The Feedback Loop of Productivity

I think positive feedback is good. I also think it is better and more motivating than negative feedback (although both are necessary).

I tend to set goals that I can hit. I have longer term goals. But if I only focus on long ten goals I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything even though I’m working hard. If I set lots of short term goals that lead up to the long term goal, I feel like I’ve accomplished way more, even though really I’ve accomplished the same.

It’s important to actually hit the short term goals. If you get in the habit of not hitting them, then they just become ideas you have but never get around to.

Oh no, this article is on hacker news so you wont get incrementaly higher spikes in the forseeble future...

It works in reverse too, but with failure.

In psychology papers they repeatedly talk about intrinsic motivation (internal things that you yourself value) being more reliable than extrinsic factors (like money, bigger house, etc) for motivation. I don't think $blogs ideas are that useful given that they're mostly about small, repeatable, extrinsic rewards.

In experiments done on paying people for tasks to see the impact on performance there's data that shows it only works well for large amounts. So I question small external results from the get-go. The other issue is relying on external factors to boost task performance is bad in general because experiments also show that when they're removed your performance drops lower than if you had of started with no external carrots.

In this case: what happens if OP writes something and its a dud? Does he keep writing? What if the next 10 articles are ignored? Compare the same process to someone who loves writing for their own reasons. Maybe they have been reading since they were a kid and have come to appreciate prose. No carrot is needed so they will keep writing long after most quit.

I sometimes think when reading Dr Bob or Kent Beck and so on, that a lot of what they do (e.g. overemphasis on low level unit tests) is for personal psychological reasons. But this doesn't mean they are sound engineering reasons or even that they are good for the psychology of anyone else who has to work with that code.

Here's a humble translation of the article in German: https://github.com/adi/deutsch/blob/master/001_rsp.md