4 ms·
When I read yesterday's post about the sprint to launch at SXSW, I thought 3 things: 1. Great determination, great work ethic, great job. 2. It doesn't hav
by edw519 16y ago
When I read yesterday's post about the sprint to launch at SXSW, I thought 3 things:
1. Great determination, great work ethic, great job.
2. It doesn't have to be this way.
3. It shouldn't be this way.
Thanks, Daniel, for saying what I was thinking, far better than I could have.
I feel fortunate that my DNA is blessed with some sort of internal "governor". I don't know where it came from, but I've always had it. Here's how it works: It stays out of the way when I am enthusiastic about something, allowing me work ridiculous hours and pursue almost anything that looks promising, whether it makes sense or not. But when I reach a certain point, it turns me off, completely. I don't seem to have conscious judgement of what that point is or when I reach it, but when it happens, I know.
A few examples:
- I have worked many times without sleep, preparing for a launch. Sometimes, I know my judgement is failing and continuing would cause more problems in the long run. So I stopped and apologize to everyone. I went to sleep and informed everyone that the project would resume at x. I'm not really sure exactly what happened, but I know I had little control over the governor.
- I had 2,500 invoices spread across the carpet, looking for a clue about a bug. After 8 hours, everything was fuzzy. So I just gathered up the invoices, filed them away, and went to sleep. Three days later a lightbulb went off, I spread out 100 of the invoices, and found the problem in 15 minutes. I know that if I had continued that night, I never would have found the problem.
- I worked 90 hours per week for 2 months for a big deployment. Without telling me, my co-founder spent all of our reserves travelling to a customer site to oversee the install. He emailed me every 20 minutes with a problem. Between being pissed off at him and exhausted from working on the wrong things, I realized the project was going nowhere and would never succeed. So I just stopped working completely. I went to bed and didn't answer email for 4 days. I'm not proud of this, just one more story about my internal governor.
I'm a little frustrated that I don't have much control over my governor, but also a little relieved that it does it's thing. After all, I've never really been burnt out, and I'm still going strong. Thank you, governor.
- dabent 16y agoI've encountered something similar to your "invoices" situation many times. I'm actually blocked on something now, but I know my mind is hard at work to get things straight in some background process. Once my block is cleared, I know I'll just dive in and get things done in the same amount of time it would have originally taken, only with better results. I know that, because that's how it's worked for me so many times before. Every once in a while I forget what I was working on, but it's usually in favor of a better project or solution. Fortunately, my blocks are usually short and resolved by letting my background processes chew on a problem during a night of sleep. I think the real trick is to actually attack problems that cause me to block. If I stick with simple things I can process in real time, I'm not thinking hard enough. Of course, this sort of discussion here wouldn't be complete without a reference to good and bad procrastination: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
- robeastham 16y agoThe Pragmatic Bookshelf has a fantastic book that goes into some detail about how your brain might be working in these situations. Often sleeping on a problem and letting your subconscious do some of the work is the best policy. Check the book out here: http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-lear...
- vyrotek 16y agoI had a logic teacher in college who would force us to exercise this concept. He would have us look at the very last problem on an exam on test days and make us just stare at it (no working on it allowed) for 5 minutes. Then we had to start the test from the beginning. The theory being that your subconscious is working out the problem and you'll have a better chance of figuring it out. I felt like it really did work.
- khafra 16y agoSeems like he should've had half the class do the staring, the other half take the test normally, and give as many points as appropriate. One could get a lot of data after doing that for several classes.
- vyrotek 16y agoI'm sure he had done that at some point. He also liked to show off his many other amazing 'mind hacks' such as memorizing everyone's name within the first few minutes of the first day of class. There were almost 100 students in his class and after he said he was done 'doing his thing' he would ask the students to change seats and never sit in the same seat twice for the first week to test him.