Besides startups, it's not enough to find the most important thing you should do. You should also make yourself do it, often at the expense of ignoring everything else. I'm surprised how often I'm able to intellectually tell what the most important thing is and still not bring myself do it. I wish the article offered tips on how to do that.
A big problem I have with time is that it seems you need to have some runway of time for your subconscious to mull over things. And you can't force this process. Not only do you get an answer when you least expect it, which you can't predict, but it also seems that forcing yourself to come up with an answer yields a bad one. It's as if you should be forcing yourself to not try hard for an answer.
How do you deal with that?
Could you get better at this type of ambient thinking? How? Are there exercises for improving, or at least directing, subconscious thought?
I suspect the place to look isn't the hard sciences but the arts.
For hard problems, you can take advantage of (and should embrace) the mind's wild variability by consciously outlining what you know about the problem until you hit a pause in the stream of consciousness, letting your subconscious work it over for a while as you put your conscious mind into a different context, and returning to it every so often to see if you've realized anything new. For me this is sometimes highly productive. And it's not always something glaringly apparent that will be presented to you. Often something up the hierarchy has changed but your conscious representation is left with a bunch of dangling pointers. So it's good to revisit the roots of the problem and reconstruct the problem from there outwards.
A good way to get better at it is to deliberately engage in this active context switching. You will pick up on what sorts of frequencies and how far away from the original problem you should context switch as you get more experience with doing this as deliberately as possible.
Didn't show up as tiny for me, but it's an absolutely horrible font for long texts: a) Missing serifs - which by itself is not critical, but makes it significantly worse when combined with b) Paper-thin weight, which is hard to read, and worsens on computer displays because antialiasing (regardless of subpixel or not) artifacts become much more visible and hence have more impact.
"Designer" most likely worked on his shiny Retina Macbook and forgot to take lower ppi displays into account. Which (unfortunately) are still the majority, and will continue to for quite some time.
I have a tool for moments like this. It takes the central article on a page and displays only it in a nicely formatted in-window pop-up. I use Firefox Reader, though Evernote's Clearly and Readability would both suffice. Pocket would work too.
As much as I love HN, the UI is clearly geared towards a list of links, not text such as lengthy comments – these are harder to read. Granted, not unreadable and with proper paragraphs done by the author good enough, but not quite optimal as well IMO.
Yep, it's almost as annoying as using "Apple adjectives" (flowery prose like wonderful, pleasure, beauty, love, etc... applied towards any tech).
Hacker hasn't really meant anything for decades. I remember the old guys getting mad when "hacker" became a boogieman for the news, but the recent round seemed to start when some dude wrote a book that used the cachet of "hacking" to sell impressionable youths on the idea of working for him in a tech-adjacent position. By appealing to someone's desires and by giving your thing a unique je ne sais quoi (no matter how flimsy it really is) you can influence them into your personal brand of chasing their desires.
Time and again, a term associated with a good and rare quality gets picked up by the business world, and then the marketing machine, in the process of using that term to sell everything and the kitchen sink, turns it into something annoying and worthless.
A big problem I have with time is that it seems you need to have some runway of time for your subconscious to mull over things. And you can't force this process. Not only do you get an answer when you least expect it, which you can't predict, but it also seems that forcing yourself to come up with an answer yields a bad one. It's as if you should be forcing yourself to not try hard for an answer.
How do you deal with that?
Could you get better at this type of ambient thinking? How? Are there exercises for improving, or at least directing, subconscious thought?
I suspect the place to look isn't the hard sciences but the arts.