Comment by swfisher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swfisher | Hacker News Reader

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To be honest, it sounds like the author’s primary productivity issue is not a poor memory for syntax, but a stack of time wasting habits attached to the cue of looking up syntax. This has everything to do with our relationship to attention and focus.

The way the author managed to reduce the impact of this habit was to remove the cue for wasting time by memorizing syntax. Congrats on that! This seems like a pretty demanding solution, though.

Perhaps a very simple way forward would be to employ a site blocker on distracting sites during work hours.

Beyond that the author might regulate their work hours so that they have limited time to get things done and avoid burnout from long days.

They also might consider using a pomodoro technique, so that their brain can alternate between focused and relaxed attention. Setting boundaries around when it’s time to focus and introducing a purposeful schedule of relaxing breaks helps keep one from falling victim to bad habits when your brain needs a moment to relax.

Maybe you don't suffer from this, but these suggestions don't work.

Why? There is a sharp divide between "interacting with the internet" and "not." There is no one site (or set of sites) to block that can help. If I visit SO I now am one step away from an effectively infinite number of interesting things.

The key behavioral difference is removing the need to interact with the general net.

Burnout and tiredness are also not root causes in this situation they are a symptom of repeated failure to accomplish a goal. Pomodoro doesn't help much there.

Great point on the site blocker and infinite possibilities for distraction. Removing the whole environment of the Internet takes away all the cues for distraction.

Burnout and tiredness are definitely factors that keep people in a cycle of distraction because our brain is ready to be distracted in those states. If unproductive work leads to excessive work, this is a vicious cycle with tiredness as both cause and effect. You can’t regulate your attention optimally unless you are well rested.

I would say the “root cause” in this situation is the need for sustained attention on the intended task and the lack of a system to achieve it. The strategies I’ve listed are well known ways to achieve this. The author found a different way and was pleased with the results.

They dont work for you, but they work for others. For me blocking few sites and sertting pomodoro is enough. I am not lured by stackoverflow questions on the right that much and can switch context easily between code and SO

Just what I thought. Sounds like author has awareness of the problem, but decided on a rather difficult solution.

You can still get into flow while looking up syntax you haven't committed to memory, but know how to find in 2 min.

I have a habit not to commit anything to memory that I could Google in 2 min, saving on RAM.

Two minutes? If I'm in flow (a very rare occurrence these days, sadly), five seconds is on the cusp of too long. In my editor, spending time looking through the list of autocomplete suggestions is often enough to lose track of some of the things I had mentally stacked up to write. Switching to a browser to find docs risks the whole stack.

One way I've found to mitigate this is to not try to write things that that would definitely work on the first draft. Instead, whenever I need something I don't remember, I just write enough of it to note what I'm trying to do and keep going. The details of whether it would be more convenient to use slice or substring here aren't important when I'm trying to write things down before I forget them.

I go a step further: I tend to keep tabs open for pages that I know I will be referencing frequently. I trade mental RAM for physical RAM

"First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play."

- Famous sax guy

Is it that demanding though? Seems like you only need to speend few minutes everyday for this.

Good point. I suppose it depends how far you need to take it.

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