4 ms·

PG and others, instead of using 2 computers, you might want to try what works for me. I used RescueTime for a few months before realizing I was asking the wron

by prakash 18y ago

PG and others, instead of using 2 computers, you might want to try what works for me. I used RescueTime for a few months before realizing I was asking the wrong question i.e. (Where & how long do I spend my online time?). The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted. Once you start browsing, while you are supposed to be working, you go into this downward spiral, and before you know it, it's the end of the day, and you have not done much. So, a better solution for me, is to enable this gem of a software called Freedom (http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/ http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/) that disables all wireless & ethernet networking on my computer for up to three hours at a time, and I can go about doing my work for those hours. At the end of it browse a bit, and enable Freedom again.

nostrademons 18y ago
"The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted." I've tried this, and it's generally a better approach, but then I run into a new question: what do I want to complete today? There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work. For example, I finished one feature yesterday, compared to a dozen commits on Wednesday (and an average of about 2-3 features/day). But it was a feature that's been bugging me for a couple weeks so far, while Wednesday's work was a couple misc features, some added unit tests, updating to a new version of JQuery UI, and a lot of refactoring. When I was working on yesterday's feature, it was very much a "Shit, I haven't done anything today" - but that was because it was a hard feature to implement that required a lot of thought into how it integrated with the rest of the system. While on Wednesday, if I'd stopped after 2 svn commits, I would've done a grand total of 8 lines of work. Also, I've found that my attitude towards more work changes significantly after finishing a new feature. Before check-in, I was like "Damnit, I can't wait for this to be over, I wonder what's on news.YC", while afterwards, I was like "Hmm, I wonder what else I can add." (I didn't add anything because it was 11:30 PM, but I probably could've worked in a few small bugfixes.)
- prakash 18y ago
  "There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work." I agree. But, isn't this an independent question? For such things an individual's flavor of "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity" should help. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html Also, look at this gem posted by edw519, :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 What do you think?

by prakash 18y ago

nostrademons 18y ago

"The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted." I've tried this, and it's generally a better approach, but then I run into a new question: what do I want to complete today? There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work. For example, I finished one feature yesterday, compared to a dozen commits on Wednesday (and an average of about 2-3 features/day). But it was a feature that's been bugging me for a couple weeks so far, while Wednesday's work was a couple misc features, some added unit tests, updating to a new version of JQuery UI, and a lot of refactoring. When I was working on yesterday's feature, it was very much a "Shit, I haven't done anything today" - but that was because it was a hard feature to implement that required a lot of thought into how it integrated with the rest of the system. While on Wednesday, if I'd stopped after 2 svn commits, I would've done a grand total of 8 lines of work. Also, I've found that my attitude towards more work changes significantly after finishing a new feature. Before check-in, I was like "Damnit, I can't wait for this to be over, I wonder what's on news.YC", while afterwards, I was like "Hmm, I wonder what else I can add." (I didn't add anything because it was 11:30 PM, but I probably could've worked in a few small bugfixes.)

prakash 18y ago
"There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work." I agree. But, isn't this an independent question? For such things an individual's flavor of "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity" should help. http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html Also, look at this gem posted by edw519, :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275 What do you think?