The habit is in the 7th paragraph, after 2 images:
> Rather than trying to complete your task in 20 minutes, take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task. Then go home. Rest. A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Only you will be full of energy, together with a settled plan. No doubt you’ll accomplish your task before lunch.
> A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day.
Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce that feeling again.
I do the same thing as the author does. Moreover, I keep these notes more frequently, to the project's notebook with my other thoughts during the day.
When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined version most of the time.
Then, I get to work and finish what I have started.
Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.
I will first offer you a cliche from a movie that I saw in my pre-adolescence in the '70s from a much older era, the title of which I do not recall:
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
How I obey this rule at the end of the day is to continue my code in the necessary points, interspersed with "blahs" if I am feeling verbose (and necessary means that nothing critical is left out, and nothing irrelevant is included in reminding tomorrow).
How I disobey this rule is to verbally say (out loud) the idea that comes to mind in odd moments, as they are prone, followed by "note this" (at which point everyone around you admires your incomprehensible spontaneous demeanor). This imposes a tag on the inspirational memory of perspective and involvement, and I find that I retain it until no longer needed.
> that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening
I find that it can even ruin an evening. I'll find myself trying to solve a problem in my head rather than being present with my family.
The only thing that works for me is waiting for clean breaks that happen mid-late afternoon. As soon as I reach a happy stopping point, I must stop and switch to shallow work for the rest of the afternoon. Then it's easy to leave my computer at the end of the day.
It's hard but after years of struggling with this, I found a sustainable way to balance work and life.
I also track my consistency with doing this so that I notice myself slipping back and correct it before it becomes a problem.
A good night of sleep induces its own feeling of well-being, excitement, awesomeness. I swear, I have terrible sleep and when I get an 85+ sleep score I'm a different person.
It's weird how thoroughly people have internalized that tl;dr is supposed to be the default way to take in information now. Not only for themselves, but for others.
Most of what I read these days can be captured— almost entirely— by a good tl;dr. Unless I’m reading for pleasure, I’d prefer to read content that is as direct and succinct as possible.
I wonder what the oldest reference is we can find to this practice. I bet it's very old. Oldest I know of is only the late 19th century, but I bet we could beat that by at least several hundred years. Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?
“20 minutes more and I will finish it,” you think. Obviously, this is not the case; some edge cases and new issues will inevitably arise. You come to your senses only 2–3 hours later—tired, hungry, demotivated, and still struggling with your problem. You just wasted your evening, with nothing to show for it."
To add to that, leaving something in a very obviously broken unfinished state really helps to jump back into the flow the next morning, or whenever you come back.
I actually find it very hard to do this, to walk away with some code that isn't compiling or a test that isn't passing. It feels like leaving something unfinished.
When you return it's an easy jumping off point, with a tangible goal and helps bring you back into the context.
That's a great trick. I often leave myself a TODO in a source code. But as a plain text, not as a syntactically valid comment. With this project won't compile and on the next day is obvious where I ended up.
I'll just delete what I wrote and forget about. It also doesn't work with python. Can someone make a todo app that forces you to see it? I feel like it's already done.
I actually hate leaving something not compiling in the evening, it feels like things are unfinished, but it helps getting back into it. I tend to use this more when taking a break for an hour or two.
But it is effective.
However leaving an intentionally broken comment sounds like a good way to get the sense of completion for the day, but have the compiler focus your attention on where you left off!
During my previous jobs, i used to use a sort of "end of day review" to see both what i accomplished that day (which made me feel good when i completed things), plus also get allowed me to get ready for what i need to do the next day. I suppose its similar to the habit denoted in this piece; pretty cool!
At my current job, things are messier and shall we say not sustainable - culture is simply toxic. I actually can not do a review...because the moment someone sees that i am still logged on, i get bothered...Mostly this is from folks in other time zones (who don't care that its my end of day...like i said, its toxic here). So, i started doing the review offline, but saw that i needed to be logged on to review stuff...i started jumping through too many hoops to still access info as inputs for review and next-day prep...but appear to be offline...so, instead, nowadays, at a very strict time, i log off, and have abandoned my formal end of day review...I mean i still review my thoughts...but its not as structured, and i don't write anything down...and, i see the difference (sadly)...but, mostly, i just don't like my current job. ;-)
Genuine question, why do you feel the need to respond to every message? I work in a place with teams on my project split across multiple time zones, and I reply to people when I'm able. If something is really on fire, I'll get a load of messages but generally that stuff should go to the team chat and not at me directly.
Of course, we all keep some 'favourites' we do the odd favour for, but if you can't find 15 minutes to work interrupted (and your review is work) then you really need to think about how you're working as you're making the problems worse.
Being the superhero feels good for the first decade, eventually you realise you're Brent from the Phoenix Project and you're really part of the problem.
Not a personal attack, mxuribe, just some crap I worked out over the years. YMMV.
> ...I work in a place with teams on my project split across multiple time zones, and I reply to people when I'm able...
I've worked in other places where i did just as you noted! But, here, at my current dayjob, the culture is vastly different in some ways compared to all the other companies that i've worked for (over the quarter century that i've sent being part of digital/technical teams across many medium and large enterprises).
Further, i wouldn't say that i'm trying to be a superhero, its merely that there's political pressure here to be "on"/activated all the time. I've been on global teams before, and as you noted, unless there is some massive issue, availability of members of the team is assumed to be within a reasonable range of hours per one's timezone...But, here, many enterprise cultural norms are thrown out the window. I kinda would assume that maybe some unique startup that is so new to the world might behave like this, but this company has been around a long time...and they seem to have lots of churn of their digital/tech teams....and although no company is perfect, this firm's issues i believe stems mostly from its toxic culture. So, for now, i'm doing my time, putting up with the annoyance for the time being, until it suits me to jump ship. Just not worth it for my peace of mind.
Yeah well, what can I say ... totally resonates, except that for me, the "getting in the zone" part is most definitely not two hours, rather tends to stretch to 4am if not worse.
And the "write down everything and go home" is:
a) extremely frustrating
b) cant get anywhere near to dumping the amount of context that's flying in my head while I code/build. Most of it evaporates if I don't get to the end.
So ... agree with the problem, really not sure I agree with the solution.
A mention of the Pomodoro technique is relevant. It encourages 100% focus on work for 25 minutes followed by a 5 minute break where you are forbidden to work at all in any way. You're supposed to tell a joke, stretch, stare out the window, etc. But no meetings, no email, etc. At first I felt a strong resistance to the "stop work" part, often delaying until "one last thing" was done, but I tried it anyway. What surprised me was that without exception, my thoughts and actions were clearer when I took the break. It never really added a delay, and in fact sped me up considerably. I'm not entirely sure why, or whether its true for others, but that disciplined cadence of 25m 100% focus and 5m 0% focus is like magic.
This was a key plot device in almost every episode of House. Stepping away from the problem gives your brain time to work on the problem in the background.
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> Rather than trying to complete your task in 20 minutes, take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task. Then go home. Rest. A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Only you will be full of energy, together with a settled plan. No doubt you’ll accomplish your task before lunch.
Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce that feeling again.
When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined version most of the time.
Then, I get to work and finish what I have started.
Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
How I obey this rule at the end of the day is to continue my code in the necessary points, interspersed with "blahs" if I am feeling verbose (and necessary means that nothing critical is left out, and nothing irrelevant is included in reminding tomorrow).
How I disobey this rule is to verbally say (out loud) the idea that comes to mind in odd moments, as they are prone, followed by "note this" (at which point everyone around you admires your incomprehensible spontaneous demeanor). This imposes a tag on the inspirational memory of perspective and involvement, and I find that I retain it until no longer needed.
This works for me.
I find that it can even ruin an evening. I'll find myself trying to solve a problem in my head rather than being present with my family.
The only thing that works for me is waiting for clean breaks that happen mid-late afternoon. As soon as I reach a happy stopping point, I must stop and switch to shallow work for the rest of the afternoon. Then it's easy to leave my computer at the end of the day.
It's hard but after years of struggling with this, I found a sustainable way to balance work and life.
I also track my consistency with doing this so that I notice myself slipping back and correct it before it becomes a problem.
I do this all the time, quitting when I know what comes next, but noting it down so I don’t forget and become frustrated.
[0] https://bk2coady.medium.com/the-hemingway-method-fb56bf93836...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
Deleted Comment
Next up: how to poop on company time.
I feel personally attacked
I actually find it very hard to do this, to walk away with some code that isn't compiling or a test that isn't passing. It feels like leaving something unfinished.
When you return it's an easy jumping off point, with a tangible goal and helps bring you back into the context.
I actually hate leaving something not compiling in the evening, it feels like things are unfinished, but it helps getting back into it. I tend to use this more when taking a break for an hour or two. But it is effective.
However leaving an intentionally broken comment sounds like a good way to get the sense of completion for the day, but have the compiler focus your attention on where you left off!
At my current job, things are messier and shall we say not sustainable - culture is simply toxic. I actually can not do a review...because the moment someone sees that i am still logged on, i get bothered...Mostly this is from folks in other time zones (who don't care that its my end of day...like i said, its toxic here). So, i started doing the review offline, but saw that i needed to be logged on to review stuff...i started jumping through too many hoops to still access info as inputs for review and next-day prep...but appear to be offline...so, instead, nowadays, at a very strict time, i log off, and have abandoned my formal end of day review...I mean i still review my thoughts...but its not as structured, and i don't write anything down...and, i see the difference (sadly)...but, mostly, i just don't like my current job. ;-)
Of course, we all keep some 'favourites' we do the odd favour for, but if you can't find 15 minutes to work interrupted (and your review is work) then you really need to think about how you're working as you're making the problems worse.
Being the superhero feels good for the first decade, eventually you realise you're Brent from the Phoenix Project and you're really part of the problem.
Not a personal attack, mxuribe, just some crap I worked out over the years. YMMV.
> ...I work in a place with teams on my project split across multiple time zones, and I reply to people when I'm able...
I've worked in other places where i did just as you noted! But, here, at my current dayjob, the culture is vastly different in some ways compared to all the other companies that i've worked for (over the quarter century that i've sent being part of digital/technical teams across many medium and large enterprises).
Further, i wouldn't say that i'm trying to be a superhero, its merely that there's political pressure here to be "on"/activated all the time. I've been on global teams before, and as you noted, unless there is some massive issue, availability of members of the team is assumed to be within a reasonable range of hours per one's timezone...But, here, many enterprise cultural norms are thrown out the window. I kinda would assume that maybe some unique startup that is so new to the world might behave like this, but this company has been around a long time...and they seem to have lots of churn of their digital/tech teams....and although no company is perfect, this firm's issues i believe stems mostly from its toxic culture. So, for now, i'm doing my time, putting up with the annoyance for the time being, until it suits me to jump ship. Just not worth it for my peace of mind.
And the "write down everything and go home" is:
a) extremely frustrating
b) cant get anywhere near to dumping the amount of context that's flying in my head while I code/build. Most of it evaporates if I don't get to the end.
So ... agree with the problem, really not sure I agree with the solution.
You can tune Pomodoro's work lengths. 25 minute is the sweet spot for me, but you can go 20 or 30 depending on how your mind works and endures.
Also, don't forget to take your long, 15 minute breaks after every 4th pomodoro.
People often get new ideas or unblocked somehow after stopping the work. If this happens, don't open the laptop again. Write it down.
IMO this feature should not be underestimated. Happens to me semi-regularly.