How to be more productive | Hacker News Reader

How to be more productive

aaronsw.com

190 pointsrhapsodyv47 comments

great thoughts.

loved this part:

But if you’re trying to do something worthwhile and creative, then shutting down your brain is entirely the wrong way to go. The real secret to productivity is the reverse: to listen to your body. To eat when you’re hungry, to sleep when you’re tired, to take a break when you’re bored, to work on projects that seem fun and interesting.

It reminds me of a saying they have in show business: You need to go away before you can make a comeback.

I have never heard that before but it is a very truthful proverb.

"So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it’s fun. And if it isn’t, then you need to make it fun."

This one woke me up.

  | Life is short (or so I’m told)

Truer words...

Not only is life short, it's shorter than you think.

jamesbritt's law: life is shorter than you think even when you consider jamesbritt's law

Funny he mentioned TV? These days my problem is Twitter and Facebook. I even wrote a tool to reduce my Twitter intake (essenceapp.com)

I try to convince myself Twitter is for wasting time and that getting work completed is 10x more fun.

I quit twitter altogether. Never felt better. I'm worried HN has replaced it though.

Spent so much time a year back on twitter, facebook, instagram the best way is close all your accounts. It's hard the first month and then you realise how good in fact it is trust me!

The Web is easily my biggest timesink.

Twitter didn't exist back then.

Ok, It's just plain scary how much I identify with this article.

Speaking of 'lists of things to go back to read', I really need to go and read every essay he's written. Every time somebody links one on HN, I'm blown away.

If you have a reader, download the ebook from https://github.com/joshleitzel/rawthought. I read it not long ago, and it's one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

RIP Aaron.

I don't know what kind of person would downvote this comment.

No one has yet..

I mostly a lurker of hacker news, do the see the scores as you gain more profile karama?

No.

What?

http://i.imgur.com/S0e14ml.png

You see your own points, not others'.

Pretty sure that was the question being asked. He wanted to know if/how mikeroher knew he hadn't been downvoted.

Since only I can see it, at the moment, the comment has 7 points.

Possibly they had. Possibly went gray for a time, indicating that its score was non-positive. Then it got upvoted, bringing it back to being positive.

It's a vapid comment that lowers signal:noise, of course it should be downvoted.

Such comments are explicitly encouraged—see http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html:

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

"Are ok" is not the same as "are explicitly encouraged". They are tolerated would be more correct. Also we cannot mindlessly follow a static HTML document.

It's interesting how technology leads to immortality, no?

He's dead, yet we still read his words, listen to his thoughts, think of him as a person.

The written word leads to immortality. Although one could argue that writing and preserving writings are products of technology, I think you mean internet and such 21st century stuff, not the printing press or ink.

I don't mean to find fault - only replied because it never ceases to amaze me that people can talk to me across centuries.

The written word is immortal, but websites are not. Eventually your domain name and hosting will expire, your server will die. Presumably someone is keeping Aaron's site alive, but by default, things you write on your own website will go away when you're gone.

Maybe someone should do a kickstarter for large buildings where printed websites can be stored for posterity.

The Internet Archive[0] is an organization that is working to preserve websites and online content, albeit not in printed form. In fact, they have an archive of Aaron's website[1] and a collection of other digital artifacts from his life[2].

[0]: http://archive.org/

[1]: http://wayback.archive-it.org/3492/20130113003702/http://www...

[2]: http://archive.org/details/aaronsw

What's the difference between Descartes' mediations and Aaron's writings? Ignoring the obvious, technology simply made them easier to read. They're avail. on his public website whereas Descartes' mediations are more commonly found in textbooks and reproductions of his originals.

Descartes probably isn't the best example because with one quick Google search, I found this: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/medit... Still, the principle remains true.

How to be more productive: don't intentionally and permanently stop producing things forever. :(

I have little tolerance for people that are hypocritical on that scale.

Who knows what was going through his mind when he decided enough was enough. I think your comment lacks compassion, and that is a shame because one might argue that lack of compassion is getting to the root of the reasons behind his suicide.

> Who knows what was going through his mind when he decided enough was enough.

Who knows what's going through anyone's mind when they are being productive, either?

We hackers go by output, which is why his article is about being more productive.

Compassion or no, it's fundamentally hypocritical to espouse productivity as a virtue and then do an about-face in your own personal choices.

>Compassion or no, it's fundamentally hypocritical to espouse productivity as a virtue and then do an about-face in your own personal choices.

It need not be hypocritical to perform actions that disregard one of your claimed virtues, as long as said actions are in line with some of your other claimed virtues (or in line with well-founded consequentialist-type reasoning).

A man who preaches courage may find himself on a battlefield where courageous action leads to certain death, and would be wise to retreat to safety.

> I have little tolerance for people that are hypocritical on that scale.

What are you going to do, write him a nasty letter? It's not even necessarily hypocritical. He didn't make the claim that one should value productivity over all other things. As can be said of all suicides, he lived his life as well as he knew how and then he ended it when he didn't know how to live it anymore. Let's enjoy what there is to enjoy about his legacy and let his mistakes, minor as they are, fade.

I do not subscribe to the common belief that it is better to minimize the shortcomings of people to a greater degree after they have died.

I'm not sure why dying confers greater respect upon people. Perhaps it's the fear of death in the minds of the living?

https://mobile.twitter.com/sneakatdatavibe/status/2901109457...

I don't necessarily believe that respect is due unconditionally after death, e.g Hitler and Stalin are definitely not deserving.

I don't agree that Aaron was hypocritical at all though. He has been far more productive in his tragically short life than most. I know that he has done more combined than myself and all that I know in person.

The fact he has achieved what he has with severe depression makes him far less of a hypocrite. It's very hard to get yourself to do anything with depression. I couldn't and it wasn't half as bad as Aaron's.

Fact is Aaron died because he lost a battle to an illness, much like all those who have died from physical diseases. Depression is a mental illness and a suicide due to that is not the resposibility of the victim, much like when someone with severe schizophrenia wouldn't be responsible if they had killed someone based on their delusions.

He is not a hypocrite. It actually makes this advice far more powerful.

Does his hypocrisy, a debatable assertion here at best, render his advice on how to be more productive invalid somehow? Does not seem so to me.

His point about a dissertation is interesting, having just finished one myself, I had never thought that it could have been inspired as a task to focus (not distract) our attention on studying.

It's a shame that his site is not updated more often nowadays. :(

He died...

That is why the frown :(

(2005)

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