Comment by powersnail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by powersnail | Hacker News Reader

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The tool doesn't matter. What works, is to actually do the stuff consistently.

One of the most productive people I know, took her lecture notes in the comment panel of PowerPoint in college, simply because _it's there_ when she open a lecture note. UI wise, it's probably worse than any note taking system that has ever showed up on HN. Nevertheless, she was a straight A student juggling 2 majors, 1 minor, and a lot of social life.

This is what I observed in hyper productive people: some of them have a unique, novel system of organizing their knowledge, but many of them don't. So, having such a system is probably not that important.

And even though I'm not a hyper productive person, this applies to what I'm good at doing as well. You can take away my favorite text editors/plugins/command line tools, and I can still competently write programs. I can code in notepad.exe if I have to. It won't be as convenient, but I can absolutely be productive.

It's the same for writing/reading/thinking. If you can already write, it's fine to try to perfect your workflow. If you can't write, it's not because you have the wrong pen.

Just today my inner voice was refraining the saying(which I learned online, but appears to be of military origin) "fast is smooth, smooth is slow".

Many of my most productive workflows have come from finding smoothness. There's a lot of stop/start in digital: something commanding your attention that is not the task, that needs immediate resolution. Often the "proper" way of dealing with it means stopping again, and the "improper" way blows up down the road. Deal with that a few times and suddenly I find myself browsing Twitter, because I've reached a "good stopping place." When that happens, it doesn't matter that it was "fast". I did one part of the actual thing fast, and then I wasted the rest of the time.

Wish more people understood this. We spend a lot of time changing tools and it's as bad or worse than context switching. Every tool has a learning curve and if you keep switching tools, you are always stuck in the initial part of the learning curve. I think this greatly hampers learning.

Hyper productive people who I have seen as well exhibit similar behavior. They just stick to tools that they are comfortable with and focus on the task at hand.

Also another anecdotal observation - some of the best chefs I have seen don't usually switch tools, be it knives or utensils. They mostly stick to the same tools for a very long time. So they invest in tools that can last and can be maintained. Not sure if the analogy holds true in other fields as well.

Pen and paper as a form of expressing streaming thoughts works for me as well. It also works because I write a lot slower than I can type. Ever since I have started writing pretty consistently over the last 4-5 months, the format of pen and paper doesn't really matter to me. I can write using any pen and any paper. I have found fountain pens to be particularly cumbersome to maintain and also my kids just take whatever pen is on my table and run off. As a result I just have a 100s pack of the same cheap pen. One went missing, pick up another one.

I've thought about this quite a bit, and I think a lot of the luck that "hyper productive people" have in getting to a state of hyper productivity, is basically like you say, but finding that thing that works for them if there is one earlier than others.

Now at 30, I'm not that productive, but there are many things I have to deal with regularly that I just haven't found very productive ways of operating with.

Right now, fwiw, writing my day out on pen and paper before I open my computer has lent me slightly increased levels of focus, but I think that for marginally more successful people, some of these gains were realized early on and happened to work for them, or they didn't need them.

I do think this extends somewhat to more general life circumstances like stable family life and not being so susceptible to distractions.

I also think that for some people who have the intellectual capability, juggling 2 majors and 1 minor might be just what they need to deal with the former.

notepad.exe user reporting in; I neglected my gentoo install one month too long on an FFXIV binge...

I find that notepad has all the features I need, I generally only work on my own code so I don't need fancy tooling.

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