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Exactly this. After lots of trial and error I’ve found it easier to build better engines by extracting and abstracting the common elements from my game development process than focusing solely on engine development. Really can’t describe how much my productivity has gone up since I switched my focus by adding constraints to my development process and narrowing my focus to more parochial problems instead of always pondering the general/wider abstractions. It seems that abstractions are the natural consequence of focusing on a narrow and concrete problem, but people instead try to directly jump to the wider abstract space without any bounds or constraints set, and eventually overwhelming themselves.

Lol. Looks more like the first option to me, but I also feel that there is something very very special about these kind of efforts and people who don’t mind spending their time and energy on things like this, precisely because of the fact that the world is filled with the ‘useful-or-not’ types. In fact, I feel we need a lot more of these ‘do-I-find-it-personally-interesting-or-not’ types, so that the rest of us can keep riding the ‘whether-or-not’ bandwagon and when that one off ‘interesting-or-not’ turns out to be useful, in ways we didn’t foresee, we can ask them to join us.

I still don’t understand how this is any different from the notion of problem solving. And I really didn’t understand the human-AI equivalence, is it just the substrate independent nature of turing-completeness? If so, I think we still lack the epistemic toolkit to say anything conclusive about creating an equivalence, or for that matter any form of comparative relationship, especially given that AGI is still not a problem that is well-defined, let alone discussing the solution space. No?

Such an important point that. I would just add that the lack of enthusiasm for paid tools I think is because of the lack of significant developments in the space itself. The fact that we can still use clis and 40 year old tools like Emacs without losing much on the benefits of the modern day tooling system says everything one would need to know. And I don't mean it in a degrading way, but there needs to be a paradigm shift from the HCI side. You can't just throw in a debugger, syntax highlighter, linter, and expect people to pay for it; when I can do all of that and more on Emacs with probably a weekends worth of tinkering.

I feel "Focus" as a function of overwhelming want or overwhelming need is a better proposition than as a function of tips and tricks. I've had times when despite all the raging distractions I've got the work done because I was so invested in it and there have been times when despite being in a perfectly isolated, no distraction environment, I have failed to get the work done because there was no real urgent need for it to be done, intrinsic or otherwise.

I would say work on things based on constraints, that are beyond the artificial boundary of productivity tricks, like an overwhelming desire for action or an imminent deadline from an external enforcing agent; differentiate between want, want-to-want, and have-to-want; and mainly rest well, for energy management is key in working well.

Agree on one level, but on the contrary, if we give the medium its due, it is much more conducive to memorialization than the pre-digitized/non-digitized world. I think this question might help future "anthropologist-like" professionals to go about understanding the developments much better than what we can do today. This is to say that there is significantly better contextual returns when asking this question in a digitised environment than in a non-digitized environment like in-person physical conversations and other similar events.

'Hard vs Easy' is probably one of the worst dichotomies to invoke when you are trying to get people interested in something that you think is hard.

And more importantly, no one ever who does hard stuff thinks to themselves that they are doing hard stuff. Almost every inch of such work is a combination of interest and constraint i.e., you want to do it or you have to do it.

Secondly, you want emotions helping you here. Emotions evade this trap tactfully by being abstract in their appearance. Every person I know who works on hard mathematics is either a romantic who does it because of their love (interest) for mathematics or a foot soldier who does it because they have to. There is no way you can articulate your way into anything if there is no emotional vector involved(negative or positive). Hardness is just a detail that can be abstracted if you are emotionally aligned.

Copy pasting my answer from "Don't offer a free plan":

When it comes to B2C, prescriptions don't apply uniformly, or for that matter scale. Beware.

My only suggestion would be that be honest with the value proposition of your product. Know that your electron-based note-taking tool is not the same as the entire g-suite or ms office.

And finally, remember that no one is more emotionally invested in your product than you are. So let the suggestions trade.

When it comes to B2C, prescriptions don't apply uniformly, or for that matter scale. Beware.

My only suggestion would be that be honest with the value proposition of your product. Know that your electron-based note-taking tool is not the same as the entire g-suite or ms office.

And finally, remember that no one is more emotionally invested in your product than you are. So let the suggestions trade.

Good point, but I think the problem is almost always with the parsing of the advice. Receiver's perception and experience uniquely determines the degree of deviation in the interpretation. For eg. "Write short sentences" can be easily perceived as a dichotomy between fixed length vs variable length sentence, especially if you do not see the two categories, long and short, separately. Adding rhythm is merely a byproduct of noticing the recurring pattern and adjusting one's sentences. This is to say that the argument you make towards "short sentences" can also made towards your argument of writing "easy sentences".

Agree with your sentiment. Contextuality and Applicability are definitely two main components when it comes to knowledge acquisition. But there are people who just derive pleasure from learning, irrespective of whether the concepts are connected or disjoint, and I think it is very important that we have all variety of people, and encourage them into pursuing what gives them satisfaction.

This is completely misguided. People who call themselves C/C++ Programmers are basically developers who are proficient in Systems Programming and not necessarily C or C++. It just happens to be that C and C++ were the only primetime options until the likes of Go and Rust entered the scene.

Also if you know C++ to a decent enough extent, you are going to have a certain level of command over C too. And there is no reason why calling yourself a C/C++ Programmer should undermine your proficiency in either of those languages.

Broad generalizations are generally bad.

Take whatever I say with a grain of salt, but I feel intentions(not to be confused with intentionality) help a lot here. They play a distinctive role in the etiology of attention(and the subsequent process of resilience building), one of the fundamental aspect of dealing with psychological issues. For eg, Whenever you become aware of these nightmares, try to observe the casual chain, eventually your mind will be inured to these episodes and will become much better at threat detection. Something like a mindfulness(Vipassana) retreat can help with this a lot.

My experience has been that most of the psychological issues can be resolved to a great extent by employing the "redundancy of potential command a.k.a Self-Organization"(See McCulloch). Meditation does this by asking you to bring back the wandering mind again and again. But you can also do this voluntarily by repeatedly observing the stress inducing conditions such as nightmare(in your case), which can help your brain better adjust and detect patterns.

Stress resilience is one of the most important things when it comes to knowledge work, also one of the most neglected aspect. Mindfulness, stoicism, exercise help, but nothing helps as much as a good night sleep. Also the other thing people usually fail to note is the vicious stress-sleep cycle (lack of sleep induced stress <-> stress induced lack of sleep). It took me years to realize that so much of my problems with bedtime revenge, burnout, non-clinical depression, permastress was basically just lack of quality sleep. FWIW, it helps to think of productivity in terms of sleep and stress when you are working in the knowledge economy. Just like sleep debt, you can also accumulate productivity debt due to lack of stress resilience, lack of sleep, which can eventually lead to things like burnout.

My view is that the category error is inevitable, for we still do not have a clear idea of what each of those categories really mean. In this case, what does it even mean to be creative? If there is no consensus yet on an objective definition for creativity, then what stops us from including tacit knowledge as part of creativity?

William Morris, one of the father of modern day design and a medievalist despised industrialization, but considered sincere imitation to be authentic. If we consider authenticity to be an essential characteristic of being creative, can you call imitation a creative endeavor? https://www.raghuveer.net/posts/sincere-imitation-can-be-aut...

That is why I usually try to avoid advice from people who (explicitly) give advice. It is better to observe what they do than what they say. Even if you wind up not enjoying the wealth, you’ll have understood it yourself and not be cursing yourself for not having tried. Except for life and death situations, and situations involving technical expertise, this applies to everything. Most of the time it is just our laziness selecting for examples of success that allow it to stay while reaping the benefits of working hard. A mind virus discouraging responsibility.

I have a feeling that you do side-projects because they provide you the autonomy and the ability to tinker that official projects and collaborative OSS don't. And it is part of this autonomy that allows you to up and leave anytime you don't feel like it, whereas you can't do that with say your office project. So why take away that distinct advantage that allows you to do these things in the first place. My only question is why are we self-commoditizing the only thing that is providing a sense of relief from what is already a measured activity ie., people(office) constantly telling us what to do, when to do, and what tools to use etc and how well we did in abiding by that.

Agree with the post, but not with the title. Overtime I have come to realize that being lazy/productive are the most meaningless measures there can be. You are either enjoying what you are doing so much so that you don't give an f about the time spent or you are at a position of responsibility. Either way you are doing something worthwhile(at least to you). The unwarranted mechanization of your life through quantifying the superficial aspects of what constitutes productive and what doesn't will only distance you from writing more. In fact, The feeling of being unproductive is more often than not a byproduct of not being in one of these situations --- all it says is neither am I enjoying what I'm doing nor am I in a position of responsibility. A net negative term, says nothing of essence at all, squeezing every bit of life out of you by inducing unwarranted guilt!

Unproductive: The Procrustean Bed of Modernity. My experience has been that a person is either enjoying it so much so that he or she doesn't give an f about hours spent, or is bound by responsibility. The feeling of being unproductive is more often than not a byproduct of not being in one of these situations --- all it says is neither am I enjoying what I'm doing nor am I in a position of responsibility. A net negative term, says nothing of essence at all, squeezing every bit of life out of you by inducing unwarranted guilt!

Knowledge Continuum (https://www.raghuveer.net)

An attempt to explore everything compsci, cogsci, philosophy, math, history.