4 ms·

The first comment nails it on the head: > What most people need when building a side business is consecutive hours … especially in programming. > 30 minutes h

by teej 18y ago

The first comment nails it on the head: > What most people need when building a side business is consecutive hours … especially in programming. > 30 minutes here and 1 hour there, in the programming word won’t get you much because of the huge time lag for developers when they have to context switch. My issue is that the cost of watching TV is easy to measure, and thus easy to target. The cost of reading fluff 37Signals articles, however, is not.

josefresco 18y ago
Awesome point, how much time do we waste reading about innovative business practices preached by 37Signals compared with how much time we spend actually implementing said practices. Even though the article you may be reading might be genius or hugely informative, it's still the same as watching the History channel on TV if you do nothing about it, or spend less time actually doing something then you spend watching or reading about it.
kulkarnic 18y ago
I don't believe that you need 3+ continuous hours to program. I myself routinely take breaks every hour or so; and believe the context switch is amortized at that time-frame. Also, the point is not purely about television. I've not watched ANY television at all for the past 4 years. However, random excursions into Wikipedia or reading blogs do cost time. At the end of the day, I still wonder if it is worth reading all that-- I could contribute to some open-source project (reporting bugs) for instance.
- joeyo 18y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if this depends strongly on the individual in question. Some people are very good at "reclaiming" small chunks of time--15 minutes here and there--that add up over the course of a day. Other people have a much more difficult time even getting started unless they have a large block of time.
  - phugoid 18y ago
    To me it also depends on the task at hand. 20 minutes will get me through a chapter from Learning Pything (even if I'm not entirely sober), while 3 hours doesn't feel like enough to work on my ARM7 development board in Assembler (something totally new to me and not easy).
nihilocrat 18y ago
Zing! I hate TV and see no reason for it to be around, but I think it's dubious they're singling out TV. They could just as well target video games, reading, just relaxing, or other things that aren't particularly productive. It's a little too easy for people these days to see downtime as valueless, I just hope it never gets to the point where people think you are lazy if you aren't working every waking moment of your life.
- latortuga 18y ago
  Singling out TV is pretty easy because, first, it consumes a significant portion of the majority of American's lives and second, because there is a lot of reliable data measuring that time. There isn't anything that takes up that much time outside of work unless you count sleeping (and god damn what I would give to cut that out of my daily schedule)
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    "There isn't anything that takes up that much time outside of work unless you count sleeping (and god damn what I would give to cut that out of my daily schedule)" Actually I wonder if it would make as significant a difference as you'd expect, or even at all. Reminds me of those school research projects where I'd have 2 months to do the project, do nothing at all except worry a bit for the major portion of the time then do everything in the last 2 days and get a decent grade. I wouldn't have done better or worse if I had been given 1 week or 4 months instead.

by teej 18y ago

josefresco 18y ago

Awesome point, how much time do we waste reading about innovative business practices preached by 37Signals compared with how much time we spend actually implementing said practices. Even though the article you may be reading might be genius or hugely informative, it's still the same as watching the History channel on TV if you do nothing about it, or spend less time actually doing something then you spend watching or reading about it.

kulkarnic 18y ago

I don't believe that you need 3+ continuous hours to program. I myself routinely take breaks every hour or so; and believe the context switch is amortized at that time-frame. Also, the point is not purely about television. I've not watched ANY television at all for the past 4 years. However, random excursions into Wikipedia or reading blogs do cost time. At the end of the day, I still wonder if it is worth reading all that-- I could contribute to some open-source project (reporting bugs) for instance.

joeyo 18y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this depends strongly on the individual in question. Some people are very good at "reclaiming" small chunks of time--15 minutes here and there--that add up over the course of a day. Other people have a much more difficult time even getting started unless they have a large block of time.
- phugoid 18y ago
  To me it also depends on the task at hand. 20 minutes will get me through a chapter from Learning Pything (even if I'm not entirely sober), while 3 hours doesn't feel like enough to work on my ARM7 development board in Assembler (something totally new to me and not easy).

nihilocrat 18y ago

Zing! I hate TV and see no reason for it to be around, but I think it's dubious they're singling out TV. They could just as well target video games, reading, just relaxing, or other things that aren't particularly productive. It's a little too easy for people these days to see downtime as valueless, I just hope it never gets to the point where people think you are lazy if you aren't working every waking moment of your life.

latortuga 18y ago
Singling out TV is pretty easy because, first, it consumes a significant portion of the majority of American's lives and second, because there is a lot of reliable data measuring that time. There isn't anything that takes up that much time outside of work unless you count sleeping (and god damn what I would give to cut that out of my daily schedule)
- Hexstream 18y ago
  "There isn't anything that takes up that much time outside of work unless you count sleeping (and god damn what I would give to cut that out of my daily schedule)" Actually I wonder if it would make as significant a difference as you'd expect, or even at all. Reminds me of those school research projects where I'd have 2 months to do the project, do nothing at all except worry a bit for the major portion of the time then do everything in the last 2 days and get a decent grade. I wouldn't have done better or worse if I had been given 1 week or 4 months instead.