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Hard agree. Another flaw in his thinking: brain cycles and sub-conscious processing. I'm in the middle of a hard problem right now. I ran out of ideas, and op
by eszed 3y ago
Hard agree.
Another flaw in his thinking: brain cycles and sub-conscious processing.
I'm in the middle of a hard problem right now. I ran out of ideas, and opened HN about half an hour ago. In that time, without "trying", I've had two new ideas - one sent me back to my notes, which revealed that my original thinking was flawed; the second sent me to documentation, which suggested a new route to pursue. I'm digesting the implications of that while I write this.
Beating my head against the problem directly for thirty minutes would have been less productive. (Though if I wasn't WFH I would have, and also been miserable, and learned less about the industry than I have from this thread. So there's that.)
I'm far from a 10x anything, but I don't have the only brain which works this way.
- littlekey 3y agoNot disagreeing with you, but just as a thought exercise: what if you had spent that time going for a walk outside rather than on HN?
- eszed 3y agoIf I'd done that I couldn't have context-switched back to the documentation so easily! Nah. I get what you're saying, and it's a great idea. Sometimes I do go for a walk. More often I do dishes. Those are both, however, higher-commitment, more time-consuming activities than flipping to a different window. If I remember correctly, my sticking point that day felt like a small one, and so the distraction / break I felt like I needed was correspondingly small.