Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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Nice...I generally skip over the endorsements section but Addy Osamni's statement of confidence caught my eye, and it reminded me why I should even be interested in such a narrowly-tailored book: optimizing workflow.

I've clearly lost brain cells as I've gotten older, but I think I've been able to maintain a constant rate of learning new things by reducing the amount of slack and drag in how I work (and read)...I really like the selling point of "As a developer, I value my time at $100/hr and this book will save me 30 min/day...This means I will have an extra $12,500 per year". That's a nice way to think about it, though it probably underestimates the impact of more time in life.

I like the pricing of the video (at least at the launch price)...I almost never learn via video (yes, I'm that old) but for an extra $9 (or +$5 of the regularly-priced book)...that's not at all a bad deal. And I've been trying to make screencasts on workflow and tooling and am always interested in how the pros teach with video.

So, sold.

By that logic, this is a very expensive book. If it takes 6 hours to read fully it costs $600 + sticker price!

Just because you get paid $100/hr doesnt mean you value your time at $100/hr. In fact in means that you value your time LESS than $100/hr (though not by how much).

Not every unit of a resource has the same value. Marginal utility is typically a curve, with the value of each unit of the resource decreasing as you have more of it.

In theory, yes, the time someone spends working is worth less to them than what they are paid. Hence why they spend it working.

But, in theory, they only stop working because the remaining time they have left in the day is at that point worth more to them than their hourly pay.

Speaking personally, the marginal value of my time is quite a bit higher than my normal billable rate, because I'm busy.

I'm curious to know how the videos stack up to the tuts+ video series [0]. (Even though I think tuts+ is ST2 only.) Have you viewed those?

[0] http://code.tutsplus.com/courses/perfect-workflow-in-sublime...

I don't think that it will save me 30 min/day, but when it saves me 1 min/day, it will be enough too.

To be fair, you should also subtract the time it will take you to learn the skills that will end up saving you that time. As long as it's less than 365 minutes it should pay off for you in less than a year.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1205/

I just spent two hours practicing getting in and out of my car. It was totally worth it!

Well, this is "book reading time" and it's spent reading a book. If I wasn't reading this and optimizing my workflow, I would be reading some other book anyway.

To add to this, I think the hidden value of workflow optimization is avoiding interruptions.

If the optimization itself is only worth a few seconds but it allows me to remain focused on whatever I'm actually working on, it becomes much more valuable.

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