Tell HN: Stop surfing and start making things people want

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372359

by quizbiz • 16 years ago

86 72 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've hit a slump and can't get to work. I have a to do list and I'm going to cross out five items before the end of today.

What progress are you making?

paulgb• 16 years ago

My code's compiling :-)

(Actually, I'm waiting for a data extraction script to finish, but I suppose I could be doing more productive things than HN while I wait)

edw519• 16 years ago

A simple hack that has worked wonders for me: On any given day my to do list has exactly one item. This enables me to focus better on the most important thing. I try to make it about one day's work, but who knows...

Today's item: Get buffering working on complex lookups.

patio112• 16 years ago

Trying out new AdWords campaigns for the first time in ~8 months. Got one A/B test live and another coded. (That is the Mother of All A/B Tests for me, since it completely removes one product from my site.)

I also nailed a freelance proposal, got it accepted, and did half a day of well-compensated work that should make the client happy.

Progress on Appointment Reminder, on the other hand, was not so great this week, aside from paper prototyping and a few more pages added to the development notebook.

[Edit: Pace Paras, none of this was actually done on Sunday. I quit working weekends when I went full time, aside from de minimis customer support.]

subbu• 16 years ago

Do you still get time to work on client projects with 2 products in hand? How do you manage it?

tptacek4• 16 years ago

He spent something like 5 hours a week on his "flagship" product; if he put 3x effort into the new product, he'd still be working the equivalent of US half-time.

matt14• 16 years ago

I'm experimenting with price and freemium variations for my web app, which have turned out very well so far (more on that in another post). I'm currently adding support to my timeline app so the color palette includes previously used colors, which has been a highly requested feature. Two year wedding anniversary is also this weekend--trying to balance it all is always fun.

juliend2• 16 years ago

You timeline app seems pretty nice. I love the UI.

matt14• 16 years ago

Thanks! I've tried to make it as clean as possible, which is a challenge as I add more and more things to it.

faramarz• 16 years ago

Awesome product!

I have to add a comment/suggestion. Have you thought of allowing tweets to register as events on the timeline? This is a problem that plagues TV NEWS anchors. Every time they blowup twitter.com to show viewer responses or reactions to a certain event, there's no way for them to manage the tweet other than to have multiple browser tabs open and switch between them.

Terrible experience for the audience and the the anchor as user.

Letting them to save tweets in a fashion that annotates on your timeline seems to be the ideal solution. Keep it up!

matt14• 16 years ago

Hey thanks for the kudos. Twitter integration (and in general third party integration) has been on the todo list for a while now, but it's a pretty big undertaking and I've put it aside in favor of working on the easier kills first. It's definitely something I'd like to integrate one day though. Appreciate the feedback!

paraschopra• 16 years ago

Oh please, today is Sunday :) Seriously, take a day or two off in a week.

Periodic• 16 years ago

I have a full week worth of work planned this coming week. I just had a busy week last week. Right now I'm sitting at the breakfast table with my wife and we're surfing and sharing interesting things we find.

These are the moments I work hard for.

quizbiz3• 16 years ago

I'm in Israel with my family after finishing spring semester. Sunday is a workday here and thus I completely forgot it was Sunday. For better and worse, I feel better about my laziness now.

10ren• 16 years ago

If they can work through the weekend, more power to them. As for me, I find I work better if I take 1-2 days off a week - my thinking is so much clearer. Clarity makes a big difference for the kind of work I'm doing at the moment (I've even tried taking Wednesday off, to get a second boost of clarity, but I can't quite talk myself into it). However, I think there are some kinds of work that don't benefit much from clarity; and sometimes, if you get into the zone, it's much more efficient to keep that loaded in memory, that taking a break, and having to load it in and out. Some people work really well on 34hour days (and a few days off).

dolphenstein• 16 years ago

Not in Australia! It's Monday morning! Still taking the time off though......

albertk• 16 years ago

Making the first mockups of my site.

jsvaughan• 16 years ago

why not do something interesting that's not on the list? something that'll make it better in the long run maybe; get those tests running faster, script up something you do manually, try a different IDE or something?

davidw• 16 years ago

I got a lot of traffic to http://bikechatter.com by providing some live tweeting of the Giro d'Italia stage. Ok, maybe not anything great, but I love watching bike racing, and I would have watched it anyway:-)

Awesome stage up Monte Zoncolan, one of, if not the hardest climbs in Europe. Went to see the stage finish in Asolo in person yesterday.

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

My to-do list for today is to spend more time with my girlfriend and family. All the startup success in the world would not make-up for the love and support of family and friends, if I were to let those relationships slip.

Alright, back to work. Good luck with your 5 items ;-)

tptacek4• 16 years ago

Resolving my 2006 taxes.

quizbiz3• 16 years ago

Better late than never. :) What caused you to do this? if i may ask

tptacek4• 16 years ago

Notice of levy. =)

holdenc• 16 years ago

Today I am also procrastinating -- working on marketing material and brochureware. Ughh. Sometimes I give myself a break by working on an interesting programming problem or just walking around outside. My rule-of-thumb though is to make sure a couple hours of each day involve something (anything) you are really looking forward to.

chanux• 16 years ago

I'm surfing.

pierrefar• 16 years ago

I've added the courses from a couple of new universities to OCW Search (not yet live), and now building a social media "dashboard" to help me keep track of what people are saying about it. The latter got me upset at reddit as it doesn't support JSONP, just plain JSON.

mtkd• 16 years ago

Planted some tomatoes

raganwald2• 16 years ago

re-implementing moving forward in the game history for a local html+JS+CSS implementation of a go game board:

http://github.com/raganwald/go/commit/40800b91b896f17d8371c1...

delano4• 16 years ago

Interesting. Where do people play Go in Toronto btw?

raganwald2• 16 years ago

No idea, as I don't play Go very much myself. I learned the basic rules and have the odd fun game with a good friend. I'm currently working on making a pass-and-play game that supports a wide variety of rule variations as well as the standard game.

As of this moment, you can actually play standard Go with a friend or play a variation called "One Eye Go" where you cannot play into an intersection without liberties unless it extends one of your own groups that has other liberties.

I'll be adding other variations soon, next up are the games that have standard rules for capturing stones but where the objectives differ from taking territory. For example, to connect two sides, to create a line of seven stones, to make the first capture, and so forth.

I just want to be able to take out an iPad and use it as a Go board that remembers plays for analysis.

olliesaunders• 16 years ago

Hey Delano, there were some guys playing at http://hacklab.to/ a year or so back, possibly might still be.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

I was going to get through a chapter a day of Kochan's Objective-C book this weekend. That means two chapters today...

Concours• 16 years ago

doing some seo stuff today, following Patio11 advices and strategy, was not on the list.

delano4• 16 years ago

I left full time work 2 years ago to bootstrap my own company. I've hit many periods of "reduced productivity" along the way, but I'm now about a week away from a public beta that I feel great about.

Allow yourself to be less productive sometimes. That downtime gives you a chance to reflect.

KingOfB2• 16 years ago

I'll second this. If I attempt to be productive for more than an hour and fail, do something else. Exercise I find to be one of the better options.

If I can't snap into it after forcing myself to work for an hour, it's just not meant to be. And if I pretend to be productive for a day and don't get anything done, I usually feel like crap.

delano4• 16 years ago

Absolutely. Cleaning your home is also very effective.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

Right now I'm trying to get a wall posters/art print site off the ground. Just a normal shopping cart. My dad happened into a deal where he gets really good wholesale prices from a few vendors, so we're trying to get that going. It's not going too well so far but hopefully we can figure it out how to get traffic and turn that traffic into purchases soon. The key is really SEO I guess, which just gets built over time so hopefully that will all work out OK soon.

KingOfB2• 16 years ago

Working on dumping 2 days of design work into some ruby code and tests. Then working on Braintree integration. Yea it's sunday, but I can't sit still with all this code in my head.

chrisconley3• 16 years ago

Taking a break from coding and contacting a few people to alpha test my api, which provides an awfully simple front-end to Mechanical Turk.

matt14• 16 years ago

Sounds great, how does it work?

chrisconley3• 16 years ago

How nice of you to ask, Matt. :)

All you need to do is make a http post to my api with the details of the work you want completed* with a url for me to post back the answer to. I take care of dealing with the mturk api and qualifying answers.

* Title, price, and a form partial which provides instructions and the form inputs to be answered.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

If you would just open up MT through the backdoor for us Europeans that would be great.

chrisconley3• 16 years ago

This might be possible since I'm the one making the requests to mechanical turk. I'll look into their terms to see if there's anything preventing this.

flubba• 16 years ago

Trying to get node.js working on webfaction, and then attempting to create something with it. sigh.

winternett• 16 years ago

I create drupal and wordpress sites currently but not apps, customers are so chincy and difficult to work with because they don't understand the tech at all. I want to get deeper because I need to create something that will stabilize my life and finances. This IT world is so vast and there a billion people flocking to whatever the latest IT trend is.

It takes so much money, time, and knowledge to focus on a venture and on any given day the distractions and discouragement are intense, preventing the focus and the space I need to gain that focus. Also great ideas only come out when I am focused. I have taken on a government job, that is interesting, but I fear it will take me further away from being my own boss. It seems that the only way to separate yourself from the herd is to make an original and "hard to emulate" product that won't be easily re-created or copied by the "big boys". I'm working to save up money, then I'll drop off the radar and go for my dreams. Wish me luck!

I have been surfing the past few years instead of getting to work myself. Thanks for making me feel even worse! :P

kashif• 16 years ago

I am done with trying to be super productive. I have changed my working style quite significantly lately. I used to work out plans and to-do lists and have everything organized and feel in control. I reckoned that if I really love programming I can do it for long hours everyday. Unfortunately, this kind of trip fails time and again and starts to feel like a chore. I realized I cant play video games, golf, read for long hours on a regular basis even though I love doing these things. So why should programming be any different. I will only code when I feel like it. I think its less productive then the traditional style but the code feels better.

jdietrich2• 16 years ago

Personal revelation: things really start to move when you measure your progress on a project in terms of business value. It's incredibly easy to get caught up in near-field stuff and just do whatever is at the top of the to do list. I found that when I started asking "what do I do today to add maximum value to my business?" I spent a lot less time in my IDE and a lot more time in Gmail.

johnrob• 16 years ago

There is a law of nature at play: the greater your desire to make money, the more time you spend selling. Holds true in every field.

jdietrich2• 16 years ago

It's not just selling - when you stop measuring your personal productivity in lines of code, it's amazing how much you discover can be outsourced or bought in. Efficiency vs effectiveness and all that.

davidedicillo• 16 years ago

finish a website layout, work on a logo for a new client and some work on the front-end on fancydocs.com

grease• 16 years ago

This one worked for me .. http://nowdothis.com/

Todd• 16 years ago

I wish this archived done items.

jhancock2• 16 years ago

Sunday: I have 5000 new registered users and no way to efficiently send newsletters. I'm finishing the code to handle this today. Note to sendgrid or critsend: you guys really need list management tools/APIs!! I know, I know, your working on it...

petercooper• 16 years ago

Wouldn't that just be something like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor? :-)

jhancock2• 16 years ago

Here's how my startup is growing (I think this applies to many):

1 - user finds my site and signs up. >> Transactional email <<

2 - repeat step 1 enough times.

3 - send out newsletter. This will now start happening every 2 weeks. >> Newsletter email <<

Why should I be paying/configing/templating/testing/managing 2 mail services (mailchimp && sendgrid/critsend)? I don't have sophisticated newsletter tracking needs. I just need to be able to manage a list and use the same/similar API I use for transaction emails, but instead of plugging in an email address in the "to" field, I reference the name of a list stored on the sendgrid server. Doing this, I only have to sync my lists. I don't have to write code to handle sending 5000 emails, taking into account limits on how many addresses will fit into the "to" field on each API call.

Both sendgrid and critsend are working on these features. Its just not there yet.

tmsh• 16 years ago

I usually work in phases.

-explore possibilities that challenge my sense of the problem space (closely allied with reading stuff on the internet, that leads to HN, etc.) -try out various different ideas -come up with a pretty cool idea (using a two-dimensional array for double dispatch -- b/c you can create a nice text table of which functions are being invoked...) -that cool idea encourages me to really solve this problem well -i realize that at this point i really don't need to do something that extensive -i solve it simply using closer to the bare minimum of what was needed -i solve other simple things that i've had queued up

and repeat. in other words, there are two types of productivities that i think we as developers go through. exploratory, expansive stages. and synthetic, work stages. this probably isn't news to anyone. but they really are two different things, and you really have to balance both to be efficient. too much 'getting it done' and you'll lose interest and miss large steps figured out by others or by yourself. not to mention you'll lose the expansive 'energy' that comes from solving things abstractly and in a new way. on the other hand, too much of an 'exploratory' attitude and you not only won't get stuff done, but you'll lose the confidence you had about how well you can solve things in small steps, that build up, etc.

anyway, that's just my sense. there may be more than just two 'phases'. and the phase change is more a calibration of emphasis than an all-or-nothing switch. when i'm going through the exploratory phase i'm much more sociable, taking breaks, etc. and then i pwn in the work phase. or something. i also download and watch a fair amount of tv.

but i think part of what makes one developer more experienced than another is that they have larger phases. they've had the confidence from experience to not need to get to that work phase quite so quickly. of course, you can make mistakes, and not be ready for quite so large an explore/work phase balance -- and have to reel it back a bit, but generally speaking, one's threshold sort of increases (the more features are delivered on time, the more projects are delivered, etc.). anyway.... more important than anything is probably being honest with yourself (if you are the type who naturally tries to self-improve). anyway, this is all a bit off topic...

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

for me, if there is a commitment to a partner or a real customer, whether or not money is necessarily attached to meeting every commitment, I work very hard and get things done.

but without other people and their feedback, I eventually lose steam.

We need other people. We evolved that way. As with sex and many other things, you can do them on your own, but they aren't nearly as compelling and rewarding.

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

Have you tried making commitments with yourself, and putting them where they are always visible?

If not, then maybe you don't need outside forces to make you work, you just aren't good at doing it by yourself (yet).

simplegeek• 16 years ago

Well, I just started MS, four years after my undergraduate. Last semester, I just took one course and didn't do good because it was really hard for me to find nice work-study balance. Anyway, lessons learned and am right now thinking what courses should I take? On a side note, I just finished reading "High Performance JavaScript" that I bought during Oreilly's $9 sale and it was money well spent. And I'm also thinking what Oreilly title should I buy next?

_corbett• 16 years ago

I usually love Sundays for working, because they are so uninterrupted that I can really knock things out. today I was traveling so... not so much.

Woke up at 7:30 to go into office, respond to some emails, printed out boarding pass, grabbed nicest laptop, went home and packed, went to airport, flew to Madrid (watched Dr. Who enroute for break), drank sangria with friends over tapas, took bus outside of Madrid, mingled with conference attendees, came back to hotel room and obsessed about my app stats with AppViz, read my tech blogs, responded to this, now perhaps sleep.

I use the pomodoro method (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com) when I'm in the fugue where I want to be productive but am somehow not managing to.

callmeed• 16 years ago

Wife is out of town this weekend so I'm just trying to keep the kitchen clean and kids alive :)

Tomorrow I will make progress.

scorchin• 16 years ago

Today I lacquered a shed. It's around 30ft x 25ft x 20ft in size. Took all day.

Best part was being outside. I need to get myself a laptop to enjoy hacking in the sun.

megablast• 16 years ago

Two methods that I have read, that writers use to great effect.

Create a big calendar, above your workspace, or somewhere you see all the time. Every day you do work, put a cross on it. Try to get as many crosses in a row as you can. Hemmingway used this method apparently.

The other that actually works great, the first task you do in the morning should be the one you least likely want to do. The one that is easiest to put off. Surprising how good this makes you feel.

andyjdavis2• 16 years ago

I haven't heard of Hemmingway using the calendar method but I believe Jerry Seinfeld used/uses it to help motivate him to sit down and do some writing every day.

crazydiamond• 16 years ago

In your todo list, always mark out your top item for today and finish it +first+. Do your browsing/surfing etc after finishing your top item.

amk• 16 years ago

I have just two really simple bug fixes to be completed, and there is no more work assigned to me yet. But I just can't bring myself to complete it. I have been very lazy for the past 2-3 days :(

Tell HN: Stop surfing and start making things people want

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