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Comment by adampk | Hacker News Reader

Not technical but the self-knowledge of how to put yourself in a productive state. Knowing how to sleep well, eat well, exercise well to allow yourself to perform at a sustained high-level.

Someone may be more technically competent at a problem-space (at the start), but if you are able to work diligently at the problem over a sustained period, you will have 10x better results than those who crash/burnout/lose interest/try to sprint to the finish.

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As someone who struggles with ADHD and depression, this isn’t always possible.

At 38 years old, what I have discovered are ways to make myself valuable to my employer even when I’m not at my peak. The move to a more “architectural” role has been a Godsend for me. It means that I’m a let to serve to some degree in an advisory capacity for others. When I’m not able to enter “flow” with my primary project, I can usually find someone else with a problem that they’re struggling on, pair up with them, and help them get over whatever is in their way. This makes the team as a whole significantly more productive.

As a bonus, I often find that focusing on a problem of short duration helps me overcome the mental barriers to becoming engaged in my work and lets me get done what I was struggling not to avoid doing in the first place.

ha, lucky. I have a similar constellation of problems and never found an employer willing to tolerate it long term. I can put large volumes of high quality work for 3-5 weeks at a time followed by 2-4 weeks of a low output slump. I usually get fired on the fourth or fifth cycle, freelance for a while, then try again.

Always hoping to find somewhere willing to accept the inconsistency in output but haven't found it yet. Anyways it's cool to hear someone in one of these threads acknowledge this reality for a lot of people. The general HN consensus seems to be that anyone who isn't a top 10% technical star and an incredible productivity machine doesn't deserve to touch code.

Larger enterprises should tolerate this better.

Yes, but some small ones do very well.

Those of us who are like this are a “good value” to them - both in terms of relative pay, and because we tend to be VERY loyal when we find a “home.”

What type of work do you do? I run a small consulting company that builds web apps for biotech, and we’re always looking for help. I suffer from similar problems so I’m sympathetic to the situation you described.

> I have a similar constellation of problems and never found an employer willing to tolerate it long term. I can put large volumes of high quality work for 3-5 weeks at a time followed by 2-4 weeks of a low output slump. I usually get fired on the fourth or fifth cycle, freelance for a while, then try again.

This sounds 100% like me.

I currently work for a healthcare company in the mental health space. We’re definitely hiring. Shoot me an email, and we’ll see if we can’t get you into the interview process.

nominallyanonymous@protonmail.com

Came here to say this. The library of Alexandria fell into disrepair. Try not to let the same thing happen to you, or all that knowledge will be for nothing.

The mental model for this state is known as "flow" or atheletes sometimes call it "the zone"

...lots (most?) of the actual work that needs to be do is "grinding" or "working against tons of hard/impossibly to remove friction": you'll never achieve any kind of flow doing this kind of work!

So the productivity multiplier advice is this: learn to cope and be productive at doing the kinds of work where flow is impossible/unfeasible!

(This way you'll not be already tired and behind when you get to the work for which "flow" is possible...)

You can gamify anything. Gamify makes the toil of grinding fun.

Flow happens during fun.

Sometimes there are shortcuts to grinding that can only be discovered during "flow" (usually for me, it's to identify better tools)

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