ChanningAllen

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It's doing quite well. Thanks for asking. :) Good observation re the forum: folks find it novel and engaging for about a week, then get bored of the repetition. Not very monetizable for an indie team.

Author here. I've spent a decade drinking my own "snake oil" (the advice in this essay), and I've only now committed it to writing so that others can apply it or ignore it as they wish.

I haven't burned out. Instead, I find my work fulfilling, endlessly novel, and valuable to others.

Does this do anything to change your mental model?

Do you think the people described thought about how to increase their practice surface area? No, they were simply /interested/.

In fact, many of them did think about it. Many of them designed, tested, experimented, and tweaked their approaches to their crafts endlessly throughout their lives.

It can be comforting (because it lets us off the hook) to think that masters of their craft all follow the "just do it" ethos while simply "accepting themselves as they are," but usually the opposite is true. At least at the margin.

This article makes me want to cry. I'm an unbelievably big Cormac McCarthy fan and the findings in his library shed so much light on many inscrutable and poetic passages from his books.

I think for example about the following quote from the judge, an insatiably curious (and evil) character from Blood Meridian:

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Cormac's personal library contained "upwards of 20,000 volumes." Turns out, that wasn't the judge speaking but McCarthy himself.

It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.

In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.

Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more people will get it.

Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the rapper Eminem.

I believe OP would agree that the Plan should be low quality, at least at the beginning.

OP emphatically agrees. Overplanning is arrogance in a world with so many unknown unknowns.

Couldn't agree more. I always return to the following quote [1] from Marvin Minsky, who's an intellectual hero of mine:

Most people think that accomplishments like [those of geniuses] require "talents" or "gifts" that cannot be explained… [but] I suspect that genius needs… unusually effective ways to learn. It’s not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of “higher-order” expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657...

It depends… Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.

I have to say that physiological randomness of this kind is one of the main "use cases" for structured routines.

Before I lived such a structured life, I also felt like I would enter various activities with a roulette wheel of emotions. Which I found to be a big problem! But these days, and due to my structure, a) my mood is highly stable and predictable and b) on the rare occasions when my mood deviates, I usually have a very good idea of why, e.g. deviations in sleep.

Nice app! I've rolled my own custom solution inside of Notion, or else you'd probably have another signup.

Complex goals often require complex solutions.

Keeping it simple is probably a good policy for most people most of the time. But for those who want to break through the plateaus that simple solutions will inevitably lead to, they can look to posts like this one.

Fixed

I'm a big fan of all 5! Plus many, many more.

I wasn't being hyperbolic in my use of the term "80/20." The aim, fire, scan article truly only represents about 20% of the tools/techniques I swear by.

On that note, read some Extended Mind philosophy if you haven’t, originally from Chalmers I believe

Literally considering writing a book on extended mind theoretic ideas. Highly recommend Andy Clark's "Supersizing the Mind" (2010).

do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?

Both. At first (~10 years ago) it was about managing deficiencies, but before long I was performing far above the average neurotypical knowledge worker.

Really glad to hear that. My recommendation is to put a lot of emphasis on the "environment" step toward the end of the article. Otherwise, you might find yourself gaining a merely temporary hold of self-control only to get distracted and fall back into a previous pattern of thinking/behavior.

I enjoyed "On Bullshit" but I would much more emphatically recommend Frankfurt's "The Reasons of Love," [0] the basic argument of which is that self-love has been wrongly maligned in our society.

Here's a taste:

Insofar as a person loves himself — in other words, to the extent that he is volitionally wholehearted — he does not resist any movements of his own will. He is not at odds with himself; he does not oppose, or seek to impede, the expression in practical reasoning and in conduct of whatever love his self-love entails. He is free in loving what he loves, at least in the sense that his loving is not obstructed or interfered with by himself.

RIP.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Love-Princeton-Classics/dp/06...

I say this as someone who was probably like you once. … I also tried all the meditation techniques whilst relentlessly trying to optimise my productivity, work and life, resulting in an inevitable burn out. … Following that, I have ended up just using a few text files for organisation and I am probably more organised than I have ever been.

I applaud your journey. (Genuinely!) But isn't it possible that even though you and I have followed a similar path re productivity systems, the path has suited me better than it has suited you? And not because either of us is a better or worse person than the other, but because we're simply different?

Here's the way I see it [0]: Society is a pack of cards with multiple suits, and there's an ace in each suit. If someone else's ace card doesn't work for you, it doesn't necessarily mean they're full of sh*t; it might just mean they belong to a different suit.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/chasing-other-peoples-ace-...

The replication problems of the marshmallow test are certainly interesting, but I'm not sure how they are relevant to the point being made by Robert Sapolsky in the quoted passage.

His point has nothing to do with the predictive powers of the test. Instead it's that the children who succeeded in deferring gratification succeeded by means of effective strategies rather than by stoicism or genetics.

Author here. I am a fan of box breathing, along with several other "proven" breathing techniques.

Not sure what the downside is of experimenting with new techniques to add to one's tool set? Keep in mind that I'm just a guy on the internet who discovered something that worked and decided to share it with others in the hope that they'd also find it helpful.

Indeed the author did. Thanks for the catch.

Teach and inspire people to become entrepreneurs on their own terms, e.g. without raising venture capital. Media company (podcast, newsletter) with a large online and in-person community.

Tech is weird in that you're competing against a lot of very smart people, the barriers to building a tech product are very low, and the competition is global. In contrast if you open a used car lot you'll typically be competing with few average business men in the area who had the capital to start the company. Your chances of success are astronomically higher even if it's capped.

This is exactly what I tell some of my non-techie friends who are interested in entrepreneurship. Problem is, it turns out most people care just as much about the journey as they do about the destination and turn their noses up at the prospect of being another guy/gal running a drab retail store down the street.

A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results.

This is a central pillar of Newport's argument, and it doesn't hold water.

Anyone who has actually built and managed knowledge work teams knows that a "heavy burden" of work from the perspective of one employee might be "child's play" to another employee. Perhaps this is less true with blue-collar jobs, but it's emphatically true with knowledge work. Hell, it's even true with the same employee across time. (Coding work that would have overwhelmed me as a junior developer would bore me to tears today.)

If we're strictly talking about optimizing for market competitiveness, the onus is on Newport to explain how lowering the work burden for employees who can't sustainably do N units of work per week is a better idea than simply replacing those employees with others who can do N units/week.

Yep, I use Notion for nesting, since that's where I do all of my other work.

Workflowy is great though — years back, I used it for everything. These days I supplement my Notion workflow with Dynalist, which is basically a Workflowy clone with additional features.

does it generalize well to others?

Numerous readers have already responded saying it's worked for them so far, but the devil's in the details I suppose. I really only shared the tip of the iceberg of how it works, and a lot of the magic [1] happens down at the level of the active work sessions.

[1] Things like website blocking, task timers, interstitial journaling, pattern interrupts, etc. (Of course, there's a certain logic to it all that I'll spell out in a future article.)

By default I'm actually very low energy. Always have been. I recall my dad admonishing me many times in adolescence that he'd take me to the doctor and they'd prick me with needles if I didn't stop napping during the day.

Somewhat circularly, it's the system itself that gives me the energy to keep using the system. I know, because I've engineered it to work that way. (At first this wasn't intentional, but when I noticed the positive effects in an earlier version I systematically began to tease out those effects.)

Ultimately they're both expressions of the scientific method.

But the "innovation" (if that's not too strong of a word) in the nested plan-do-learn loop is that it's explicitly engineered for someone's personal life routine, rather than, say, the development of an external product or service.

I can come at this from either direction, since both of the following statements are true: a) this system reduces the frequency with which unexpected events happen in the first place, and b) the unexpected events that do take place become a lot easier to handle with the system.

a) The fact that I work in conscious 90-minute chunks allows me to take steps to prevent myself from getting distracted. For example, at the planning phase of a 90-minute session, I'll usually activate a 90-minute website block using an app called Freedom [1] and turn on DND mode across all my devices. Then when the session is over, I can lower all these defenses guilt-free.

b) Say I have a friend or relative staying over, which is pretty distracting. I communicate with them upfront: "Hey, I have this routine where, first thing every morning, I do a couple hours of focused work and don't do any socializing. I even wear headphones to block distracting noise. It's not you, it's me. So would you mind just doing your thing for like an hour or two when you wake up tomorrow morning? Then we can chill and go for brunch." etc.

As far as being sick? I guess it depends on what kind of sickness we're talking about lol. I've gotten COVID, been a little hungover, and other aberrations, and usually had no problem carrying myself through just a single work session. (Notably, my first 90-minute session of the day is a routine I've deeply internalized through repetition, so it requires very little mental effort.)

[1] https://freedom.to