If you're busy, you're doing something wrong
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
In the past when I've worked with friends on side projects, the conversation would sometimes go like this.
Me: "Hey, let's try and meet like three evenings a week for two hours to work on this. Let's start tomorrow?" Them: "Yeah -- wait, I have to meet a friend for dinner tomorrow. Can you do the day after?" Me: "Sure."
[two days later]
Me: "Hey, we're still meeting up tonight, right?" Them: "Crap, I have to work late. Let's meet on Saturday and just bang out some work all afternoon."
We're fucked. We're fucked before we've even started. If every "dinner with a friend" or "I have to work late" is going to sideline you, then how the hell are you supposed to do anything? Even if we do work for six hours on Saturday instead of three two-hour sessions during the week, it's just not the same. We'll have no cadence or rhythm and feel stressed and probably a lot like the people in the OP's study.
A few years ago I recognized this anti-pattern and so I don't really take on new projects or goals unless I'm literally willing to prioritize everything but the bare essentials (ie. family) above it. PG's "Top of Your Mind" describes what 'mental prioritization' looks like, and I think this study points describes what 'schedule prioritization' looks like.
I realize that my own conclusions are my projections completely based on own anecdotes, and I'm sure many people on HN won't hesitate to point out the logical fallacies for why that's dumb. But look back in your life and think about the times you've consistently said, "Sorry, I can't make it, I have to do X first." Did you eventually reach a level of achievement with X? I'm guessing you probably did.
I would like to ask a question that nags me every time I read an article like this: Why do we assume that we need "free time"? And to answer this, I have to ask another that occurred to me while reading the article: What do these elite players do during their free time?
This is an important questions for programmers and engineers, because we generally enjoy building things. In the context of the article, I take it as implicit that the one thing the elite players are not doing in their "free time" is playing music or that would obviously be a form of practicing.
So, then what is this free time that the elite have and how are they using it? Are they bumming in the front of the TV? Is the formula for success: work intensely for two short blocks and then veg?
Two reasons:
* For better or worse, humans are not machines. We can only keep doing the same thing over and over for so long before we go crazy, somewhat like Chaplin in Modern Times [1]. Creative work is somewhat less tedious than assembly line work, but there's still a limit.
* Because "non-free" time is time you spend making somebody else happy: Your boss, customers, friends or family, or society at large, e.g living up to expectations that you ought to be successful. Somewhere in there you need to make room to make yourself happy as well, it's not possible to live a life merely by attempting to live up to other people's expectations.
> I take it as implicit that the one thing the elite players are not doing in their "free time" is playing music or that would obviously be a form of practicing.
That doesn't follow. The kind of practice that makes you better is the boring stuff - playing scales and working on your technique. Doing fun stuff like playing your favorite tunes may be part of the training, but it's not the kind of training that improves your skills.
To keep learning, you need to keep pushing yourself into new unfamiliar territory, and to stay focused on mastering it while you're there. And we generally can't stay that focused for more than a couple of hours at a time.
My query was intended to refer to the second definition.
Neither of your objections have much to do with the first definition, and they do not satisfy me with regards to the second form of free time. If you consider the case of someone like a physicist, for whom their great love is also their form of achieving "success". For people of this type, and for ambitious people who discover fulfillment through worldly success, work is exactly the sort of activity that brings them happiness.
So perhaps that's the split. People of these types concern themselves with free time for efficiency, and the rest concern themselves with the second sort of free time. Perhaps this is also the split between the elite players and the music teachers.
Because we're not machines.
And because not everybody works on what he loves.
Sometimes, the things you love are not actual jobs (not rent paying ones, at least). Other times, they are very competitive and only few can land those jobs.
>This is an important questions for programmers and engineers, because we generally enjoy building things.
We also enjoy other things. I like programming at work. I like programming at home. I like reading about programming. I like participating in programming forums (well, it's kind of obvious, since it's Saturday night were I am and I'm on HN).
But I have tons of other stuff I'm interested in.
Not all if related to my work -- or even programming in general. And, yes, from time to time, I like to "veg in front of the TV".
I understand that people work lousy jobs. This is not the interesting case. The interesting case is for those people who are working jobs doing things they quite like, for example musicians.
"Relaxation is necessary tension. Tension is unnecessary tension."
Second, the author proceeds to extrapolates these results and asserts that everyone ought to adhere to this method of practice. Why? Is there any evidence whatsoever that sugests this is universal, or at the very least common to a few fields? All that is given is this research that is pertinent only to music students. It seems as though laborious, high-stress situations might be preferable to a casual but "deliberate" schedule in a lot of instances. Entrepreneurship and Academics are two domains that come to mind...
This piece is just a very poor interpretation and extrapolation of very specific correlative data. I don't buy these conclusions.
We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music. The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).
Were they more relaxed when they were working hard?
Edit: for a less-sharp tone.
Let me find a study, breathtakingly misinterpret the results and write an article that has an overly applicative bait-y title and start ringing in the views. It's apparently that fucking easy.
Look at our start up folk heroes, super smart geniuses who work 18 hours a day, network for 2 and sleep for 4. They're busy because they have to be busy. If you're busy it's because you're busy.
Something like making a CRUD web app is probably closer to building a wall than perfectly playing a concerto. If you're trying to build in a brand new feature into your web app that requires genuine creativity and a difficult algorithm, then you'll probably find that creating that feature in a single intense session while still fresh is going to work far better than trying to patch it together across a day of interruptions.
I suggest that there are concepts and capabilities that the elite have that average do not. Let's call it complier design or writing prolog.
Writing an enterprises decision engine in Prolog can save time effort energy, maintenance and be worth a fortune in a competitive Market.
But if you are the Prolog programmer, being able to perform is like being Yehudi Menuhin out busking. The elite player needs an orchestra and a concert hall and ticket sales.
Start up founders usually are busy building the concert hall, handing out flyers and selling tickets. A very rare few also play the violin well. No major corporation is going to turn up on HN asking for Prolog devs to rewrite an engine.
When time is up (say a few months to year?) have them come back and review the progress objectively along with their scheduled journals to find patterns between relative progression and time utilization.
My completely subjective opinion is that in a strongly controlled study you'd never get such black & white results. There are people who have a better natural ability to learn certain tasks than others. While I played an instrument in school I was never phenomenal but I exceeded many kids who practiced several hours a week to my maybe combined time of an hour weekly.
Gaming is similar: get a group of friends to all pick up a new game and play it for an eve, judge who got better by the end and there will always be stand-outs. Some people will have adapted abilities and skills from other games/tasks to advance; others may pick a important subset of the overall skills and hone that for the time to develop a depth of knowledge while possibly lacking a breadth but the skill gap almost always develops and you can't contribute that to time invested so much as natural ability to adapt.
"The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods."
"This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the players’ lives. Consider, for example, sleep: the elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players."
I like to race sailboats. It is amazing how mistakes/achievements can snowball quickly. Your goal is to get the snow ball going to the right direction ;)
A coworker of mine described it as the "monkeybars" approach to career development: you hold onto the last skill you developed and use that as leverage to get you a position that will stretch you and teach you new skills. You're never starting from scratch - you can always provide value to your employer - but at the same time you're continually stretching your capabilities.
2) I've met a couple of kids that took a year off from everything else and followed a rigorous schedule as described in the article. Their goal was to see if they can make it as professionals but ultimately decided they just couldn't keep up with the elite.
I think following a strict practice schedule is necessary but definitely not sufficient to becoming elite. Probably the non-elites figure out pretty quickly where they stand and simply opt out of the rat race.
It is disgusting to see all these half-baked, half-assed and half-minded articles that don't see the whole picture paraded as gospel here.
I don't mind what you do with your life.But the blood is on your hands, if some young kid takes this for advice.
In other words, the focus on improving certain specific things which are better to do in chunks. Those that just repeat can do it in small bursts. Your technique of learning determines if your practice will be chunky or not, not the other way around.
Presumably the best players also KNOW that they are the best--doesn't that make it easier to relax? How do you control for this?
It's easy to be relaxed when you know that as long as you put in some hours you'll always belong to the best of the best while others are constantly struggling with trying to become one of those best of the best to be more successful, get a better paid job (especially in music),...
Obviously, if you want to play professional basketball you likely better be pretty tall, and that is out of your control. The other skills necessary are definitely not innate, they are learned and improved through practice and competition.
I think people claim some things are innate simply because they don't see the struggle that went into building up the talent and thus it just seems inexplicable. That or they are the people with the supposed innate talent and like the adoration of people thinking they are "blessed by the gods", so to speak.
Or even better, try to solve problems you think of as tedious in ways that are not tedious. I always find it strange that so many programmers complain about boring grunt work. There is a perfect opportunity there to invent tools that optimize and speed up this boring grunt work. The next level is to make those tools work in a way that is usable and intuitive for other programmers. The end result is worth gold (or glory, depending on what you're after)
Good practice is all about doing hard things. Doing the same things that you can already do perfectly (both in music and programming) leads to no improvement. Doing things you consider hard leads to amazingly quick improvement.
Musicians that concentrate on practicing only the hard and unpolished parts of their performance are more effective than the ones that practice both the easy and the hard parts. Those musicians that have found a way to "modularize" their practice and split it to the tiniest most focused bits are the most successful ones. (This is not easy because beyond a certain point the flow of the music is lost)
In programming we must do both the easy and the hard parts, but we can turn the easy parts into hard by writing code to make them even easier or to completely eliminate them.
This is privileged people mistaking their privilege for the reason for their success instead of a result of it.