood sugar spike & drop to be true in my experience, which makes this a difficult habit to fully break for me.

I would say that avoiding documentation is one of the worst habits I keep on my teams. The excuses varies from lack of time, no standards, short term mentality of the msnagers and a large etc. I have been trying hard to improve and time to time I get some small wins with the team finding solutions in my personal notes, but it seems to be small steps.

On sugar and 'gives you energy': I'm not an expert but it seems this is extremely over-hyped, and I've noticed more people believe in this if they were raised in a place where parents believe in the 'sugar rush'. I still remember the first time I heard about 'sugar rush', already an adult. It's just folklore in some western and richer countries [1]:

> "In 1995, a meta analysis of the 23 most reliable studies was published(...). Sugar simply had no discernible effect on the children's behaviour in these studies."

If you erase that notion it becomes pretty obvious that sugar does little (if something at all) to keep you 'on', at least compared to caffeine (or, you know, harder stuff).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2014/fe...

Interesting, thanks. I will look into this more.

Would you include work related distraction via co-workers in the microbreaks category? I have found that breaking from deep concentration for 5-10 minutes in order to help my team members can set me back about 30 mins on a project. Now I schedule a time after my project should be complete in order to help them with theirs.

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