To be productive, be prepared | Hacker News Reader

To be productive, be prepared

martinrue.com

131 pointsxwowsersx29 comments

Preparing is the fun part. The hard part is doing the work. Making a study plan, picking out which books you'd like to read, making a list of all the chapters as TODO items, and even picking out the exercises you should do, is easy and fun. It's the equivalent of education fast food. You're imaging yourself in a future state where you know all this stuff without having put in real work.

The hard part is doing the unsexy work. Slogging through exercises. Confronting failure and embarrassment when you don't know something without lying to yourself and immediately googling the solution. Unfortunately there is no "one weird trick" you can use here. It's hard, but in the end all you need is discipline. Sitting down for an hour to focus and study has become increasingly rare and difficult in a society where we are conditioned by 10 social media apps bidding for your attention every second. If you are anything like me, sitting down and reading a hard textbook for an uninterrupted hour doesn't come easily anymore. And it's my fault for allowing myself to become so easily distracted.

And writing blog posts about how to study is surely more fun than actually doing the work. And posting comments on HN about how to study even more so :)

But where does the preparation end and the work start?

It's subjective, but I think a good metric to use is resistance. Whenever you feel resistance towards at task, that's work. Stuff you know you should do, but don't feel like doing.

A common example are textbook exercises in math or physics books. Most people don't mind passively watching lectures or YouTube videos on these topics, but they'll never do exercises that force them to think and produce something from scratch. They feel like work. Doing them is scary because they expose your weaknesses. It's easy to get the illusion of having understood something from watching lecture when in reality you haven't. But when you talk to actual mathematicians and physicists, they will tell you the single most important thing you must be doing are these exercises.

Writing is another common example. Sitting down and writing a book, or a blog, is scary and feels like work. It exposes gaps in your own understanding and knowledge. People have an inherent resistance to this. They'll start, but then drop it and give up early. There are probably 100x more people who have "prepared and organized" a blog or started and outline of a book than people who have kept up the practice or finished a book.

How to best deal with that resistance in order to work?

Trying to make the unsexy work funny :)

But, how do you do that?

Personally, I read my code three times. The first time it looks normal, the second it looks like a horror script, and the third like a comedy. Thus, I achieve amusement.

Fun parts you mean are brain's way of procrastinating IMHO.

This matches my process with GitHub issues. I try to start any piece of work my opening an issue where I describe the problem to be solved and then gather research on what code needs to be changed etc.

I wrote more about my process in https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jan/12/how-i-build-a-feature/ and https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/29/the-perfect-commit/

I sometimes call this "mise en place".

I was diagnosed with moderate depression that lasted most of 2022.

In hindsight, I found it interesting that I had no issues going to work and being productive, even though every other aspect of my life was crumbling away and deteriorating.

This article made me think that perhaps the reason I was productive at work was as simple as having others prepare with or for me for my tasks. (being part of a team or having a pm)

And perhaps the clearer and more "layed out" the tasks are, the less motivation you actually need.

I dont think it would have gone so well if I had to plan my day myself.

The key is knowing how much preparation is required to start. Personally, I lean more towards “just enough to start”. Then I flesh it out as I go, if I hit a brick wall, then I pause “to prepare” for the next go.

What this does is ensure that I always have enough to get a task done as opposed to overindulging in “preparation” at the cost of real progress.

Good luck, everyone. Wishing you success 2023.

I found an article the other day that touches on this: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/knowledge-cycle-efficiently-or...

The idea is to treat knowledge work more like a cycle of "collecting/preparing" and then working through that until you've finished that pile, then repeating that prepare -> work cycle ad nauseam. They recommend using a pomodoro-type system where you pre-define how long you're going to collect information for.

It seems like a promising solution to "preparing" way too much and procrastinating on the actually doing anything part. Especially since I don't think it's possible to really know how much preparation you need beforehand.

The basic process is as follows:

> Start with 1 hour of research. Stick to the time limit. You will return to this later, so take note of your trails before you leave.

> Process all your findings of the first step. Take notes and connect them in your Zettelkasten note archive. Once you think you got everything in the archive, add the notes or references to them to your draft. Write a sentence or two to explain the connections between the notes you just inserted if you like. Do whatever it takes to really integrate the new findings into your current draft.

> Reflect on the process. How well did you do? Did you learn something new? Judge the processing work you had to do: Was the amount of material manageable? How long did it take to work through your findings Would you prefer to have more or less time to research? Keep book of your answers. It’s important to write them down in a log to review changes over time.

> Adapt the routine: change the time limit of your research. Try to double or halve the time at first to get a feeling for the direction in which you’ll have to push the time boundary. The time it takes to process your findings is part of the feedback you can use to change the boundary.

(ignore the references to Zettelkasten, I think the core idea works no matter how you take notes or process what you've collected)

PlanOnDemand

I like the sentiment, but, as with all advice, moderation is key. The failure mode here is "analysis paralysis", where you get so caught up doing the preparation that you forget to actually do the work. A good example is writing. By all means, do research and create an outline prior to writing. But never ever confuse research and outlining for the writing itself. Preparation is key, but so is just buckling down and doing the damn work.

As Steve Jobs put it so well: "Real artists ship".

EDIT: Another common failure pattern that I've noticed (and personally fallen into) is spending more time figuring out todo/task tracking systems than actually doing work. The todo system is only a tool. The only measure of its value is in whether you actually get tasks done faster with the system than without. It doesn't matter if you "feel" more organized as a result; it's far better to feel disorganized, but finish projects than it is to have everything squared away... have nothing accomplished at the end of the day/week/month.

This reminds me of self-determination theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which proposes that you need autonomy, competence and relatedness to a task to be motivated.

I could see how preparing your exact steps beforehand will ensure a feeling of competence.

This makes me wonder, maybe motivation could be improved even more by also including autonomy and relatedness in the preparing questions:

  - Which steps can I take on my own, and which ones do I need help with?
  - What makes this task meaningful to me? What positive effects will completing it bring?

What we are talking about here is Organizing and Sustaining a Directed Effort. You've got the Directed Effort and the Organizing, but Sustaining needs some attention. For me that means reviewing my projects every morning, noting progress, noting what's next, and visualizing eventual success. Visualizing success is an emotional experience, and I do it to reinvigorate my motivation. Works for me.

Do you have any references to read about this idea?

I'm afraid not. It's the best I've been able to come up with after 76 years of dealing with ADHD. I organize my life within an outliner. It's specialized for academic projects, but it works well for me as a tool to organize most aspects of my life. It's called Epiphany Workflow for the Mac, but any full featured outliner should be as effective. Full Disclosure: I wrote the program.

This reminds me of an interview I saw of Tyler Joseph from "twenty-one pilots" where he describes the basic process of song-writing. I can't find the link now, but the premise is that, it is not enough to just sit around and wait for inspiration to strike - you have to be prepared to take advantage of it. So you practice writing lyrics, practice your instrument or a production technique, even when the immediate output of it seems like crap. You practice until you don't have to think about the thing that you're practicing, so when you're actually "inspired" by something, so to speak, you can just immediately rely on what you've practiced instead of not being able to reach that sound you heard in your head.

Preparation is a slippery slope that can give the illusion to perfectionists that you’re getting things done when in reality you’re doing everything but the thing itself.

Having clarity through the preparation process might be the big takeaway here, but there’s problems and goals that have little to no definition and you can’t always prepare for them, rather you have to get involved before you have enough clarity.

For obvious work (mostly defined), this idea of preparation works great. For non-obvious work (not defined at all), you can’t prepare for it, but you can prepare yourself (skills, mindset, work ethic, etc).

I agree with the basic premise of the article, but I'm not sure that the bullet list would work for me (I end up doing most of it, but the OP's prescription is quite specific, and I don't do them the same way).

I'm extremely productive. I have some habits and techniques[0] that work quite well, for me, and the way that I work. Not so sure that they would work for everyone, though.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany

To me, productive = DRY (Don't repeat yourself), it means you most of the time just forget boilerplate, plumping details to do at least work with the most outcome as possible.

One practical example, is the CI/CD workflow, the auto testing setup.

So yes, you "implicitly" need to prepare for enough abstraction to be DRY.

Good organization and code search is half of productivity. It is always better to find you already have something coded then code it again.

Motivation is a made up word. You can't hold it, put it in a jar, sell it or give to someone. It's an abstract that usually only creeps up if you "lack" it. But there is no such thing as lacking something that doesn't exist in the real world. I found it's best to completely abandon it.

Instead one should thrive to find and do the work they truly enjoy. Then anything just gets in the way of doing the real work, if it's necessary you push through it, if it's unnecessary, drop it.

> Motivation is a made up word. You can't hold it, put it in a jar, sell it or give to someone.

You actually can, with any chemical that increases dopamine (focus and task saliency) and norepinephrine (need to do something) in the pre-frontal cortex. Stimulants of the amphetamine family are notoriously good at this.

Anything we do or feel is mediated by chemical or electrical signals. There are a lot of reasons why we expect to synthesize the perfect cocktail for motivation, but we can't, and among those is that the thing that makes you say "I should be doing this" is a high-level system with little to no control over the why your brain isn't entering a motivated state.

You might be hungry, sad, depressed, have ADHD, haven't slept enough, be mentally exhausted or very often you think you want to do something, but the rest of your brain really doesn't for whatever reason. Your high level consciousness just doesn't know what's going on, but something is going on. This is why pinning down motivation is tricky.

Really like this. And reminds me of Charlie Munger's advice -- "Opportunity comes to the prepared mind"

I like that. There’s also, “Opportunity tracks down the well capitalized.” I forget who said that, but it was in the context of having a conservatively invested (e.g. liquid) “opportunity fund”.

Yeah , and don't mistake work for learning. If you learn while you work you will spend 10x more time.

to be productive or not to be

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