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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Interesting premise and article.

I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools.

re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power.

The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work style?

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This sounds like a good idea, and I’m planning to try it out. Thanks for sharing!

I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with pen and paper?

I used to have the habit of printing out other people's code to read, and read it like I would a book. I stopped doing that a long time ago, but I used to get real value from doing that. I still like to read other people's code, but I am more likely to do it by browsing github on my iPad.

> You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper, has all the ‘structure ready in the head’ but gets bored halfway through implementing it since it’s a lot to type out and it’s taking a lot of time.

Wow. I hope there aren't many people that think this way, as it sounds like a great recipe for crappy software.

Thinking things through is definitely a super power. And "typing really fast" is usually an anti-pattern.

I think you can apply this by journaling or keeping a personal diary as well. Just sit before bed and recount the thoughts of the day and put them on paper, maybe intending to read over them later to find out when some event happened or in 20 years to see what you were doing during the quarantine.

The act of reflection and organization itself is meditative.

> I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools.

Cannot one do both?

I find myself discovering solutions to problems before falling asleep at night. Usually in some state of half awake and half asleep.

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