From Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson: Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long,…
Blog Archives
Randomized studies of productivity
A couple days ago I wrote a blog post quoting Cal Newport suggesting that four hours of intense concentration a day is as much as anyone can sustain. That post struck a chord and has gotten a lot of buzz…
Four hours of concentration
As I’ve blogged about before, and mentioned again in my previous post, the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put in two hours of work in the morning and two in the evening. Apparently this is a common pattern. Cal…
Increasing your chances of entering flow
I recently ran across a tip from Mark Hepburn that caught my eye. The content of the tip isn’t important here but rather his justification of the tip: It sounds trivial, but it can really help keep you in the…
Fractured work
Vivek Haldir’s recent post Quantum of Work points out something obvious in retrospect: programming is intrinsically fractured. It does little good to tell a programmer to unplug and concentrate. He or she cannot work for more than a few minutes…
Life lessons from functional programming
Functional programming languages are either strict or lazy. Strict languages evaluate all arguments to a function before calling it. Lazy languages don’t evaluate arguments until necessary, which may be never. Strict languages evaluate arguments just-in-case, lazy languages evaluate them just-in-time.…
Do you need a to-do list?
Jeff Atwood wrote the other day that if you need a to-do list, something’s wrong. If you can’t wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you…
It's not the text editor, it's text
Vivek Haldar had a nice rant about editors a couple days ago. In response to complaints that some editors are ugly, he writes: The primary factor in looking good should be the choice of a good font at a comfortable…
Work or rest
According a recent biography of Henri Poincaré, Poincaré … worked regularly from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 5 till 7 in the late afternoon. He found that working longer seldom achieved anything … Poincaré made tremendous contributions…
Bicycle skills
A while back I wrote about learning things just-in-case or just-in-time. Some things you learn in case you need them in the future, and some things you learn as needed. How do you decide whether something is worth learning ahead…
Editing by semantic units
The most basic text editor commands operate on lines and characters: move up or down a line, delete the next or previous character, etc. More advanced commands operate on context-specific semantic units. In the context of English prose, this means…
Relearning to type
I’m starting to feel some strain in my hands, so I’m going to take Vivek Haldar’s advice: Act like you do have RSI, and change your set up right now to avoid it. For one thing, I bought an ergonomic…
Obsession
Obsession has come to have a positive connotation. Individuals and companies brag about being obsessed about this or that. But obsession is a psychosis, and the original meaning of the word is still valid. Obsession, according to the canons of…
Criteria for a computing setup
“My setup” articles have become common. These articles list the hardware and software someone uses, usually with little explanation. The subtext is often the author’s commitment to the Apple brand or to open source, to spending money on the best…
iPad as hip flask
I reread Paul Graham’s essay The Acceleration of Addictiveness after a friend quoted it in a blog post explaining why he is taking an indefinite hiatus from social media. I hadn’t noticed this gem in the footnotes when I first…
