The 10 rules of a Zen programmer « Grobmeier on Dart, Java, Struts, PHP and more. UPDATE: "The Zen Programmer" book is available! Click here. On a rainy morning I found myself sitting on the desk thinking about efficient working. Before I started as a freelancer I had some days were I worked lots but could look only back on a worse outcome.
I started with Zen practice back in 2006. What clearly came to my mind before a good while was: the old Zenmasters alredy knew before hundreds of years, how today programmers should work. 1. If you have decided to work on a task, do it as well as you can. Kodo Sawaki says: if you need to sleep, sleep. 2. Before you work on your software, you need to clean up your memory. Something exciting on the mailinglist? Think like this: at most times your mind is pretty clean when you wake up at the morning. You know it already. 3. Remember the days were you were a beginner. Was there ever a software build twice, the same way? 4. Some programmers have a huge problem: their own ego. Who is it who decides about your quality as programmer?
5. 6. Layering: Multitasking That Actually Works. In a few short years, multitasking has gone from star child to black sheep in productivity pop culture. This is because the most common forms of multitasking require rapidly switching between similar tasks, which creates a sort of “flickering” effect in your brain. (Think of a connection gone bad… annoying at best, useless at worst.) But sometimes multitasking really is the only way to fit in all of your priorities, and the benefits far out weigh any slight quality reduction.
Of course, that’s if — and this is a big IF — you’re doing it the right way. I define “layering” as strategically deciding to do tasks that require different “channels” of mental functioning such as visual, auditory, manual or language. Try out these strategies for fitting in more through layering on complementary activities. 1. Desk clutter tends to increase in direct proportion to many people’s level of creative activity. To win the war against clutter: 2. To invest more time in health and wellness: 3. 4. To Speed Up The Creative Process, Slow Down. 6Share Synopsis What's the key to creativity and problem solving? Relax. It was Sunday in church, 1974, when Arthur Fry had his moment of insight. Fry, a member of the choir, was having trouble marking pages for the hymnals.
He recalled a seminar given by his colleague, Spencer Silver, a few years ago. He called his idea the Post-It note. Fry, of course, isn’t the only person to experience a moment of insight. When we think about eureka moments Rodin’s The Thinker comes to mind, maybe Newton’s famous apple inspired insight (as the story goes). A recent experiment by Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks demonstrated this nicely. Here’s where things got interesting. When larks were tested in the evening and owls were tested in the morning, they achieved an average success rate of 56, 22 and 49 per cent, for the three insight tasks, compared with success rates of 51, 16, and 31 per cent achieved by students tested at their preferred time of day. What does this mean?
How Exercise Fuels the Brain. Shannon Stapleton/ReutersDoes exercise keep your brain running? Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and all of the complex interactions of bodily systems that allow you to take one step, then another. This increase in brain activity naturally increases the brain’s need for nutrients, but until recently, scientists hadn’t fully understood how neurons fuel themselves during exercise.
Now a series of animal studies from Japan suggest that the exercising brain has unique methods of keeping itself fueled. What’s more, the finely honed energy balance that occurs in the brain appears to have implications not only for how well the brain functions during exercise, but also for how well our thinking and memory work the rest of the time. That’s where the Japanese researchers came in. The myth of the eight-hour sleep. Image copyright Other We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. Image copyright bbc "It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says. Information Overload-When Information Becomes Noise – Workplace Psychology.
In “Information Overload: Causes, Symptoms and Solutions,” an article for the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA), Joseph Ruff says that we are bombarded with so much data that we’re on information overload. Simply put, information overload is when our ability to process information has passed its limit, and further attempts to process information or make accurate decisions from the surplus of information leads to information overload. Ruff argues that information overload interferes with our ability to learn and engage in creative problem-solving. For instance, venture capitalists with too much information cannot make accurate adjustments to their evaluation process, and because of this their learning is impeded.
“Once capacity is surpassed, additional information becomes noise and results in a decrease in information processing and decision quality…[H]aving too much information is the same as not having enough” (Ruff, 2002, p. 4). Proactive. The quantified self: Counting every moment.