A simple math equation can transform your productivity
nextbigideaclub.com
nextbigideaclub.com
0.5 * 0.2 + 0.5 * 0.15 (given that the value of the first task is 0.2 and the value of the second task is 0.15)
One important point is likely, that there is overhead in multitasking, so the actual formula becomes 0.45 * 0.2 + 0.45 * 0.15 + 0.1 * 0 where 0.1 of the time is wasted in useless (value = 0) overhead (of switching tasks, getting into the zone and so on).
You may or may not enjoy spending time in this 'useless' overhead...
Doing PC re-imaging, I set up 6 stations and would kick off one refresh and while it was running, start up the next one and so on. Using disks to install took ages, so I figured out how to make bootable USB sticks, so I would have all 6 or occasionally more (by stealing bench seats) stations humming away while I was also doing part upgrades or builds on another station, only pausing to check up on progress.
That is ideal multitasking, where you need to pay a small amount of attention to one arduous group of tasks and the remainder of your time is free to focus on fine detail high mental demand tasks with ease.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(computing) [1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/project...
However, in general sense, the return of an investment is considered as random variable, so the problem is not just max value, but max value while minimizing risk, and the solution is multitask/portfolio
I also noticed that I engage in extreme procrastination when the rewards of a high effort task are uncertain. It's like my body recoils at the idea of expending energy unnecessarily. For example, creating a "portfolio-worthy side project" immediately queues up questions, "But I heard recruiters don't look at them. If they do they'll look at it for a second. What if they think my code sucks and I blow myself out instead?" Etc etc
If anyone has some sort of mental model or frame which they're conscious of in these situations, I would love to hear it. I started researching CBT for ADHD last night and now I have 30 tabs of research articles, infographics, blog posts, book reviews and god damn it if I didnt go and get stuck in Wikipedia instead...
"Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing."
A short sentence. A second short sentence.
> A second short sentence.
On the internet it only makes sense if people scroll through an article to decide if it's worth reading. Does anyone do that? I generally don't. The scroll bar tells me how long the article is, and the heading and subheading usually tells me if it's something I care about.
I do skim through articles that are a time commitment to read to decide if it's worth reading in full, but I generally look for section headings (e.g. that would let an article be split into multiple shorter articles). If there aren't any, pull quotes are decent strings to look for; and if not, it's manual skimming to better understand the structure (e.g. the first sentence of each paragraph).
On the very important areas of my life, it is much more helpful that I do something each day to try to make progress. On the busiest or hardest days, this might just be watching 5 minutes of a video on that topic. That keeps up my habit of doing something and makes it less likely that I will forget things.
If I am 100% productive at doing something that isn't important, the result on my life is no progress.
P = T * Hbar * Cbar^Dh * E * (Po)^N
P = Productivity T = Tiredness Hbar = 2PI/(HackerNews posts read) Cbar = 2PI/(speed of light) Dh = Disruptions per hour E = Environment Po = Productivity of people you work with N = Number of people you work with
I was shoving a sandwich in my mouth while I was reading the article.
Beautiful writing.
Is there anyone that would argue that one would benefit, perhaps mentally, from not listening to a podcast when doing routine manual labor ? Maybe trying to work 2x speed first and then listening to the podcast 2x after ? Note I do not consider sweeping/cleaning mentioned in someone else example as routine labor since there is something unique about every cleaning operation.
Illustrated guide:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...
And accompanying TED Talk:
Also, first he's an astrophysicist, and then later, he's a rocket scientist. Which one is it? My money is on neither, but I'm sure he has a fancy degree.
Replace customer with "work" and you have a simple equation to transform your productivity, not some millenial woo-woo resume-boosting nonsense like in this post.
L = Lambda * W L = Avg. number of customers in system Lambda = Avg. customer arrival rate W = Avg. time customer spends in system
But if you just want to burn fat, well I’m not sure that focusing on it would change anything.
Proprioception is a nice thing to exercise, though.
I appreciate the metaphor, but... multiplication is not repeated addition.
Well, it is. 0.16 is bigger than 0.2 and 0.8, because it has 3 digits instead of 2, and 16 is bigger than 2 and 8. (and 4/25 is obviously bigger than 1/5 and 4/5 too)
The problem actually is to (really) understand that the opposite is true. As soon as the denominators are different enough, we can't easily (just by looking at the numbers) compare two fractions like 26551/3690 and 26545/3689
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." ― Alan Watts.
(In the sense that physically doing nothing else, but secretly thinking about other things, is also distraction).
But if you're ascribing a higher meaning to the act is it still Zen? Maybe true Zen would be not even knowing it existed in the first place.
The point of it, beyond contributing to the greater community, was to do these chores mindfully. There was no higher spirituality to it; just be present. When washing dishes, I was only focusing on washing, rinsing, drying, and putting them away. When sweeping, I was only sweeping the floor to collect dirt. When I collected the dirt, I was only collecting it. And so on. It sounds a bit silly, but it was a tremendous practice to force yourself to only do one thing and to think about that thing while you're doing it.
Do you see any lasting benefits from your experiences? I personally still struggle with focus and attentiveness, especially when the demand is external. I haven't concluded whether I wasted my time, or if I need to get back to meditating. It's time-consuming!
However, I feel like the retreats were a positive for me, albeit not in the same way that meditation might be. Sitting, walking, and doing "work practice" (the term they used) mindfully gave me a great perspective shift. I found doing dishes truly enjoyable and worth my effort even if it wasn't changing the world.
Maybe I enjoyed it so much because of my personality. Or maybe the retreats helped me appreciate silence and downtime, thereby changing my personality. I can stand in line at the grocery store without needing to be entertained by my phone, which is a herculean effort for many people I know. It's too hard to say :)
I’ve said too much.
大道無門 The Great Way is gateless,
千差有路 Approached in a thousand ways.
透得此關 Once past this checkpoint
乾坤獨歩 You stride through the universe.
I would start with this short series of animated Alan Watts lectures by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VvrfnE7Q-0w, listen to some of his lectures (the ones where he’s drinking are often the best), read The Book, and then just have fun with all the other books/content he put out there. Alongside it, dive into the deep texts, Zen, the Vedanta, etc.
I find Watts' advice to just peel the potatoes more useful than this concept of striding through the universe through The Great Way.
But that might just be because I don't find gratuitous capitalisation spiritually enlightening, or entertaining.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/qrvk2i/comment/hk...
Many discoveries or solutions to problems (from scientific to the everyday) are found on walks when the mind is working on problems in the background, and I believe this creativity could be lost with mindfulness of the current activity all of the time.
Besides, your subconscious will constantly be working and making connections even if your conscious mind is 無(blank).
When you want a big car and you don't have one, you suffer. When you want to keep up with the neighbours and cannot, you suffer. When you desire to be out of the cold, you suffer both coldness and unfulfilled desire. If you released your desire to be out of the cold, you would experience coldness, not suffer it.[1] From that kind of thinking, desiring to solve problems and worrying that you cannot is a suffering. Desiring to solve problems so people look up to you is a suffering. Desiring to make the most out of every moment and not waste time "merely peeling potatoes" because you want to be better, smarter, cleverer, more productive, more important, living a more exiciting or higher status life than people who merely peel potatoes is a suffering.
Go through life from start to finish like a river, the river does not seek to be somewhere else, to do something else, to be more or less than it is. Nor will you escape aging, disease, and death, by thinking about other things while peeling potatoes. Nor will you have a better life by solving problems while peeling potatoes, for everything is body sensations and breathing and seeing and hearing, from the cheapest clothes to the most expensive, from the cheapest hut to the luxuryiest apartment, the lables 'cheap', 'luxury', 'comfortable', 'uncomfortable', 'homely', 'ugly', are labels in our heads taught to us by marketers trying to sow social discord and sell products. You have potatoes to peel, peel them. Attend to the movement of your fingers, the sharpness of the blade, the pulsing of your heartbeat, the firmness of the flesh, the way the peel falls, the mud, the splashing water, the scent of raw vegetable, would it be different if you were peeling Venusian potatoes dressed in Flash Gordon shiny silver spaceclothes in a Dyson Swarm pod? Well, I'd rather someone else peeled the potatoes while I did something more exciting, you say, sitting at your computer reading this on HN having an unexciting life, waiting year after year for your exciting life to start, desiring it, suffering for its lack, sadly aware that you have teeth to brush, hands to wash, food to prepare, possibly potatoes to peel, in the imminent future.
[1] the only way I can make sense of this is to be willing to accept that it may result in physical pain, damage, even the end of your life, and accept that, too. Desiring to prolong your life when you cannot do so, is suffering also. Desire for a healthy body when you are injured, is suffering. If you can go inside out of the cold, do so. Take action, have a preference. But if you cannot, do not. [If you can avoid peeling potatoes, and wish to do that, do so. If you cannot, do not]. Do not add suffering by longing for log fires and blankets and hot tea, and self-chastising for letting yourself get stuck outside, or resenting your coworkers or family who dragged you out, or your bad luck for your bus to be late, and so on. If 'experiencing cold' is your life now, then experience it attentively and do a good job of it. [I believe it goes on that the physical discomfort becomes a sensation like speech becomes noise, and then people have surgeries without anaesthetic not because they can stop feeling sensations but because they can stop desiring to not feel pain, they can experience sensations without labelling them as "pain" and needing them to stop.].
The leader used all sorts of mathy pseudologic to make connections between equations and human feelings. It managed to gain some pretty smart members in spite of the bullshit.
https://artvoice.com/2019/05/27/guest-view-keith-mathematica...
It relates Boyle's law to productivity. It goes something like this:
Boyle's law, or the ideal gas equation is: PV = nRT
Pressure, Volume, and Temperature. n is the number of 'moles' of the substance in question R is a constant which is specific to the gas in question (whose pressure, volume and temperature one might fluctuate)
I find that this equation also describes nicely 'academic' work (or software work, or this kind of work)
and for the sake of using the same letters, even though other letters might have been better, hahah
we'll define
P = Professionalism (i.e. Quality of output, or personal standards of quality)
V = Volume (or amount) of work that can / is expected to be done
n = Number of projects one is undertaking at the same time
R = A 'constant' unique to the individual
T = time available / allocated for the work
First, let's define R exactly. It is a constant, unique to the individual (under constant circumstances), describing the quality that can be expected, for a single unit of work (on a single project), for a unit of time allocated.
While R is a 'constant', this does not mean that it cannot change - indeed it can change due to circumstances ... but that means that your R has changed. E.g. burnout, psychology etc. Or motivation on the other end.
But for the purposes of studying your work output as a closed system, it is a constant.
And this is a very important part of this realisation.
So
the main parts of the system, are P, V, and T.
In boyle's law, this says that, given constant pressure, an accompanying increase in temperature must be accompanied by an increase in volume. Or given constant volume, increase in temperature must be accompanied by an increase in pressure, etc.
When it comes to work:
An increase in volume of work, must necessarily lead to: - either an increase in time allocated for the work - or a reduction in expected quality.
This, btw, was the insight that kickstarted this analogy, because there's a famous dilbert comic effectively saying the same thing (let me try and find it quickly...)
https://assets.amuniversal.com/fa5edf906d5101301d7a001dd8b71...
So. Let's examine keeping the other variables constant.
Expected professionalism / quality of output needs to improve. This necessarily means that - Volume of work needs to be reduced, given for the same deadline. - Time allocated needs to go up for the same amount of work
Let's examine time. The deadline has been pushed forward: - Volume necessarily must go down, or - Quality must go down.
The other directions also lead to nice insights.
You just got an extension. If you choose to use up this allocated time, you can choose to: - Try to improve quality of already existing material (i.e. procrastination, lol) - Try to improve amount of work at the same quality
Your volume has gone down (an unexpected project is now off the table). Do you: - Choose to finish things up on time - Improve the quality, but stick to the same deadline (i.e. Parkinson's Law / Procrastination) :p
Your boss has told you that you can afford to not be so nitpicky. Do you - Do more work at a lower quality. - Finish things up faster.
etc etc
Now. Let's attack n
When talking about Boyle's law, there are two versions (kinda). PV = cT vs PV = nRT the difference being, in the latter case, we assume we're dealing with n moles of the same gas, whereas the former is general enough to assume generic volume, which may be of a mixture of gases
Therefore
If one is talking about n 'projects', which can be interpreted to all carry more or less the same volume of required work
e.g. "how many experiments do I need to conduct for my PhD"
then PV=nRT is appropriate.
otherwise you should be a bit more generic and treat 'volume' as a more generic "amount of work" situation
however, the n offers another insight into this work model.
meaning
"One way to improve quality / reduce workload / save time, is to stop bloody accepting every project you're offered"
(guilty as charged )
which could totally also mean personal projects, such as learning monads for absolutely fuck all reason
or
conversely
the case of increasing n - "by all means take up more projects, as long as you feel you can handle the increase in volume, or the increase in time you will have to spend, or the reduction in quality on all your other projects"
or something like that
now, here's where it all comes together.
I would like to believe, that in any reasonable employment, one is hired for their (perceived) R
at least as perceived at the time of interview :p
which, can be considered a "constant" in closed system terms.
however
the system is not really 'closed'.
E.g. burnout will invariably reduce your R. This means that for the same expectation of quality, and allocated time, you will be able to produce less volume of work (or alternatively, for the same deliverables, you'll only be able to do less work)
UNFORTUNATELY, for someone like me, this is an emotionally negative path
which risks reducing your R even further in a vicious cycle of psychological negativity
therefore, what we tend to consider first, is increasing T as a counterbalance
i.e. "I'll work more hours than I should"
problem is, this is not sustainable, and often serves to reduce your R even further, compounding the problem
Furthermore, if you have made the mistake of creating false expectations in your bosses about a high R
but this high R comes (possibly unbeknownst to them) from an artificially inflated T, rather than from a genuinely organically high R constant
then this will lead to more V, or possibly a higher expectation of P ... even when time T is suddenly unavoidably low
etc etc ... I'm sure you can think of similar scenarios / cautionary tales
In any case, what PV=nRT has done for me is the following:
If my bosses ask me to increase V, with no increase in T, I am now unashamedly willing to reduce my P
rather than steal T from personal time and suffer consequences that at the end of the day make things worse by 'opening' the system and affecting my R
and in fact, people seem to expect this
I have battled with my psychological aversion of low P for a while, but this thought helps me do it without suffering the negative thoughts so much.
"It will not reflect badly on me if my quality drops. I should simply point out it's a natural cause of the reduction of the other variables in a closed system"
And my employer should NOT expect me to change my R
In other words, they should not expect me to:
"Do better work (without giving me the right ammunition to do so)" "Increase my workload (without giving me the time and resources required for it" "Finish this quickly" (without helping me mitigate my workload, or expecting the same effort and quality)
And also, it has made me a bit more pragmatic about saying no to projects, even though they could benefit me (genuinely or not).
Or at least, it has taken away much of the guilt for not doing those projects even though they're on my list etc.
That is all.
How does technical debt fit into the whole PV=nRT framework.
The story goes like this. "We have n tasks. Unit tests are an extra task. We don't have time for n+1 tasks"
In reality, technical debt is not an additive, it's a modifier. It applies a modifier a to the current task, and a modifier b to all related tasks after it.
So it's more like having E[n] = 1 * a + (n-1) * b, where a > 1, and 0 < b < 1
E.g. if writing a unit test makes your task double, but your remaining tasks now take half the time, then you didn't really make n into n+1 with unit tests, you made n become 2 + (n-2)/2
So, for the above (admittedly unrealistic) modifiers, if you have 8 projects to do, and you're thinking should I do unit tests
In your mind you may be thinking, fukit, I can't afford to do 16 tasks instead of 8 (i.e. 8 tasks plus 8 unit tests)
But because geometric processes are so hard to reason with, it's hard to see the benefit, but the benefit is massive!
octave:16> f = @(n) 2 * n;
octave:17> g = @(n) 4 - 2 .^ (2-n);
octave:18> [ f(1:8); g(1:8) ]
ans = 2.0000 4.0000 6.0000 8.0000 10.0000 12.0000 14.0000 16.0000
2.0000 3.0000 3.5000 3.7500 3.8750 3.9375 3.9688 3.9844
(assuming related tasks and compounding effect paid from technical debt)
This is assuming output is multiplicative. Output is usually additive if you're an employee as you only reap benefits in terms of salary. Thus it is in your best interest as an employee to apply 0.8.
For an entrepreneur output is multiplicative because your output scales with customers. As an entrepreneur it is in your best interest to apply all your effort as when more customers use your product you gain more benefit.
> "If you multiply two numbers together, shouldn't the output be a larger number?"
Glad this guy isn't building rockets anymore :-)
> and bestselling author
> Click here to download a free copy of his eBook
> But in the dream, I was staring at this equation as a mathematical beginner, completely befuddled by the result. How could that be? If you multiply two numbers together, shouldn’t the result be greater than each part?
When people share stories online and forums such as HN take parts out of context to insult the author, it’s a horrible experience.
(I'm not going anywhere with this...)