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While it's probably impractical to choose your spot for the night based on your cat's, I think there's actually something we can learn from here: "Cats will sl

While it's probably impractical to choose your spot for the night based on your cat's, I think there's actually something we can learn from here: "Cats will sleep in a variety of different locations, each likely the combination of factors such as mood, warmth, light and coziness." [emphasis mine] And I think we – humans – should also follow our mood more often in our everyday lives – even things like sprint planning or building our startups. I feel there's something hidden in the feeling of how you feel (your mood). For example, you look at these 5 tasks in your backlog and choose what you want to work on based on your mood/excitement/feeling. Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? And even if that's not the case, you'll just feel better doing a task that you feel excitement for rather than the one you don't feel like doing right now. Advatages? 1) you just feel better (which I don't have to explain why that is good for you) and 2) you probably finish the task quicker and with a better quality

ganzuul 5y ago
It would be weird if there was no intelligence to e.g. how the chemical hijack of love relates to evolution. With how strong it is, and how unforgiving natural selection is, there must be a long-range correlation outside immediate perception similar to how flocks of animals know when it is time to migrate. We definitely keep a lot of what we actually know about the environment out from our daily driver philosophy.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  We need to think carefully before invoking natural selection too strongly. The fact that it has much less emphasis on activities taken on after we stop procreation is a huge blindspot for one thing. Someone who invents the cure for cancer but has no children is considered a failure by natural selection. Someone who never contributes anything to society but has 15 kids is conversely considered a huge success.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    Well in terms of evolution there needs to be a set of instructions that gets passed on. If those instructions can mutate, we have evolution. Perhaps it isn't genetic code that gets passed on, but e.g. cultural inventions. That said, these biological circuits that we are considering get replicated in whatever environment that they exist in. Love may lead to other things than biological reproduction. Our lore regarding the human, personal experience of love and what to do with it also mutates and evolves. A poem then, may take the place of the greatest invention.
  - brongondwana 5y ago
    If they invent a cure and it's forgotten by future generations, then it is a failure. If their cure is remembered and passed on, then their memetic output is not lost, so they contributed - just not genetically. Sure genetic material can survive where culture and memory is lost, and evolves more slowly, but cultural contributions do shape the future a lot as well.
  - kortex 5y ago
    Not at the macro level. Natural selection isn't just about fitness of an individual. For example, altruism can be selected for, despite resulting in the sacrifice of the individual. It increases the fitness of their kin by globally reducing risk. If you extend "kinship" to "all of humanity", then having a pool on non-reproducing scientists still increases the species' fitness. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLX_r_WPrIw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLX_r_WPrIw
bdefore 5y ago
Ideally management is not dogmatic about 'take from the top' for several reasons, but I like your suggestion to account for mood as well. There are definitely tasks that are mood-swingers one way or the other. Choose work based on where you want your mood to go (or can responsibly mood-sustain, if the mood-delta is negative). Upon reflection, I believe I've been implicitly doing this on tasks for side projects. Whether its feasible on teams may vary.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  I think valued employees are generally allowed to do this. I am not even good but most places have explicitly allowed/encouraged such a thing.
- raunometsa 5y ago
  >> Upon reflection, I believe I've been implicitly doing this on tasks for side projects. Yes, me too. I wrote about it here: https://remotehunt.com/blog/startup-art https://remotehunt.com/blog/startup-art "The way I work on my side-project is very different from the way I work as a developer at a startup. But what's the difference?" TL;DR a) startup: I work on what I have to b) side project: "I work on what excites me the most at this moment."
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    Hey, Rauno! I’ve been following your projects for a while and noticed that your Twitter profile links all 404. That’s gotta be hurting your conversions on your sales pages! Did you change Twitter handle or is the account gone?
Godel_unicode 5y ago
Based on the fact that the only constant in tech is accumulation of debt, across personal projects/FOSS/paid development, I feel confident in saying that nobody will ever feel like working on some tasks. Those tasks are important and need to be done.
- metadaemon 5y ago
  I think a lot of the technical debt I’ve acquired in the past is due to having to rapidly apply business logic to existing systems for customers. This is typically not the type of work that I feel excited about. I do, to some extent, feel excitement about reducing technical debt. I’d assume that other engineers appreciate taking the time to “clean” outside of writing net new features. I could be totally off base, but I do think it would be interesting to see an environment that was purely mood driven development.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    I think you have a solid incentive structure there so PMDD (Purely Mood Driven Development) is only a matter of implementation. Sort of like the job isn't done until you are putting away your tools.
  - raunometsa 5y ago
    I love your term "mood driven development" (or MDD for short?). I know Gumroad is doing this to at least some extent: "At the end of the day there's a lot of emotion that goes into Gumroad, that's not dissimilar from an art project. We sometimes pick what's fun and feels good to work on! We love listening to creators! We don't do tons of data analysis to decide what's worth working on." – @shl, founder I wrote about it more on my post "Startups should be more like art projects" (link somewhere in the comments already, won't add it here again not to spam)
    - layer8 5y ago
      > mood driven development (or MDD for short) Somehow I don’t think this will be a successful marketing term for that methodology. Or maybe we’ll end up getting Mood Master certifications, daily mood-ups, mood retrospectives, and mood boards where we move tasks around. ;)
2ndbigbang 5y ago
This is similar to some of the ideas in David Kadavy's "Mind Management, Not Time Management". https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Management-Not-Time-Productivity-ebook/dp/B08DQGLPSN https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Management-Not-Time-Productivity...
dspillett 5y ago
> Cats will sleep in a variety of different locations, each likely the combination of factors such as mood, warmth, light and coziness." [emphasis mine] They miss out a key component for some cats: territory monitoring. My boss seemingly often picks places where she can see a lot by just looking up & around, and can hear what is going on around the flat, when taking a light nap. For a deeper sleep coziness seems to be a higher priority.
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  This seems to matter to both of mine, but in different ways - they’re siblings. The male always sleeps in the same spot, from which he can see his food, the living room, and the door. The female sleeps next to me in bed. Like clockwork - I go to bed, she follows, and settles down neatly between the wall and me, and doesn’t move until I get up with dawn. I’m the territory, in the latter case, I think. It isn’t warmth - I sleep with the window open, and when I’m not in bed she sleeps in front of the fire, which is warm all night.
_rpxe 5y ago
What you're describing is also known as staying in your comfort zone, which can be devastating. You should be mindful of your feelings and examine their origins, yes. But I wouldn't recommend being driven by them.
- xwdv 5y ago
  There is nothing wrong with a comfort zone, life is too short really to spend long periods of time in brutal discomfort. Some people ruin their lives this way to the point where it will be impossible to ever be comfortable again before they die.
  - _rpxe 5y ago
    That's really bad advice for people who are naturally very fragile, have social anxiety or can't deal with confrontation. Unless they start dealing with the feeling of discomfort, they will either suffer their entire life or just reinforce bad habits like avoidance, procrastination, delusion and drug addictions. Lots of people ruin their lives like that.
    - xwdv 5y ago
      Those people are not in a comfort zone, their entire life is discomfort, they just don’t know anything else. They need to move into the comfort zone or their lives will always be ruined.
    - drjasonharrison 5y ago
      I feel that you are possibly jumping to conclusions as to what constitutes a "good life" versus a "ruined life". If people who have "small" comfort zones need support to move outside of them. Throwing categories such as avoidance, procrastination, delusion, and drug addiction into the same group leads me to believe that you might not understand what these supports look like.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  That was how I used to believe. What I didn't understand at the time is that there is a difference between "being comfortable" and "being complacent" - and that in order to achieve things or grow yourself, you don't necessarily have to be in a position of discomfort. The self-mortification theory ("push it to the limit, leave your comfort zone") in its extreme, as propagated by growth evangelists (and as it originally came from the field of high-performance sports) is anti-life and wrong. People are not bonsai trees - and bonsai trees are unnatural freaks of nature. We don't have to contort ourselves to live up to an externally imposed ideal. We can - firmly grounded - become greater than these ideals, simply by growing steadily - at our own speed, and with our own, "natural", methods - even within the speeds at which we feel comfortable. So: DO listen to your gut feelings. Examine them. And listen to them.
eptcyka 5y ago
Do be careful as a 100% investment in such a strategy will destroy your will power. Will power is a muscle that needs to be exercised by doing things you don't feel like doing.
bob1029 5y ago
> Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? I very strongly believe there is a bigger unconscious component to productivity than there is a conscious one. Some mornings I wake up and I want to jump into the super nasty bucket of customer support tickets. "What the hell is still broken!? I am gonna fix that shit". On others, I will find customer support items antagonistic in every way, but would really like to spend time on a bunch of deep tech debt that has been piling up. And then there's the mornings where I wake up and I'd rather just play overwatch or <insert latest AAA title> all day. And you know what? At this point, I just fucking let it happen. I have found, over the course of about a decade, that if I let my monkey brain indulge periodically, the disciplined mind has a much better chance taking control the next time around. Some days I find myself very productively flip-flopping between gaming and work. I've watched some of my peers take this too far in the wrong way, but for whatever reason I can keep it on rails.
taneq 5y ago
> Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? I have never, not ever, not once, felt excitement about doing taxes, or about reviewing a functional description, or any of the other necessary evils of my job. Eventually you just gotta, though. If you only ever had to do things that were fun, it wouldn’t be called work.

ganzuul 5y ago

It would be weird if there was no intelligence to e.g. how the chemical hijack of love relates to evolution. With how strong it is, and how unforgiving natural selection is, there must be a long-range correlation outside immediate perception similar to how flocks of animals know when it is time to migrate. We definitely keep a lot of what we actually know about the environment out from our daily driver philosophy.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
We need to think carefully before invoking natural selection too strongly. The fact that it has much less emphasis on activities taken on after we stop procreation is a huge blindspot for one thing. Someone who invents the cure for cancer but has no children is considered a failure by natural selection. Someone who never contributes anything to society but has 15 kids is conversely considered a huge success.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Well in terms of evolution there needs to be a set of instructions that gets passed on. If those instructions can mutate, we have evolution. Perhaps it isn't genetic code that gets passed on, but e.g. cultural inventions. That said, these biological circuits that we are considering get replicated in whatever environment that they exist in. Love may lead to other things than biological reproduction. Our lore regarding the human, personal experience of love and what to do with it also mutates and evolves. A poem then, may take the place of the greatest invention.
- brongondwana 5y ago
  If they invent a cure and it's forgotten by future generations, then it is a failure. If their cure is remembered and passed on, then their memetic output is not lost, so they contributed - just not genetically. Sure genetic material can survive where culture and memory is lost, and evolves more slowly, but cultural contributions do shape the future a lot as well.
- kortex 5y ago
  Not at the macro level. Natural selection isn't just about fitness of an individual. For example, altruism can be selected for, despite resulting in the sacrifice of the individual. It increases the fitness of their kin by globally reducing risk. If you extend "kinship" to "all of humanity", then having a pool on non-reproducing scientists still increases the species' fitness. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLX_r_WPrIw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLX_r_WPrIw

bdefore 5y ago

Ideally management is not dogmatic about 'take from the top' for several reasons, but I like your suggestion to account for mood as well. There are definitely tasks that are mood-swingers one way or the other. Choose work based on where you want your mood to go (or can responsibly mood-sustain, if the mood-delta is negative). Upon reflection, I believe I've been implicitly doing this on tasks for side projects. Whether its feasible on teams may vary.

beebeepka 5y ago
I think valued employees are generally allowed to do this. I am not even good but most places have explicitly allowed/encouraged such a thing.
raunometsa 5y ago
>> Upon reflection, I believe I've been implicitly doing this on tasks for side projects. Yes, me too. I wrote about it here: https://remotehunt.com/blog/startup-art https://remotehunt.com/blog/startup-art "The way I work on my side-project is very different from the way I work as a developer at a startup. But what's the difference?" TL;DR a) startup: I work on what I have to b) side project: "I work on what excites me the most at this moment."
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  Hey, Rauno! I’ve been following your projects for a while and noticed that your Twitter profile links all 404. That’s gotta be hurting your conversions on your sales pages! Did you change Twitter handle or is the account gone?

Godel_unicode 5y ago

Based on the fact that the only constant in tech is accumulation of debt, across personal projects/FOSS/paid development, I feel confident in saying that nobody will ever feel like working on some tasks. Those tasks are important and need to be done.

metadaemon 5y ago
I think a lot of the technical debt I’ve acquired in the past is due to having to rapidly apply business logic to existing systems for customers. This is typically not the type of work that I feel excited about. I do, to some extent, feel excitement about reducing technical debt. I’d assume that other engineers appreciate taking the time to “clean” outside of writing net new features. I could be totally off base, but I do think it would be interesting to see an environment that was purely mood driven development.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  I think you have a solid incentive structure there so PMDD (Purely Mood Driven Development) is only a matter of implementation. Sort of like the job isn't done until you are putting away your tools.
- raunometsa 5y ago
  I love your term "mood driven development" (or MDD for short?). I know Gumroad is doing this to at least some extent: "At the end of the day there's a lot of emotion that goes into Gumroad, that's not dissimilar from an art project. We sometimes pick what's fun and feels good to work on! We love listening to creators! We don't do tons of data analysis to decide what's worth working on." – @shl, founder I wrote about it more on my post "Startups should be more like art projects" (link somewhere in the comments already, won't add it here again not to spam)
  - layer8 5y ago
    > mood driven development (or MDD for short) Somehow I don’t think this will be a successful marketing term for that methodology. Or maybe we’ll end up getting Mood Master certifications, daily mood-ups, mood retrospectives, and mood boards where we move tasks around. ;)

2ndbigbang 5y ago

This is similar to some of the ideas in David Kadavy's "Mind Management, Not Time Management". https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Management-Not-Time-Productivity-ebook/dp/B08DQGLPSN https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Management-Not-Time-Productivity...

dspillett 5y ago

> Cats will sleep in a variety of different locations, each likely the combination of factors such as mood, warmth, light and coziness." [emphasis mine] They miss out a key component for some cats: territory monitoring. My boss seemingly often picks places where she can see a lot by just looking up & around, and can hear what is going on around the flat, when taking a light nap. For a deeper sleep coziness seems to be a higher priority.

madaxe_again 5y ago
This seems to matter to both of mine, but in different ways - they’re siblings. The male always sleeps in the same spot, from which he can see his food, the living room, and the door. The female sleeps next to me in bed. Like clockwork - I go to bed, she follows, and settles down neatly between the wall and me, and doesn’t move until I get up with dawn. I’m the territory, in the latter case, I think. It isn’t warmth - I sleep with the window open, and when I’m not in bed she sleeps in front of the fire, which is warm all night.

_rpxe 5y ago

What you're describing is also known as staying in your comfort zone, which can be devastating. You should be mindful of your feelings and examine their origins, yes. But I wouldn't recommend being driven by them.

xwdv 5y ago
There is nothing wrong with a comfort zone, life is too short really to spend long periods of time in brutal discomfort. Some people ruin their lives this way to the point where it will be impossible to ever be comfortable again before they die.
- _rpxe 5y ago
  That's really bad advice for people who are naturally very fragile, have social anxiety or can't deal with confrontation. Unless they start dealing with the feeling of discomfort, they will either suffer their entire life or just reinforce bad habits like avoidance, procrastination, delusion and drug addictions. Lots of people ruin their lives like that.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Those people are not in a comfort zone, their entire life is discomfort, they just don’t know anything else. They need to move into the comfort zone or their lives will always be ruined.
  - drjasonharrison 5y ago
    I feel that you are possibly jumping to conclusions as to what constitutes a "good life" versus a "ruined life". If people who have "small" comfort zones need support to move outside of them. Throwing categories such as avoidance, procrastination, delusion, and drug addiction into the same group leads me to believe that you might not understand what these supports look like.
DocTomoe 5y ago
That was how I used to believe. What I didn't understand at the time is that there is a difference between "being comfortable" and "being complacent" - and that in order to achieve things or grow yourself, you don't necessarily have to be in a position of discomfort. The self-mortification theory ("push it to the limit, leave your comfort zone") in its extreme, as propagated by growth evangelists (and as it originally came from the field of high-performance sports) is anti-life and wrong. People are not bonsai trees - and bonsai trees are unnatural freaks of nature. We don't have to contort ourselves to live up to an externally imposed ideal. We can - firmly grounded - become greater than these ideals, simply by growing steadily - at our own speed, and with our own, "natural", methods - even within the speeds at which we feel comfortable. So: DO listen to your gut feelings. Examine them. And listen to them.

eptcyka 5y ago

Do be careful as a 100% investment in such a strategy will destroy your will power. Will power is a muscle that needs to be exercised by doing things you don't feel like doing.

bob1029 5y ago

> Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? I very strongly believe there is a bigger unconscious component to productivity than there is a conscious one. Some mornings I wake up and I want to jump into the super nasty bucket of customer support tickets. "What the hell is still broken!? I am gonna fix that shit". On others, I will find customer support items antagonistic in every way, but would really like to spend time on a bunch of deep tech debt that has been piling up. And then there's the mornings where I wake up and I'd rather just play overwatch or <insert latest AAA title> all day. And you know what? At this point, I just fucking let it happen. I have found, over the course of about a decade, that if I let my monkey brain indulge periodically, the disciplined mind has a much better chance taking control the next time around. Some days I find myself very productively flip-flopping between gaming and work. I've watched some of my peers take this too far in the wrong way, but for whatever reason I can keep it on rails.

taneq 5y ago

> Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? I have never, not ever, not once, felt excitement about doing taxes, or about reviewing a functional description, or any of the other necessary evils of my job. Eventually you just gotta, though. If you only ever had to do things that were fun, it wouldn’t be called work.