Busy Person Patterns (2006) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Busy Person Patterns (2006) [pdf]

hillside.net

350 pointsmpweiher17 comments

This is pretty cool

Should be the kind of thing that is in new hire orientations and onboarding training (especially for new grad hires) but basically never is

The missing one is, "Eh, fuck it."

That is pretty much "drop unimportant tasks" (on page 27)

It’s like a diversified portfolio of attention, time, and energy investments. Remember to keep some in cash (unscheduled time, my favorite).

Wow, this is a jewel! I need to paste snippets of this on my work and study area.

I really like the TLDRs for each section in the table of contents. Pretty neat idea. Maybe I don't read enough, but I haven't seen this in a lot of books.

Chapter X. IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT IS ONLY TOO GLAD TO GET OFF WITH THE LOSS OF HIS SHOES

Common in some older books, and modern books in certain fields. Some (philosophy is where I've see this quite a bit) will instead put from a paragraph up to a couple pages describing the topics a chapter/"book" covers at the beginning of the chapter, which allows for a little more space than cramming it into a TOC. Helps with "OK I know that was in here somewhere but which chapter was it..."

I love this.

Hmmmm.... needs icons. My favorite patterns books (which seem more exhaustively researched) have icons used in diagrams. Makes things more 'real' somehow....

They must have been too busy to do that. ;) Sadly though they licensed it under NoDeriv creative commons so we can't add pictures for them.

Can you recommend some patterns books?

Not the OP but I can recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0321200683 and it has icons, too.

Are you sure you're talking about the same thing?

This article is about psychological patterns related to task management and productivity. The book you linked to seems about software messaging system design.

Apparently ues, because the OP gave exactly the same answer: he was talking about "pattern books" in general, and apart from this pdf and the original Alexander's book the absolute majority of "pattern books" (and articles) is about IT themes.

That's quite odd because such patterns and archetypes exist everywhere. It seems like quite a mathematical notion.

Absolutely. My very favorite is "Enterprise Integration Patterns".

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