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Comment by minihat | Hacker News Reader

The actionable advice in this post: 1) Track where you spend your time 2) Apply deliberate practice to improve where you are weak/slow

I am typically energy constrained rather than time constrained, as I imagine is the case for many working in engineering/science. Yet, the author's advice remains useful. Deliberate practice should provide gains to both time and energy costs of tasks.

For me most productivity advice, including this post, ultimately reduces to "try to get better at your trade, and track your progress".

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> I am typically energy constrained rather than time constrained, as I imagine is the case for many working in engineering/science.

I've found that being energy constrained is much easier to track than time constrained. You notice instantly when a task takes a ton of your energy, you start hating the task so you work hard to ensure you don't have to do the task any more. Compare that to someone who mostly wastes time, they'd happily sit and waste tons of time every day since you don't really feel your time slip away.

Energy constrained? That’s odd. Just eat more? CICO after all. Maybe guzzle some lard? It’s very dense.

“Mental energy” is a pretty common phrase, and it refers to the ability to start and sustain work on tasks which require mental effort. Eating a candy bar can provide a temporary boost to mental energy, but it’s not an effective everyday approach.

There are many physical and psychological issues which diminish people’s mental energy. ADHD and depression being the most obvious.

Fortunately for many of those conditions there are also ways to increase the amount of mental energy you have available.

And yet this advice is not necessarily wrong. We spend a significant fraction of the calories we eat operating our brain. I have personally measured a significant increase in my ability after a good lunch compared to just an hour or two prior.

"Energy constrained" doesn't mean he lacks sugar, it means his brain isn't letting him do the work anymore because it is in the process of burning out.

Yes, this is my intended meaning. I am a PhD student working on my thesis. After a certain number of hours of doing mathematics or algorithm design, I have to switch to easier tasks like reading papers in a domain I'm familiar with, or documenting code.

While I cannot speak for anyone but myself, my performance on highly challenging tasks is capped at 4-5 hours per day. At that point, it is better for me to switch to lower hanging fruit.

If I am feeling especially inspired, sometimes I'll put in a 12+ hour day of hard work. Rarely, even two or more in a row. But inevitably, I will feel extra burned out in the subsequent days.

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