I find that this pattern works really well for me, even if it's not at the start of my day. When I get home from work, I try to "produce" something, like writing a blog post, exercising, or spending an hour coding a side-project. As a result, I don't have the mental guilt about watching a movie, reading HN, or playing xbox later in the evening.
I find if I do things in the reverse order (come home from work, plop down and start checking Twitter/reddit) then it quickly becomes dinner time and my brain has "shut down" for the day. It's easy to lull myself into thinking "Well Matt, today is almost over so no sense in starting something, just work on $FOO tomorrow".
Another trick that I've found that is highly effective for me is to "link" a producing behavior to a consuming one. I'm a bit of a TV addict so I made a deal with myself - I can watch as much TV as I want, as long as I'm doing it on the treadmill. Maybe you really enjoy listening to podcasts or sports talk radio, allow yourself to consume but only while you are doing chores or running errands. Some would argue that this is not a good way to build habits (in the sense that you are doing a behavior for the wrong motivations - in my case I am exercising in order to watch TV not to become healthier) but its been working for me so far.
Hebb's Law: "Neurons that fire together wire together." This means you are probably setting yourself up for the following side effect: if you ever find yourself in a situation where you are sitting watching TV (at a friend's house, in a waiting room) you'll have the urge to get up and move.
In that book, Leo recommends your days 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks). These tasks are derived from your Goals, and Projects lists (He recommends that you start with only ONE goal for year, for e.g Learn Spanish, and break it down into 6-month goals, 1-month goals, and weekly goals). Furthermore, we all have projects on our plates, but he recommends that we
1. Pick only 3 projects (of which one should be tied to your ONE goal)
2. Finish ALL 3 projects before putting 3 more on the plate.
These projects (ideally those things that require more than 1 To-do item, otherwise they would be just a To-do item :D), along with your goals should drive your To-do list (We all have other items on a day to day basis, and these do show up on your things to do, but more about that in a minute).
With all that in place, you should, on a day-to-day basis establish the 3 things you that will take you one step closer to your GOAL, or completion of a project - These MITs (decided on the night before, or first thing in the morning) are the first things you do everyday. That way, you know you have knocked out important items without having the day, or your manager, or your email throw you off.
He even recommends checking your email at 10 am (if possible, or later than the absolute first thing in the morning, because if you are like most people, your email usually has a few To-dos in it).
I have just incorporated his advice and am attempting to apply the same and I have to say that I feel so much less cluttered and far more focused. Knowing that I am doing what I need to do and then relegating myself to the not-so-important tasks later on the day seems to free up so much of the internal chatter in my head.
[Disclaimer - The link above is an a non-affiliate link, and I have no connection with the author other than having just read his book]
The problem with this kind of advice is that it is based on conscious goals and requires staying focused on one goal for an entire year. In my experience (and I believe research tends to support this) humans have a hard time giving conscious goals priority over unconscious needs.
As far as I can tell, the best way to work toward being the person you want to be is to trick yourself into making a habit of it before it becomes too onerous to the lizard brain. It's only things that you do without thinking that will be able to override the desire to sit on the couch and consume calories.
Not that I think reducing distraction and cutting out that which is not necessary is bad, but when putting it into practice involves making all these lists day after day it starts to sound like New Year's resolutions -- ready to be abandoned by February.
On the other hand, in the "Talent is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin it says, that any task thats gotten automated (on subconscious level) is not getting you better or even bringing you one step down.
Simply putting, if you are coding without stretching yourself, if you don't put much thought in it and do it almost subconsciously you are not learning anything.
He suggest to avoid acquiring habits for the things you want get better at. He supports his words with real life examples. I could relate it to myself, and found his techniques useful in my life. Overall it is a nice read.
I haven't read Colvin, and I don't know what he bases that assertion on -- it may be well supported, but on its face it sounds absurd. You can't get better at anything as long as you still have to think about the things on which it is based.
For example, when playing a stringed instrument, if every note you play gets bogged down in what you have to do to make that note happen (place the finger down quickly, with a pop, then relax it instantly, move the bow arm in the opposite direction, allowing the fingers to cushion the crunch that would otherwise occur -- and that's a ridiculously simplified version) you would be literally unable to play.
Likewise, if you're constantly having to be super conscious of syntax, or thinking hard about how to split a string, you'll have a hard time writing code that does anything.
In fact, I think a lot of getting better at any complex task is the process of making the lower-level parts of the task subconscious, and being able to think at increasing levels of abstraction. The only way this can bog you down is if you refuse to revisit lower-level skills if their implementation is causing you problems.
From the standpoint of productivity, since that's what we're talking about here, if you have to list a bunch of long terms goals, and split them into tasks and whatnot in order to get yourself to start working, you've already lost. There's no way this will win out, in the long run, over the things that you do and want without thinking. Working has to be something that you just do. Once you've started then you can be conscious of what you're doing.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. I do agree with you, and maybe what I was trying to say and what you are saying are different things.
I couldn't find the exact citation from the book, but I will try to write down what I remember.
Colvin explains that with an example of Tiger Woods. He says that Tiger never subconsciously hit the ball. When he starts the movement of the arm to hit the ball and someone from the background screams, he can stop his arm halfway, and then after he is no longer distracted, he hits again.
Normally, when a mediocre player starts moving his arm in order to hit the ball, he no longer able to stop halfway through the action of arm swinging. And usually he would miss, because of concentration loss. He addresses that kind of behavior due to automation of some actions. He says that after some action has gotten automated, person performing it has almost no control over it. He also gives example of the professional car drivers and average drivers. Average driver will not be able to control the dangerous situation on the road due to the fact that his actions are almost automated. While professional drivers are able to see the situation much earlier, and steer and break more efficiently, because they are in better control of situation due to less automation of driving action (Less habit more conscious control).
I hope I could convey his words clearly, because I am not a native English speaker
Edit: Regarding programming, I noticed, the more code I write subconsciously, the more stupid bugs I get. Sometimes I write mysql_real_escape_string() instead of mysql_fetch_array() and then wonder whats gone wrong. I even look at the line with this bug for several minutes, until I stop, look away for a bit, and try to switch from autopilot to manual mode. After I fire up my real brain, I spot the bug in seconds, and have a stupid smile for a half second or so :)
I am reminded of a basketball player to was practicing before an away game. He missed the first few shot's, paused made an adjustment and then made the next several shots. A reporter asked what he changed and he said "I noticed the basket was 2 inches to low." It's not that he is constantly aware of all the individual stages of every shot, it's just that he can make conscious adjustments to those subconscious processes.
The secret is not being aware of all the minor details, it's the ability to pay attention at the correct level of abstraction when there is a problem. I once had a horrible bug that after several rounds of testing seemed vary odd, until I got the ram swapped out on the test box and everything worked just fine. I don't assume RAM is faulty every day, but it's something to consider when no other option seems reasonable.
This is a paradox. People create/produce because they want:
1. to be powerful. Being powerful makes them able to consume more, hence being more happy. People do everything to be more comfortable.
2. to solve peoples problems, make the world better place = to feed their internal ego, prove the world that he/she can be helpful. This is a subliminal instinct of humanbeing having the main goal is being powerful among other species. Being powerful - see point 1.
3. to make money. Having more money makes people able to consume more, without any problems.
Aren't there any producer without a goal gaining power to consume more? I don't know, maybe. Don't we always say that if we want people use our products first we should ask ourselves would I use it? If yes, this means you are a producer, because you made a problem-solving product. But this also means you are a consumer, because you would like to use it. Mark uses facebook. Is he a producer or consumer?
Do you know any producer that don't consume 100 times more than avarage consumers?!
Fuller was born in Massachusetts in 1895 and died
in 1983. He was admitted to Harvard twice, and twice
expelled. He went from job to job until he was broke.
After illness killed his young daughter, he had a
revelation. He determined to make his life “an
experiment to find what a single individual can
contribute to changing the world and benefiting all
humanity.”
Sometimes there's just something you want to exist that doesn't and you need to make it. Look at how many artists and writers toiled at their craft for their entire lives without any reward. I doubt many of them had the goal of becoming more powerful in order to consume more stuff. At least if they did, there were no doubt countless easier ways they could have gone about it.
More money enables you to consume more. But some see the benefits of production and do it on principle. Not everyone is a corrupt Roman senator out of Fellini's Satyricon when they have the financial support. Though many are, granted, the cynical view is not necessarily the correct one.
> 2. to solve peoples problems, make the world better place = to feed their internal ego, prove the world that he/she can be helpful. This is a subliminal instinct of humanbeing having the main goal is being powerful among other species. Being powerful - see point 1.
Speak for yourself. Actually, it seems like you already have spoken for yourself. What I mean to say is "don't pretend to speak for everyone when you are only speaking for yourself". It's mighty presumptuous of you to claim that you know the motivations of everyone in the world who is a producer.
My quote isn't the only example of this in your post, but it's the most egregious.
And surely not 100x more than the average consumer.
You think Linus goes on reading blogs and watching movies all day?
Steve Jobs was quite a miimalist in how he lived. He even debated for months what furniture to buy -- and he lived for a while in an unfurnished apartment.
A huge lot of musicians when asked in interviews say the don't listen to much music besides what they work on.
Sorry but I think you have no idea about Steve's personal life. Or you didn't understand what is being a consumer.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Gates fan, I love Apple, I have 9 apple computers at home.
Before 90s he was a cool geek, famous millionaire guy, consuming too much clothes. He had always trendy fashion look. He bought one of most expensive cars when he was in his 20s. A Porsche then Mercedes. In his dashing days at Apple and NeXT, he weared the most expensive Brioni suits. He had a Plane. A super expensive plane. Do you know why? He said: "What I really need is a plane where I can take my family to Hawaii on vacation, go to the East Coast." He loved to stay in expensive resort hotels. Consumed too much there. Sorry but for me staying in a resort hotel doing nothing but looking to the sea 20 days is one of last things what would I do before I die.
Before 90s he was a cool geek, famous millionaire guy, consuming too much clothes. He had always trendy fashion look. He bought one of most expensive cars when he was in his 20s. A Porsche then Mercedes. In his dashing days at Apple and NeXT, he weared the most expensive Brioni suits. He had a Plane. A super expensive plane. Do you know why? He said: "What I really need is a plane where I can take my family to Hawaii on vacation, go to the East Coast." He loved to stay in expensive resort hotels. Consumed too much there. Sorry but for me staying in a resort hotel doing nothing but looking to the sea 20 days is one of last things what would I do before I die.
What are you aiming for here? Has Steve been happier in this part of his
life? Why has he changed his life style? To get unhappier?
>Steve Jobs was quite a miimalist in how he lived. He even debated for months what furniture to buy -- and he lived for a while in an unfurnished apartment.
Sorry but I think you have no idea about Steve's personal life. Or you didn't understand what is being a consumer.
Sorry, but I have a pretty good idea. I've also read the book. I think it's you that you didn't understand what is being a "consumer" IN THE CONTEXT of this discussion.
It has nothing to do with buying expensive cars, suits, lear jets and stuff. It has nothing to do even with buying lots and lots of them. Even if Jobs had a garage with 1,000 luxury cars and a walk in closet with 10,000 designer suits it wouldn't matter at all in the discussion we're having.
I might have muddled the waters a little with the "no-furniture room" example, but the discussion we're having (and the original article on reddit too), is about producing vs consuming as a life balance. Not about having less. As for my "no furniture" argument, that was not meant to imply that not buying stuff matters, just that consuming was not his goal, whereas building products (and companies) was.
Nobody would argue that Job's life was much more about producing than consuming stuff. He din't spend his hours in luxury car shows, nor in fashion boutiques, he spend them thinking about business and products. And I'd say he even did so while staying in "expensive resort hotels". The main criterion is if the items consumed are the GOAL of your life or just DECORATION. To put it in other words, Jobs was no Paris Hilton, nor "Hoarders" material.
I agree with this 110%. Starting the day out with productive work was a key element for me moving from a chronic procrastinator to a productive individual.
I took it one step further though. I knew how weak I was from years of habitual web surfing, so I forced a productive routine on myself by using the open-source app "SelfControl" to actually restrict me from accessing sites I knew were a time sink.
I also knew that I was unlikely to actually start the app at the beginning of the day, so I scripted it in my calendar to start the app an hour before I get up, that way I have no choice but to work. At the end of my workday, the app quits and I can then surf to my heart's desire.
I'm curious: why exactly is being a "consumer" such a bad thing? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but I'm having trouble coming up with an explanation, and it seems like everyone is simply assuming that consumption is a bad thing.
Since consumers need producers and producers need consumers, you really can't argue that either one is inherently bad.
However, I would argue that our intent should be biased toward producing, since producing helps us grow. Consuming in this context has connotations of passivity, and while rest is important, too much rest will make us weak. Also, when you are consuming you can be mindless. When you are producing, you stretch your mind. Not only do you have to think about how to meet your goal, you have to think about what you are producing in context of value and other people. It's mind-expanding.
Also, it is natural for us to want to grow, so if we spend most of our time in passive consumption it will negatively affect our mood and sense of well-being in the world.
Good points. I think a lot of it depends on the definition of "consumption." Most people use it pejoratively to mean "mindless consumption," but personally I don't think I engage in that much "mindless consumption." Sure, I surf reddit and hn, but most of my time online is spent either having conversations like this one, laughing at funny stuff (surely entertainment and comedy can't be all bad), or actively educating myself (e.g. reading programming articles, current events). Actually, I think even "mindlessness" can have benefits: everyone knows the value of relaxation or even meditation.
Doesn't matter whether it's mindless or not. Consumption is consumption. Educating yourself by reading programming articles could be considered an investment, which is the distinction you want to make here, but if it's not an investment towards future production, then it's still just consumption and not much different from playing Farmville.
I still don't agree. I don't think knowledge for the sake of knowledge is such a bad thing. I feel happier when I learn things, even if the things are unlikely to help me be productive in any measurable capacity. I will go on Wikipedia binges on bizarre topics like fighter aircraft or quantum mechanics, and it makes me happy even though I certainly don't retain any real expertise of the subjects. I guess that makes it "entertainment" more than anything, but I think that's fine.
No one said consumption is "bad". All that's said is that consumption is dependent on "production", and "production" gets its value from "consumption" (even the producer ends up being the only consumer).
That wonderful book you read? It wasn't created by someone reading; it was created by someone writing. If everyone read Wikipedia and no one wrote Wikipedia, there wouldn't be anything to read.
I don't think he's implying that consumption is a bad thing inherently. I think an underlying assumption of the article is that the author has greater aspirations which he feels he is not be pursuing effectively.
It's about focus and goals which can only be achieved by concerted effort over a long period.
I don't think it's a bad thing, but the things that are easy to consume take time and don't provide much benefit. Nobody would say that spending a couple of hours reading a novel is a waste of time, but reading HN is probably not as good a use of time. (The difference, in my mind, is that reading edited long-form literature is going to help you write better, while reading a bunch of casual comments about the latest Internet Outrage isn't.)
Actually, pg says just this in his essay How to Do What You Love: "Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive."
I don't read books to "feel productive", I read them to take my mind somewhere else for a while. I don't get the whole "feeling productive" thing; if I'm being productive, I'm too focused on producing to feel anything.
I think the problem is consuming through addiction, gamification, procrastination, etc. If I spend a day or evening in the garden creating something, designing a new side project or similar, I never find myself regretting that expense of time later. But after any night of trawling crappy news sites, or flicking channels, I head to bed defeated and annoyed at myself for not being able to overcome those things.
For me, It isn't so much about being a consumer as it is resigning myself to a mentality of not putting work and important things first. I'll read one article on HN, then another, then check techcrunch, then mashable, some blogs, and before I know it I've wasted two hours and haven't accomplished anything productive.
Instead of "producer" and "consumer" I could have said "force of nature" and "hopeless stimulation junkie".
Whether or not you make anything of value to exchange with other people is not really important. How much you're consuming is also pretty irrelevant. The important thing is that your brain is in "make things happen" mode, not "stimulate me" mode.
I wasn't writing about economics, I wrote about you getting what you really want out of today and not having your attention and focus stolen.
This motivation trick used to work for me, it doesn't any more for some reason. I expressed it as "Action precedes motivation", since it's a recognition that once you have started working it's easy to keep going. I know some people who intentionally leave their source tree in a broken state before leaving for the day so that they have something simple to work on the next morning to start the action-ball rolling. (Or using the OP's language, make the first producing action easy to achieve.) Unfortunately it's not a guaranteed trick, it was nice while it lasted.
Well I'd like to hear more about how it has failed for you, then! I mean, this sounds like an interesting proposition to approach in its own right.
I find there's a certain paradox in the fact that we're probably all here on Hacker News and Reddit during our workdays, so we're mostly slacking. The question of why we slack and how to slack less (or whether we should slack less) is deep, relevant, immediate, and not covered really by this advice.
The first problem with distraction I think we could call the Train Problem -- unrelated to the trolley problem in ethics. This is the problem that you need a higher-order reflective process to 'switch tracks', so that your brain is like a runaway train on the track of distraction even though you literally have every opportunity to un-distract yourself. Flipping a switch and jumping on a track to the right destination just requires a little bit of oomph to do it, and the only reason why Wikipedia and webcomics and news sites are so distracting is because we forget to have this moment of "oomph" to pursue something better.
I've started to think of it this way: that the basic unit of will is Resolve. And resolve is as simple as choosing a future that you have somehow committed to moving forward. It's the moment that you say "I am getting married to her" but before you have set the date, or decided where, or proposed, or anything of that sort. You switch mental contexts to take something new for granted. In the philosophical sense, I suppose, we would say that you choose to believe something new. But I prefer to think of it as a database-driven programmer: we're talking about your brain querying itself, independent of the world it models. A resolve occurs when you make your brain return new, different results.
There's a subtler aspect which philosopher John Searle calls "the continuous causal gap" -- the sense in which you can resolve to think of yourself as a French-learner, but there is another resolve needed to take your first lesson, and then more resolve is needed to continue the lessons, and then you have to resolve to visit France and immerse yourself, and so on. It's a continuous gap of times when you need to "shift tracks" when you could have chosen not to shift them. The initial resolve only functions to guide the future ones -- "I am the sort of person who is learning French" just makes it easier to say, "what should I do today? Go to my French lesson." So there are mini-resolves every day which we've got to also consider.
But while this gives a useful view of the problem, it doesn't answer it. What went wrong, in your experience, with the trick of "starting off pointed in the right direction"? What did you need in order to "break free" of distractions -- what sort of system is conducive to reminding us to have these higher-order reflective processes where we can say, "yeah, I should really switch tracks, right now, at this instant"?
(I'll give you an example of something which makes it much harder: tabbed browsing. Closing a tab to signify the end of one distraction brings up immediately another distraction which I said I "would get to." Another thing which makes distractions on Hacker News more tempting is the knowledge that they will expire, so that if I do not read it now, I might never read it.)
I know some people who intentionally leave their source tree in a broken state...
This sounds like a slightly forced version of Hemingway's method:
"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."
(i.e. stop for the day when you know exactly what your next step is, not when you're 'finished' and definitely not when you're stuck)
I wonder how many people like myself read this and thought "hey, good point, I already knew it but this reaffirms that I am wasting valuable time that I should be using to seize the day" and then went looking for something else on hacker news to fill the void. Disclaimer: I am on my lunch break.
While I agree with the premise that being a mindless consumer is probably not a good thing, I strongly believe that consuming is just as important as producing. Exposing one's self to as many different ideas as possible is incredibly important to being able to produce high quality work. If we go with the definition that a person is the aggregate of their experiences, then most of these experiences are things we consume from the external world and other people. Why not try and maximize these experiences?
I personally try and give myself at least an hour a day for just consuming whatever content I'm in the mood for. More times than not, I find use for this information sometime in my life. I think the hardest part is curating this content so it will be the most useful, which I think this post is getting at. Maybe the author doesn't find a benefit to reading their Twitter/Facebook stream which is fine, but this is not a producer vs. consumer problem, it's a signal to noise problem.
The majority of experiences may be consumption, but I would argue the more significant experiences are driven by production. I would also argue curation is in many ways more a facet of production than of consumption.
Also, I don't think it's so much about producer versus consumer (despite the title), but instead starting the day with easy productivity, to get into a mindset of getting things done. Consuming content is important, and can be very beneficial when curated well, but it's much easier to start consuming things than to start producing.
So if you consume a lot of web content in a day u sometimes get into a funk which is seriously hard to break out of. Ie you dont really want to sleep even.. Just keep consumng... Its very weird ...Has anyone else had this problem?
Does anyone know why this happens and ggod ways to stop it from happening.
I think whether it's addiction of media, drugs, or even Facebook, most people are aware of what they're doing. This notion that we're unaware of our addictions, that "denial is the first mistake" is all bullshit. People are particularly rational (in their own respective idea of what rational is) when it comes to addictions. It's just a cost benefit analysis. The cost is time and the opportunity cost of what we could be doing versus the benefit of being connected, consuming information (even social), or the high. How each of us weighs those options is a deeply subjective thing, but to say that we're not aware or that "we have a choice" to be producers, with that pedantic tone, is just wrong.
I personally find that even just 5 minute exercise in the morning before I take a shower gets me in the right mood.
Before I eat my breakfast or take a shower, I'll do a couple of pressups until I can't any more (usually about 40) and then some sit-ups(30 crunches and 30 normal ones). I'll then do so really light stretching (no idea what the names are: fetus position to stretching my back as I try to look at the ceiling etc...)
I'm currently living in Russia right now and trying to learn the language so my whole breakfast/exercise/shower I've got some Russian audio book playing in the background as well.
Probably pushing the comparison a bit, but The Matrix is here. Only, we are not a source of direct energy but glazed eyeballs glued to television; to sticky content sites, checking news sources and aggregators to see if there's anything new in the last five minutes; succumbing to the urge to find the latest thing for Twitter or HN or Reddit to gain artificial scores; sitting through CoD intermission for the next round rather than quitting; getting worked up as the mainstream papers inflate another trivial issue to incite response.
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"
This is a difficult balance to master: you undoubtedly need to read a lot... both deeply and broadly. But there is such a thing as reading too much. It can curb creativity and become a goal in and of itself. I have not solved this problem... :)
Well, you've got a goal, right? So match everything you read with your research and see if it can help. A lot of times, it will.
Reading digital copies has a major advantage in that you can search by keyword and only read the stuff that is pertinent to your research/goal. The rest is useless and you don't even have to skim through it...
Reading academic literature takes a certain amount of effort. In a sense you are producing an analysis of that journal article (perhaps for other people's consumption if you're presenting at a journal club; for your own otherwise).
Quick observation: With research science, there is an end goal; something you would like to achieve with your reading outside of burning time and general malaise.
This is still a great read. But I have to admit I was more excited when I thought from the title that a super interesting article on threading had made its way to Reddit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbXgsMxOPtI A quick google revealed this which seems to be the video in question (or relevant to "saying no to science" by invoking God, at least.)
I find if I do things in the reverse order (come home from work, plop down and start checking Twitter/reddit) then it quickly becomes dinner time and my brain has "shut down" for the day. It's easy to lull myself into thinking "Well Matt, today is almost over so no sense in starting something, just work on $FOO tomorrow".
Another trick that I've found that is highly effective for me is to "link" a producing behavior to a consuming one. I'm a bit of a TV addict so I made a deal with myself - I can watch as much TV as I want, as long as I'm doing it on the treadmill. Maybe you really enjoy listening to podcasts or sports talk radio, allow yourself to consume but only while you are doing chores or running errands. Some would argue that this is not a good way to build habits (in the sense that you are doing a behavior for the wrong motivations - in my case I am exercising in order to watch TV not to become healthier) but its been working for me so far.