Anxiety - Lightweight To-do Management. Welcome - Ommwriter. Quick, Nimble Languages. » 01 Oct 2009 or Why the Mainstream Will Never Steal Our Surplus I am a programming languages bigot. There — I admit it. I write Rails code for startups and turn my nose up at those who slave away in Eclipse working with Java. I have always assumed that the promised land of modern, dynamic languages bears fruit for anyone who seeks it.
I never really considered the “why” of Java, as that would interfere with my unbridled hate. Many prominent figures support this observation. Would switching to nimble, dynamic languages give mainstream Java code shops the surplus or productivity boost that so many of us enjoy? From the code I’ve seen, the average developer writes overly verbose dynamic code. Java makes doing dangerous (or interesting) things painful. I believe that this speed penalty is only a major factor for better programmers, because Java only contributes to the slowdown caused by inefficient tools. This helps explain why dynamic languages are such a great fit for startups. My Get-Back-To-Work Hack. I’ve been looking for a way to fight distractions on the web. I’ve tried SelfControl, but just getting a “server not found” error in the browser when I visit a temptingly unproductive site isn’t particularly motivational.
The hack for this I came up with today is cheap and dumb, but it works. If you want to be sure it’s worth your time, watch this 46 second long screencast, then read on if you like what you see. If you’re an experienced web developer, this will probably take you all of ten minutes to set up. If not, I’ve tried to explain it in pretty friendly terminology, but you might want to grab the nearest techie to help you out.
Step One: Block Distracting Domains The /etc/hosts file tells your computer where other computers are. We can make use of the /etc/hosts file to block specific domains that we shouldn’t be spending time on. My /etc/hosts looks like this. Go ahead and put your own time-wasting sites in there; be sure to add the “www.” variant, if the site has one. Variations. Freeverse. Time Sort (Noguchi) Filing System. In my attempts at organization, I came across what I think is a rather ingenious idea for filing -- at least for files for current projects.
The idea is deceptively simple: Take a large vertical envelope (I use 10" x 13") Cut off the top flap (leaving the top open) The envelope should be about 12" tall now. Label what you want to file on back, vertically down the left edge of the envelope. Put today's date under the label. Put what you want to file in it. Place it on your desk or on a bookshelf between bookends. As you create new envelopes, add it to the shelf on the left side. As you pull a file for use, replace it on the left side. As you create files, and use them, all your "active files" will stay toward the left of the shelf, and all the inactive files will end up on the right side of the shelf. When you need a file, look for it by starting at the left, and moving through the envelopes until you find it. I have been using this now since November 29th. Where did this system come from? An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day.
By Peter Bregman | 2:27 PM July 20, 2009 Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better. When I teach time management, I always start with the same question: How many of you have too much time and not enough to do in it?
That means we start every day knowing we’re not going to get it all done. But even with those lists, the challenge, as always, is execution. We need a trick. Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru, knows all about tricks; he’s famous for handcuffing himself and then swimming a mile or more while towing large boats filled with people. Ritual. Relearning: The Productivity Problem that We're Not Suppose.
Imagine that you had no memory; that everything you learned had to be re-learned again and again as you did your work. If you worked in software development, you wouldn't have to stretch too far to imagine it. Re-learning is so much a part of the moment by moment work of software development that it's considered normal. In fact, it's the unrecognized backdrop that software development plays out in front of. Because relearning is not recognized as a problem as software development, it's almost never talked about it.
And frankly, it's not a welcome subject in polite programmer society. I'll offer an observation from my own experience and from the anecdotal evidence of others in my professional circle: I would be comfortable saying that half of the lost productivity on software teams comes from re-learning. First We Scan, and then We Read Before users read the content of interactive media they scan the content. Usable code dissolves into understanding at a glance. Making Code Soluble. 10 Ways to Learn Stuff While Procrastinating Online. It's Monday. You've had a nice, long, idle weekend, and—what's this? Someone who says they're your boss wants you to do work?! Well, we'll have none of that, will we? Of course not - this is the internet. Frittering away hours in front of mental_floss' Amazing Fact Generator is always an option.
But here are 10 other easy ways to put off whatever you're supposed to be doing while also getting your knowledge fix. 1. I wish I were better able to speak and read Spanish, but that takes a good bit of time to master — on the other hand, learning to write in Elvish takes all of ten minutes, according to this website. Did I get it right? 2. You've probably heard about the man who delivered his baby son after watching a how-to on YouTube. Of course, you shouldn't limit yourself to YouTube for these sorts of how-tos. 3. This one's a no-brainer: HowStuffWorks is a great complement to mental_floss, covering pretty much every topic of inquiry you can think of. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
THE ABOLITION OF WORK. Itsme. The Things experience. Back in April of ’08, I wrote a review of Cultured Code’s Things public beta. Since then, they have successfully completed their public beta and taken Things to market — and (first off) a hearty congratulations to them. If the measure of an application’s beta is your willingness to put down money for “the real thing”, then this one was about as successful as it could get. When I wrote that review, I was unsure about whether I’d be using Things in the future. It seemed simple and effective but I wondered if it would grow with me — would Things continue to meet my needs as I learned its inner intricacies? Or would I find the application’s ceiling and still need more out of it? Right off the bat, let’s get one thing straight about Things: it is not a project management utility.
Things not only scales horizontally — working transparently for the light GTDer and the guru alike. I prefer very few, but somehow quite often manage to wind up with a great many. I’ve come to rely on Things. Printable Checklist. The Case Against Everything Buckets. The Mac software ecosystem faces a plague. A plague of Everything Buckets. Indulge me. If you search for “productivity” or “organization” software for the Mac, you’ll find variations on a particular type of application.
These applications claim to be “your outboard brain” or “your digital filing cabinet” or similar. They go by many names: Yojimbo, Together, ShoveBox, Evernote, DEVONthink. There may be differences in their implementation and appearance, but these applications are all of the same sinister ilk. An Everything Bucket, since you’re probably wondering, is what I call applications that encourage the user to throw anything and everything into them. Why Everything Buckets Are Not A Good Idea Computers work best with structured data. This proposition should not sound great. The Filesystem If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.
The Search Illusion Most Everything Buckets also let you search. Maker's notebook. HOWTO: Be more productive. Translations: 日本語 | Русский | Беларуская “With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case. Time has various levels of quality. If you want to be more productive then, you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. Spend time efficiently Choose good problems Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? This isn’t to say that all your time should be spent on the most important problem in the world. Have a bunch of them Another common myth is that you’ll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively.
Having a lot of different projects gives you work for different qualities of time. Make a list Notes. Deadline: Home. Yasnippet - Google Code. How to Improve Your Self-Control. New research suggests self-control can be improved using abstract reasoning. “It’s all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.” ~Mick Jagger Temptation comes in many forms, often so potent, so animal, that it seems impossible to resist. Eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much or letting the heart rule the head.
We get instant messages from deep in the gut that resonate through the mind, trying to dictate our behaviour. One of humanity’s most useful skills, without which advanced civilisations would not exist, is being able to engage our higher cognitive functions, our self-control, to resist these temptations. People, being only human, find the constant battle with basic urges is frequently too great and their self-control buckles. Based on new research, along with studies conducted over the past few decades, Dr Fujita and colleagues have proposed that abstract thinking and psychological distance are particularly important in self-control. 1. 2. 3. Tactics and Workarounds for a Fast Paced Scene. I recently realized that I inadvertently tune out about half of all verbal instructions.
Often I can “squint my ears” and pick up the gist of things by the context and fake it. If I actually start solving a problem, I literally tune everything out. (I noticed this last thing back in high school when I tried listening to music while studying: every once in a while I’d come out to the “zone” and realize that most of the album had gone by and I missed my favorite songs!) Another thing that happens is, if I don’t take care of an issue right away, I’m liable to put it off indefinitely. If I get overwhelmed, I have a hard time picking out what to work on and when. Being a developer, my knee-jerk response to a problem is to solve it with code. And what do I do with that twenty minutes between meetings? (Essentially, unit tests are a means of sketching requirements and design concepts during a time in which it would otherwise be impossible to think.
So back to me, Mr. Like this: Like Loading...