Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

As an academic, often I'm running experiments and have to wait for them to finish. Worse still, sometimes I can't touch my machine whilst they're running.

For a long time, I tried the "don't switch" mentality. But you just waste a lot of time.

Solutions are:

1. Avoid it by running shorter experiments - requires intellectual effort and is much like the advice in the article.

2. Do something else, but something related to what you're doing. That way, it's not a total cognitive switch. Classic example is working out ideas for how you might best present data whilst an experiment is running, or how you might further automate the process etc.

3. If you have to switch, then do something that can easily be dropped. Usually I read a (scientific) paper whilst I wait - this could be vaguely related to the experiments I'm waiting on.

Could the university you work for provide you with a second machine whilst the first machine runs experiments?

Even if so, as the article notes, if you switch to some other, yet still "productive" task, you are still task switching and losing a lot of momentum on the original task.

Also there will always be distractions; daydreaming if nothing else. At a previous employer my main work machine was not connected to the Internet (a nightmare for other reasons, like if I was on the Internet-enabled machine, may as well check email...). But even then, when waiting for a test that would take several minutes, I'd find myself reading a print newspaper.

These forced delays kill productivity for me like nothing else. Losing the task at hand every couple of minutes to retest or really slows down output.

I agree with you, that the delays are a pain.

Recently, though, I've stop listening to most of the "productivity advice" and warnings about multitasking, splitting your time into chunks, and the myriad of other approaches.

The best bit of advice I have heard is just to get on with it, work hard, and stop procrastinating about it. Too much meta is not good.

> Could the university you work for provide you with a second machine whilst the first machine runs experiments?

Sure. They do, in fact. And I use clusters for large experimentation.

However, a great rule of thumb as a researcher is to try to limit yourself to using a single laptop for your work and experiments. One advantage: your development machine and experimental machine are then identical, and they both travel with you. Academics travel a lot.

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