8 ms·

Edsger Dijkstra’s One-Day Workweek

195 points by yarapavan 3y ago

ragebol 3y ago
> He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. If your job is research, why call that a one-day workweek?
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Even then, management realized that WFH was just an excuse to goof-off if your butt was not seen in the company chair.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Yes, even then management was incompetent. People have worked remotely, seldom or never seen "in the company chair", while being more productive than people in offices by orders of magnitude...
  - ragebol 3y ago
    The full quote surrounding that from my comment: > At this point, Dijkstra had become the opposite of busy. He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. And yet, as Dijkstra’s colleagues noted: > “The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.” > In this specific case study we see hints of a general observation about slow productivity. Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work. So management was incompetent in not seeing this dude was prolific when thinking at home. But as with almost anything: it depends. Some people are work better from home, other do better in an office. All these return to office policies are BS IMHO: as long as the people you directly work with are OK with you working from home, go do that.
- PennRobotics 3y ago
  I had a research advisor explain that the timesheets are a formality if you are productive: You might mentally write your abstract in the shower, think about the research problem in the bus, get distracted while you're in the lab, rehearse parts of a talk with a friend between classes... Which of these counts as work time? One of my favorite professors came in only on Fridays (except when the department would meet). They met with the research group, taught, had office hours, and then went home. I don't think they did nothing the other 6 days, but they also never sacrificed mental health for the sake of appearing busy.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Because most people whose job is research today have to work all the time in busywork BS, lest they get fired. To churn BS papers just to stay afloat of publish-or-perish, to attend all kinds of BS meetings, to do all kinds of BS administrative work that has bureaucratically exploded in the last 30 years, to do dog and pony shows for grants, and so on. They could only dream of "spending almost all of their time thinking and recording his ideas"
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Most people in general have this problem. You have to be Dijkstra (or his equivalent in your field) to solve it. And some people can't: you can't be so good at plumbing you only have to work 1 day a week, and can think the other 6. It's a rare quality of any profession, and sub-genre in that profession, that you are paid to think, and even rarer that it's worth doing so for an individual.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >And some people can't: you can't be so good at plumbing you only have to work 1 day a week, and can think the other 6. Sure. But my point wasn't that "all professions/people should have that", but that we should let researchers and thinkers, to research and think, as opposed to bloating their day to day work with bureucratic and "dog and pony" show BS. In the case of researchers this would be equivalent to letting the plumber do actual plumbing, as opposed to having them attend BS meetings and file increasingly more reports and perform BS rituals some idiots in management create as requirements to justify their salaries. As we know that this less the case, as you go back in the decades. The administrative "BS" part of academic work has skyrocketed, to the detriment of the actual work.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
fxtentacle 3y ago
The article is BS. "He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays." The guy wrote 500+ memos on the non-Tuesday working days. That's very far off from a one-day workweek.
- krawczstef 3y ago
  yeah I think the point is a bit muddied. Academics are always working... to me, the main take-away is that he got 6 days to think, and only had a single day of "disruptive meetings" to help ground/discuss whatever he was thinking...
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    > Academics are always working... Just like comedians. They are always playing scenarios in their head and playtesting jokes.
    - rawoke083600 3y ago
      That's probably true for authors as well (not that I am one).
      - magospietato 3y ago
        I suspect these trades are artefacts of that way of thinking. Some people have a frequent flow of ideas they are compelled to capture in one way or another.
    - commonlisp94 3y ago
      Why do comedians feel the need to tell us how hard their life is all the time?
      - waterhouse 3y ago
        Because they want to talk about things from their life (which is because, among other reasons, having personal experience with the things they're talking about is rather helpful), and if they were saying how great their life was, that might evoke resentment. It also seems possible that the space of "funny things you can say about how something sucks" is bigger than the space of "funny things you can say about how something is good".
quickthrower2 3y ago
So he got out of the BS busywork by avoiding and delegating. The lesson? be so good they can’t tell you to get fucked.
- ano88888 3y ago
  good people are told to f*cked off and let go all the time. It is an imperfect and inefficient world.
Temporary_31337 3y ago
To be precise this should be called one meeting day work week. For many knowledge workers this should be the default too - 4 days of deep work and 1 day agreeing on the scope of the work etc Sure sometimes you may need feedback in the middle but it can wait or maybe the person you are interrupting is a project manager etc
- j7ake 3y ago
  High performing people like Dijkstra was probably working 6 days and 1 meeting day. Not sure where you got the 4 days part from the article. 50 percent more deep thinking time will compound enormously over a career, especially in winner-take-all dynamics like Dijkstras profession.
  - rawoke083600 3y ago
    >more deep thinking time will compound enormously over a career Damn that's kinda nice, never thought about the "compounding effect" of as you call it "deep thinking", I can 100% see how that be !
  - bjornasm 3y ago
    >Not sure where you got the 4 days part from the article. They didn't get the 4 days part from the article, they said the norm should be 4 days working and 1 day for meetings for normal workers.
  - jbottoms 3y ago
    His work also spanned large regions of CS. We owe most operating system architectures for his work on T.H.E. Computer designs including the basic ISO stack.
ramraj07 3y ago
I can’t remember the history exactly but isn’t Cal Newport the one who became famous for being a postdoc who was super prolific while still rabidly being 9-5 40 hour schedule ? Used to piss me and my friends off so much as if WE wanted to burn up by working more as opposed to the environment forcing it on us. And if I recall correctly, he recanted on it after becoming a professor and realizing that can’t actually work if you are truly responsible for things in a lab? Or something to that tune? Please correct me my memory is frail on this.
- currymj 3y ago
  it probably does work fine if your job is to only to prove theorems. the theorems will wait for you overnight.
ohdannyboy 3y ago
As a theoretical computer scientist his job was primarily to think and have really good ideas. Thinking at home all day was doing his job...
ctenb 3y ago
The article is fine, the title is wrong
imrehg 3y ago
I'd love a schedule like this: the one day gathering with likeminded people and discussing interesting topics, the rest of the time is self-directed learning and creating, delegating all the parts that are deemed less important for the "unique value add" of the person. I frequently have the feeling as we well that I could get so much done if I didn't have to work -- this is not necessarily _correct_ (most likely it isn't), but aligns well with the case made here, so there _might_ be something to it to explore how to get more free (creative time), almost at all cost.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  >I'd love a schedule like this We all would love a schedule like this. No agile, nu scrums, no meetings, no wiki page editing, no unit tests, no menial work, no code reviews, no context switching. Just work on what you deem important. It would project productivity through the roof. It's achievable only if you are self employed.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    >It's achievable only if you are self employed. I think most self employed people would tell you otherwise.
    - sixstringtheory 3y ago
      Absolutely. When I went freelance, I traded my one boss for multiple bosses: myself, plus every potential and landed client. And federal/state/local governments. And insurance providers. Thank goodness it was software so I didn’t need a landlord and bank loans, too. I imagine by “self-employed” what they really meant was “early retired”.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Also best suited for academia. Self-directed engineers would most likely not work towards the company vision of building whatever the customer wants, but play around with technology and forever improve their code.
bvoq 3y ago
Alternative title: Edsger Dijkstra’s work-from-home workweek.
- criddell 3y ago
  The difference is Dijkstra’s interactions with the other people who worked with were limited to one day per week. He had the other days for sustained focus. I think Newport is more interested in how he worked than where.
- microtherion 3y ago
  It might have been less work from home than it appears at first glance. Browsing through the EWDs, he seemed to have been on road trips of various sorts about 8 weeks a year, and those involved more than a day a week of public appearances.
nevster 3y ago
As an aside, does anyone else experience a borked scrolling experience on that website using Firefox?
baz00 3y ago
As opposed to my one day work week which is 4 days of pointless meetings and 1 day of actual productive work peppered with interruptions and spread across 5 days. An hour of straight concentration is something I crave right now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- icedchai 3y ago
  This sounds very familiar to me from a previous job at the height of the pandemic. All those interruptions are very mentally draining. I'd have about 4 or 5 meetings a day, and would get actual work done between interruptions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bregma 3y ago
According to CEO of my company, if your bum is not in your chair in the office and you fingers not clacking on the keyboard you're not working.
rramadass 3y ago
There is much to learn from Dijkstra since Human nature is not that very different. Problem-solving requires a multifaceted approach and if we find that somebody had used a Method/Process which gave them exceptional results then we need to extract the essence of their methodology and learn to apply them in our own individual contexts. As an example w.r.t Dijkstra's "working habits" here are my takeaways; 1) His focus on logical rigor in thinking of a Program as a sequence of "Predicate Transformers" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transformer_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transformer_semantic...) is very fundamental to thinking about programming. Even if i do not use his particular notation/techniques, cultivating the habit of thinking about logical predicates operating in the state space of the program before writing the code which moves the state space from one to another i.e. from Pre to Post condition is essential to writing correct programs. 2) His emphasis on writing everything down by hand before touching a computer. The biggest problem facing a Programmer today is myriads of distractions hindering any attempt to focus and think for long stretches of time consistently. If you sit with paper/pencil and force yourself to think and write out your thoughts/algorithms then the above problem goes away. He famously wrote the THE OS by hand! 3) Learn to focus only on the absolute essentials and not on accessories like IDEs/debuggers/etc. Dijkstra famously stated that programming should only be taught in a precise language for which there are no compilers to machine code in order to force students to "play computer" and think through their program execution. Tools should be used only to augment thought but never to supplant/short-circuit it. If you look at the working habits of the great Scientists/Geniuses almost without exception they avoided "busyness", ruthlessly cut out all inessentials from their work, wrote precisely, used tools judiciously and thought deeply. This is what we need to hold on to in this day and age where we have a surfeit of everything (distractions, tools, socializing etc.) designed to hinder us at every turn.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  A counterpoint to your second point is Gall's law: > A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author) At some point, problems are just too complex for any person, no matter how brilliant, to think through ahead of time. The only practical way to make progress on such problems is to implement a simplified version of a solution and then evolve it towards full function. Techniques like test driven development really embrace this idea.
nasmorn 3y ago
So he worked all the time but only did busywork one day a week. Which coincided with him being super productive. How do that surprising at all?
- beezlewax 3y ago
  This right here is the best take here - half of the work I do as a software dev is explaining what I'm doing to other people, raising tickets dealing with pipeline woes and infra problems and everything but writing code. Now code is not the only part of being a dev but it's hard to feel productive sat in some agile retro or whatever.
mad44 3y ago
I had written this in 2014 as a short introduction to Dijkstra's EWD notes. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/09/revisiting-ewds.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/09/revisiting-ewds.ht...
atregir 3y ago
Dijkstra worked remotely, before it was cool. Haha!
jonjacky 3y ago
Here is the archive of EWD memos. The last one is numbered 1318, that's one thousand three hundred and eighteen: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ Many are hand-written in ink, in his distinctive handwriting. They have no cross-outs or corrections. Some are quite long, with pages of mathematical notation. They must have taken a lot of time to prepare. Here is a sample chosen at random, which turned out to be a very nice example: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd09xx/EWD901.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd09xx/EWD901.PDF
srndsnd 3y ago
Cal Newport has become a particular kind of hustle culture charlatan, and it's been pretty fascinating to watch. I began reading his writing when was focusing on teaching study habits to college students when I myself was a college student. As he grew up, finished his PhD and started his academic career, he began building a brand around offering advice on "deep work". It sells the idea that you can, and should, only work on meaningful problems with limited distraction, and have a solid work-life balance, filled with "valuable leisure activities". You can debate the merits of his arguments, and should, as ultimately what he sells is advice, but something truly rubs me the wrong way about how he has continued to market himself. A kind of Andrew Huberman-esque, long form podcast, a thinly veiled advertisement for his courses, books, and products. One would think that if you were truly living a "deep life", watching a two hour long video podcast every week wouldn't exactly fit into your schedule. While I credit his critique of the attention economy to opening my eyes a little bit and changing how I view my time, I can't help but feel that as he's risen in popularity following his "deep life" work, he's continued to become more and more of what he used to decry, just another way to waste your time while feeling like you're being productive.
- _yb2s 3y ago
  I don't see how reading good advice on doing deep work is at odds with spending time doing it. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe," etc. It seems pretty unfair to call him a "hustle culture charlatan" when at the same time later on pointing out his emphasis on work-life balance. Isn't that the opposite of hustle culture? I've found his advice incredibly useful in my career.. both for getting more done (that is actually important to ME), and for having a less stressful life.
  - srndsnd 3y ago
    >I don't see how reading good advice on doing deep work is at odds with spending time doing it. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe," etc. If you read his book(s), and got something out of it, great! So did I. But my issue with where Cal's ideas end and his business begins. His philosophy itself is relatively simple but his business revolves around getting you into his ecosystem and keeping you consuming the same content on how the "deep life" operates. He ultimately becomes a cog in the attention economy he is trying to avoid, and for me, that casts him as a hypocrite. Like many 21st century self-help gurus, the true content can fit on an index card, and the rest is examples that are repeatedly teased out for additional length. His podcast is the most brutal extension of this. I've listened to it since its inception, but gave up because it hit the right neural circuitry that let me feel like I was improving myself without doing so. It was productivity porn. It stopped being about helping people, and started being about merchandising long ago. You can even hear it in his voice when he says things like "don't waste your time with frivolous podcast listening. Except our podcast of course! we're not frivolous. We're deep". Happens like once an episode. > It seems pretty unfair to call him a "hustle culture charlatan" when at the same time later on pointing out his emphasis on work-life balance. Isn't that the opposite of hustle culture? Even his discussion of how you spend your personal time revolves around doing activities that he refers to as "high quality leisure time". It is yet another relentless pursuit of min-maxing efficiency, with the underlying idea being that leisure is the fuel that allows you to burn brighter for longer than the other people around you, but winds up with your personal pursuits functioning as yet another resource to optimize. I think this idea, while well meaning, can be destructive. Embracing this idea that there are certain "right and wrong" leisure activities has led me to constantly question the utility of things I've enjoyed in the pursuit of "high quality". Plus how many people who seek out advice about the kind of optimization that Cal preaches are truly interested in work life balance? It's like an alcohol company telling you to drink responsibly. It's plausible deniability. This point acts as a defense against criticism for Newport. The people who truly embrace Cal are just as likely to look towards other figures who are selling the same shtick he is. His discussions of these points only serve to differentiate his rhetoric from a figure like Tim Ferris or Andrew Huberman, when they are less distinguishable than they'd like you to believe.

195 points by yarapavan 3y ago

> He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. If your job is research, why call that a one-day workweek?

fbdab103 3y ago
Even then, management realized that WFH was just an excuse to goof-off if your butt was not seen in the company chair.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Yes, even then management was incompetent. People have worked remotely, seldom or never seen "in the company chair", while being more productive than people in offices by orders of magnitude...
- ragebol 3y ago
  The full quote surrounding that from my comment: > At this point, Dijkstra had become the opposite of busy. He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. And yet, as Dijkstra’s colleagues noted: > “The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.” > In this specific case study we see hints of a general observation about slow productivity. Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work. So management was incompetent in not seeing this dude was prolific when thinking at home. But as with almost anything: it depends. Some people are work better from home, other do better in an office. All these return to office policies are BS IMHO: as long as the people you directly work with are OK with you working from home, go do that.
PennRobotics 3y ago
I had a research advisor explain that the timesheets are a formality if you are productive: You might mentally write your abstract in the shower, think about the research problem in the bus, get distracted while you're in the lab, rehearse parts of a talk with a friend between classes... Which of these counts as work time? One of my favorite professors came in only on Fridays (except when the department would meet). They met with the research group, taught, had office hours, and then went home. I don't think they did nothing the other 6 days, but they also never sacrificed mental health for the sake of appearing busy.
coldtea 3y ago
Because most people whose job is research today have to work all the time in busywork BS, lest they get fired. To churn BS papers just to stay afloat of publish-or-perish, to attend all kinds of BS meetings, to do all kinds of BS administrative work that has bureaucratically exploded in the last 30 years, to do dog and pony shows for grants, and so on. They could only dream of "spending almost all of their time thinking and recording his ideas"
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Most people in general have this problem. You have to be Dijkstra (or his equivalent in your field) to solve it. And some people can't: you can't be so good at plumbing you only have to work 1 day a week, and can think the other 6. It's a rare quality of any profession, and sub-genre in that profession, that you are paid to think, and even rarer that it's worth doing so for an individual.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >And some people can't: you can't be so good at plumbing you only have to work 1 day a week, and can think the other 6. Sure. But my point wasn't that "all professions/people should have that", but that we should let researchers and thinkers, to research and think, as opposed to bloating their day to day work with bureucratic and "dog and pony" show BS. In the case of researchers this would be equivalent to letting the plumber do actual plumbing, as opposed to having them attend BS meetings and file increasingly more reports and perform BS rituals some idiots in management create as requirements to justify their salaries. As we know that this less the case, as you go back in the decades. The administrative "BS" part of academic work has skyrocketed, to the detriment of the actual work.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

fxtentacle 3y ago

The article is BS. "He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays." The guy wrote 500+ memos on the non-Tuesday working days. That's very far off from a one-day workweek.

krawczstef 3y ago
yeah I think the point is a bit muddied. Academics are always working... to me, the main take-away is that he got 6 days to think, and only had a single day of "disruptive meetings" to help ground/discuss whatever he was thinking...
- passion__desire 3y ago
  > Academics are always working... Just like comedians. They are always playing scenarios in their head and playtesting jokes.
  - rawoke083600 3y ago
    That's probably true for authors as well (not that I am one).
    - magospietato 3y ago
      I suspect these trades are artefacts of that way of thinking. Some people have a frequent flow of ideas they are compelled to capture in one way or another.
  - commonlisp94 3y ago
    Why do comedians feel the need to tell us how hard their life is all the time?
    - waterhouse 3y ago
      Because they want to talk about things from their life (which is because, among other reasons, having personal experience with the things they're talking about is rather helpful), and if they were saying how great their life was, that might evoke resentment. It also seems possible that the space of "funny things you can say about how something sucks" is bigger than the space of "funny things you can say about how something is good".

quickthrower2 3y ago

So he got out of the BS busywork by avoiding and delegating. The lesson? be so good they can’t tell you to get fucked.

ano88888 3y ago
good people are told to f*cked off and let go all the time. It is an imperfect and inefficient world.

Temporary_31337 3y ago

To be precise this should be called one meeting day work week. For many knowledge workers this should be the default too - 4 days of deep work and 1 day agreeing on the scope of the work etc Sure sometimes you may need feedback in the middle but it can wait or maybe the person you are interrupting is a project manager etc

j7ake 3y ago
High performing people like Dijkstra was probably working 6 days and 1 meeting day. Not sure where you got the 4 days part from the article. 50 percent more deep thinking time will compound enormously over a career, especially in winner-take-all dynamics like Dijkstras profession.
- rawoke083600 3y ago
  >more deep thinking time will compound enormously over a career Damn that's kinda nice, never thought about the "compounding effect" of as you call it "deep thinking", I can 100% see how that be !
- bjornasm 3y ago
  >Not sure where you got the 4 days part from the article. They didn't get the 4 days part from the article, they said the norm should be 4 days working and 1 day for meetings for normal workers.
- jbottoms 3y ago
  His work also spanned large regions of CS. We owe most operating system architectures for his work on T.H.E. Computer designs including the basic ISO stack.

ramraj07 3y ago

I can’t remember the history exactly but isn’t Cal Newport the one who became famous for being a postdoc who was super prolific while still rabidly being 9-5 40 hour schedule ? Used to piss me and my friends off so much as if WE wanted to burn up by working more as opposed to the environment forcing it on us. And if I recall correctly, he recanted on it after becoming a professor and realizing that can’t actually work if you are truly responsible for things in a lab? Or something to that tune? Please correct me my memory is frail on this.

currymj 3y ago
it probably does work fine if your job is to only to prove theorems. the theorems will wait for you overnight.

ohdannyboy 3y ago

As a theoretical computer scientist his job was primarily to think and have really good ideas. Thinking at home all day was doing his job...

ctenb 3y ago

The article is fine, the title is wrong

imrehg 3y ago

I'd love a schedule like this: the one day gathering with likeminded people and discussing interesting topics, the rest of the time is self-directed learning and creating, delegating all the parts that are deemed less important for the "unique value add" of the person. I frequently have the feeling as we well that I could get so much done if I didn't have to work -- this is not necessarily _correct_ (most likely it isn't), but aligns well with the case made here, so there _might_ be something to it to explore how to get more free (creative time), almost at all cost.

DeathArrow 3y ago
>I'd love a schedule like this We all would love a schedule like this. No agile, nu scrums, no meetings, no wiki page editing, no unit tests, no menial work, no code reviews, no context switching. Just work on what you deem important. It would project productivity through the roof. It's achievable only if you are self employed.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >It's achievable only if you are self employed. I think most self employed people would tell you otherwise.
  - sixstringtheory 3y ago
    Absolutely. When I went freelance, I traded my one boss for multiple bosses: myself, plus every potential and landed client. And federal/state/local governments. And insurance providers. Thank goodness it was software so I didn’t need a landlord and bank loans, too. I imagine by “self-employed” what they really meant was “early retired”.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Also best suited for academia. Self-directed engineers would most likely not work towards the company vision of building whatever the customer wants, but play around with technology and forever improve their code.

bvoq 3y ago

Alternative title: Edsger Dijkstra’s work-from-home workweek.

criddell 3y ago
The difference is Dijkstra’s interactions with the other people who worked with were limited to one day per week. He had the other days for sustained focus. I think Newport is more interested in how he worked than where.
microtherion 3y ago
It might have been less work from home than it appears at first glance. Browsing through the EWDs, he seemed to have been on road trips of various sorts about 8 weeks a year, and those involved more than a day a week of public appearances.

nevster 3y ago

As an aside, does anyone else experience a borked scrolling experience on that website using Firefox?

baz00 3y ago

As opposed to my one day work week which is 4 days of pointless meetings and 1 day of actual productive work peppered with interruptions and spread across 5 days. An hour of straight concentration is something I crave right now.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
icedchai 3y ago
This sounds very familiar to me from a previous job at the height of the pandemic. All those interruptions are very mentally draining. I'd have about 4 or 5 meetings a day, and would get actual work done between interruptions.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bregma 3y ago

According to CEO of my company, if your bum is not in your chair in the office and you fingers not clacking on the keyboard you're not working.

rramadass 3y ago

There is much to learn from Dijkstra since Human nature is not that very different. Problem-solving requires a multifaceted approach and if we find that somebody had used a Method/Process which gave them exceptional results then we need to extract the essence of their methodology and learn to apply them in our own individual contexts. As an example w.r.t Dijkstra's "working habits" here are my takeaways; 1) His focus on logical rigor in thinking of a Program as a sequence of "Predicate Transformers" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transformer_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transformer_semantic...) is very fundamental to thinking about programming. Even if i do not use his particular notation/techniques, cultivating the habit of thinking about logical predicates operating in the state space of the program before writing the code which moves the state space from one to another i.e. from Pre to Post condition is essential to writing correct programs. 2) His emphasis on writing everything down by hand before touching a computer. The biggest problem facing a Programmer today is myriads of distractions hindering any attempt to focus and think for long stretches of time consistently. If you sit with paper/pencil and force yourself to think and write out your thoughts/algorithms then the above problem goes away. He famously wrote the THE OS by hand! 3) Learn to focus only on the absolute essentials and not on accessories like IDEs/debuggers/etc. Dijkstra famously stated that programming should only be taught in a precise language for which there are no compilers to machine code in order to force students to "play computer" and think through their program execution. Tools should be used only to augment thought but never to supplant/short-circuit it. If you look at the working habits of the great Scientists/Geniuses almost without exception they avoided "busyness", ruthlessly cut out all inessentials from their work, wrote precisely, used tools judiciously and thought deeply. This is what we need to hold on to in this day and age where we have a surfeit of everything (distractions, tools, socializing etc.) designed to hinder us at every turn.

nordsieck 3y ago
A counterpoint to your second point is Gall's law: > A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author) At some point, problems are just too complex for any person, no matter how brilliant, to think through ahead of time. The only practical way to make progress on such problems is to implement a simplified version of a solution and then evolve it towards full function. Techniques like test driven development really embrace this idea.

nasmorn 3y ago

So he worked all the time but only did busywork one day a week. Which coincided with him being super productive. How do that surprising at all?

beezlewax 3y ago
This right here is the best take here - half of the work I do as a software dev is explaining what I'm doing to other people, raising tickets dealing with pipeline woes and infra problems and everything but writing code. Now code is not the only part of being a dev but it's hard to feel productive sat in some agile retro or whatever.

mad44 3y ago

I had written this in 2014 as a short introduction to Dijkstra's EWD notes. https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/09/revisiting-ewds.html https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2014/09/revisiting-ewds.ht...

atregir 3y ago

Dijkstra worked remotely, before it was cool. Haha!

jonjacky 3y ago

Here is the archive of EWD memos. The last one is numbered 1318, that's one thousand three hundred and eighteen: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ Many are hand-written in ink, in his distinctive handwriting. They have no cross-outs or corrections. Some are quite long, with pages of mathematical notation. They must have taken a lot of time to prepare. Here is a sample chosen at random, which turned out to be a very nice example: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd09xx/EWD901.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd09xx/EWD901.PDF

srndsnd 3y ago

Cal Newport has become a particular kind of hustle culture charlatan, and it's been pretty fascinating to watch. I began reading his writing when was focusing on teaching study habits to college students when I myself was a college student. As he grew up, finished his PhD and started his academic career, he began building a brand around offering advice on "deep work". It sells the idea that you can, and should, only work on meaningful problems with limited distraction, and have a solid work-life balance, filled with "valuable leisure activities". You can debate the merits of his arguments, and should, as ultimately what he sells is advice, but something truly rubs me the wrong way about how he has continued to market himself. A kind of Andrew Huberman-esque, long form podcast, a thinly veiled advertisement for his courses, books, and products. One would think that if you were truly living a "deep life", watching a two hour long video podcast every week wouldn't exactly fit into your schedule. While I credit his critique of the attention economy to opening my eyes a little bit and changing how I view my time, I can't help but feel that as he's risen in popularity following his "deep life" work, he's continued to become more and more of what he used to decry, just another way to waste your time while feeling like you're being productive.

_yb2s 3y ago
I don't see how reading good advice on doing deep work is at odds with spending time doing it. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe," etc. It seems pretty unfair to call him a "hustle culture charlatan" when at the same time later on pointing out his emphasis on work-life balance. Isn't that the opposite of hustle culture? I've found his advice incredibly useful in my career.. both for getting more done (that is actually important to ME), and for having a less stressful life.
- srndsnd 3y ago
  >I don't see how reading good advice on doing deep work is at odds with spending time doing it. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe," etc. If you read his book(s), and got something out of it, great! So did I. But my issue with where Cal's ideas end and his business begins. His philosophy itself is relatively simple but his business revolves around getting you into his ecosystem and keeping you consuming the same content on how the "deep life" operates. He ultimately becomes a cog in the attention economy he is trying to avoid, and for me, that casts him as a hypocrite. Like many 21st century self-help gurus, the true content can fit on an index card, and the rest is examples that are repeatedly teased out for additional length. His podcast is the most brutal extension of this. I've listened to it since its inception, but gave up because it hit the right neural circuitry that let me feel like I was improving myself without doing so. It was productivity porn. It stopped being about helping people, and started being about merchandising long ago. You can even hear it in his voice when he says things like "don't waste your time with frivolous podcast listening. Except our podcast of course! we're not frivolous. We're deep". Happens like once an episode. > It seems pretty unfair to call him a "hustle culture charlatan" when at the same time later on pointing out his emphasis on work-life balance. Isn't that the opposite of hustle culture? Even his discussion of how you spend your personal time revolves around doing activities that he refers to as "high quality leisure time". It is yet another relentless pursuit of min-maxing efficiency, with the underlying idea being that leisure is the fuel that allows you to burn brighter for longer than the other people around you, but winds up with your personal pursuits functioning as yet another resource to optimize. I think this idea, while well meaning, can be destructive. Embracing this idea that there are certain "right and wrong" leisure activities has led me to constantly question the utility of things I've enjoyed in the pursuit of "high quality". Plus how many people who seek out advice about the kind of optimization that Cal preaches are truly interested in work life balance? It's like an alcohol company telling you to drink responsibly. It's plausible deniability. This point acts as a defense against criticism for Newport. The people who truly embrace Cal are just as likely to look towards other figures who are selling the same shtick he is. His discussions of these points only serve to differentiate his rhetoric from a figure like Tim Ferris or Andrew Huberman, when they are less distinguishable than they'd like you to believe.