I think this is cool and in my opinion has nothing to do with the workaholic culture.
I never did a deliberate 120 week, but I can attest that when I constantly do >12 hour days for a limited(!!) period my focus was much better. While there may be a cognitive decline because of the hours I believe there is a positive counterbalance when you do not need to worry about food, emails, laundry or any mundane tasks and basically you never unload the problem from your head. For certain type of coding tasks that gives much more than what is removed because of the tiredness.
This is something like an ironman. You can do it a few times, it puts you into a zen state, but obviously you don't run an ironman every day or every week of your life.
Your tagline is quite a paradox. Making deliberate practice simple is just the opposite what is deliberate practice. Which is difficult and hard.
My issue is that this is a generic tool. I also think you get the feedback theory wrong. Paying $7 for measuring myself againt some arbitrary concentration level is a joke. And also that function times out for me.
But the main question, why does this help me to do deliberate practice? I don't see any feature you have that would help:
- a list to remember for myself what areas to practice, schedule that and did I do that? but that is nothing more than a todo list
- I think the feedback concept is wrong. I understand you want to capture that somehow, but eg. for a tennis player or musician, in a session there are feedback every second, what you observe an correct in the minute. It's not a 1-5 scale for the whole session and not something you measure this way.
- go to calnewport.com , he has some good stuff on this
In my opinion the biggest problem with deliberate practice is to find out what to practice and with what framework. A gut feeling, but from a business perspective I don't see a business here. How many ppl did you interview?
I know the feeling, but I think your brain fools you. You drank the kool aid of changing the world song.
Anyway I recommend two ways to go. First, list 50 companies and/or research areas in the world who you think does really world changing stuff.
Second, don't measure yourself just by the work you produce. You want challenges, then maybe try an extremely healthy lifestyle or extreme self discipline.
Third, you said you want to cure cancer. Well, if that's the case then fully understand what your role could be in that as a sw engineer. Then go for it and forget any other world changing ideas.
Not sure which part you mean, but the important bit for this thread is that even basic Excel formulas are black magic to non-techies, and that basic hacking skills can drive real business value. There are things you can do rather trivially, such as "Add 3 calendar months to this date, and if it's later than this other cell, color the cell red," which would be a) extremely helpful, and b) otherwise a task they'd have to hire an intern to calculate each week, for many companies in the $1-20 million a year range.
And this is just Excel formulas, let alone the ability to write some VBA that does calculations and draws a chart, or a script with a regex that cleans data files, or a basic app for data entry...
If it was the ISO certification you were interested in, there are many certifications related to manufacturing, food & drug, etc. These certify that your company meets various standards, regulations, quality procedures, documentation policies, tolerance assurances, etc. These can result in a ton of additional business, since many customers desire or require them, and losing them is also a big deal. The certifiers audit companies regularly, and having some pretty spreadsheets that show how you are continuously improving and ensuring your adherence to the regs can be very valuable!
