Code everyday, contribute to open source, write n words everyday, read books everyday, exercise, learn new skills, market yourself, socialize, travel. Is there an end? I am surrounded by so many productive activities and each one within my reach that each time I am not doing it, it feels I am frittering away very valuable time. In fact, even when I am doing it like reading a book, I feel working on my mini-game could have been more productive.
Someone has written 40K words in five months, someone has created a kernel at the age of 18, someone has made 365 days streak on github and someone has done a biking trip across India. I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.
I second this: reading all this can create a sense of guilt.
I think for myself, the key is knowing that the guy who biked across India wasn't writing a novel. Or at least, he wasn't biking across India, writing a novel, and maintaining a 40+ hour job and raising a family.
I'm a husband, father of two kids, am involved in my church, and own a house with a yard. So, "contributing to open source" and "writing every day" or "learning a new skill" is #5 on my list. Probably further down the list if I think about it.
That said, I think it is possible to do _one_ of those things well on a regular basis. Right now I'm learning a new programming language. Before that I was reading a number of books.
Bottom line: it starts with knowing your own personal bandwidth limits, and knowing your prioritizes. Then backfill with the rest.
> I think for myself, the key is knowing that the guy who biked across India wasn't writing a novel. Or at least, he wasn't biking across India, writing a novel, and maintaining a 40+ hour job and raising a family.
Well exactly.
A bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that (to sicken the GP) I write at least 30000 words every 5 months - and that's with a time investment of 3-5 hours on a Tuesday evening (I write commentary for a weekly paper). I could hit eighty or ninety thousand if I didn't like video games and talking to my girlfriend etc. There's no magic there - my dad is a writer, and when I was 6 I wanted to Be Like Him, and ever since I've enjoyed writing. You do that for 22 years, you pick up some speed and style.
On the other hand, whenever I think "I need to contribute to $OPEN_SOURCE_PROJECT", I suffer immediately from 'don't know where to start' paralysis, and usually give up pretty quickly.
Nobody's ever going to be confident at everything.
EDIT: The other thing is sort of 'confirmation bias' - stuff you're very productive at feels very easy, so you don't notice the productivity so much as you feel acutely useless at things which feel difficult.
You don't contribute to open source because you think you need to contribute to open source. That only leads to "don't know where to start" paralysis.
You contribute to an open source project because it had a bug or lacked a feature you needed and you took care of it. There is no paralysis when you have laser-focus on a particular problem.
I have always picked up things because I have found them interesting but the sense of guilt of not doing enough plagues you when you see success and recognition of other people in those fields.
For eg, someone who didn't waste his time during grad years and was able to complete many awesome things, fetched a job that I could only imagine. Lately, I have been avoiding going out on weekends, because "I have to do build something for world to show". Has this been helpful? Yes maybe, but not certainly, "very enjoyable".
I agree. It's easy to overlook the sustainability advantage of doing something every day.
With the rarest exceptions, I've spent at least an hour every day on preparing for, executing, and fulfilling the Kickstarter I ran last year (http://planetoz.net/kickstarter). It's only an hour, but it adds up.
It's taken much longer to complete than I anticipated. However, I've made steady progress despite losing one job, moving to a new state, and starting a new job over the course of that year. If I had tried to put in 2-4 hours of work every day, on top of managing my full time career, I know (from many a HN comment) that I would have burned out.
Instead, I have all my bills in order, steady income, and the funds I need to get the external help (editors, proofreaders, cover artists) that I need beyond what the Kickstarter helped cover. This means a longer wait for my backers, but also much better rewards for their patience. With the hour a day pace, a finished novel looks like an inevitability rather than a mere dream.
> Bottom line: it starts with knowing your own personal bandwidth limits, and knowing your prioritizes. Then backfill with the rest.
I agree with this. All these articles about doing X number of things in order to be productive really are just ideas. They are ideas that you may or may not incorporate depending on what is beneficial for yourself.
I work out and stretch every morning, and have recently started to write and read a little bit before I get to work. I don't do these things so I can tell other people about my accomplishments or my awesome rituals. I do these things because they help me throughout my day. Stretching and working out gives me more energy while writing in the morning helps organize my thoughts for the day.
> Someone has written 40K words in five months, someone has created a kernel at the age of 18, someone has made 365 days streak on github and someone has done a biking trip across India. I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.
There is: accept and own your own past choices and move forward, and stop comparing your achievements to other people as a yardstick of past success (still do it, if you want, as a tool to find ways to improve your own future outcomes, but that's a different function.)
There are billions of people in the world. Most probably, very large (absolutely) numbers of them are going to have done more impressive things in narrow domains of achievement than you, and its quite likely that a sizable number will have done much more impressively in fairly broad areas -- and with modern technology, you are more likely to hear about all of them than in the past. But there is no reason to be guilty about not having the most impressive resume in the world (and in many cases, if you had the capacity to have mirrored their achievement [and fortune of circumstance as well as effort and innate ability often play a role], the cost would have been unacceptable -- lots of people who have done impressive things regret the cost.)
Well, maybe not an easy way, but probably easier than mirroring the all of the kind of achievements you are talking about that make you feel guilty, so easier, at least.
You certainly have to make some trade offs. But as long as you achieved what you want to do, how could that cost be "unacceptable" in any sense? You expected it and wholeheartedly embraced its existence in the very first place!
Please forgive the Gawker media owned link; it's worth it.
On a more serious note, this also can be applied to the #YouCanLearnAnything campaign. Sure, it's a positive message, and probably true, but what to learn? I sympathize; what I've found helps is starting with two realizations:
1) The possibilities are quite literally endless; don't tell yourself you can't, because it's probably not true.
2) The one certain limitation is time.
With those two things in mind, it comes down to one question: what do you want to do with what time you have?
More deeply: what is important to you? How can you best achieve it? Is your scope to small? Good, you'll finish it fast. Is your scope too large? Try breaking it down, and realize you're only human. Anyone can change, but most people won't. Don't try to change everything at once; start small and keep focused on your long term goals.
I wish I could do significant research, contribute more to open source, build a business, etc. As it is, I'm too busy coding at the day job, and all my other time is eaten up by training for search and rescue and practicing for musical performances. I'm lucky I got time to setup a self-hosted cloud for the wife's new tablet this weekend. But those are the choices I've made, and I'm mostly happy with them.
Also related is differentiating between the things you want to happen or change vs things you want to change your self.
We are surrounded by problems and it can be easy to become bogged down trying/wanting to solve them all yourselves. Realize you are not alone, that many other people are also working to solve those problems. Try to focus on finding the problems that you can solve and that you want to solve.
The simple solution is finding your niche. I commented on the thread explaining how I blog everything I learn and connect it to previous blog articles I have written (to help my memory).
I intentionally write the articles across multiple blogs to ensure no one expects I write daily and that I can explore various interests.
The point being, this works for me. It doesn't look at all like I write daily (even though I do), and as such I'll never "achieve" what other people do (i.e. I'll never have 1600 blog entries in one blog).
Does this make me feel bad?
Not at all! The point is, I am doing it for myself, not for bragging rights over others. If I wanted to do that, I could totally just set up a program to auto-push to github.
Rather, I feel good at the end of each day because I write out a list of things I need to accomplish: wash dishes, compliment my girlfriend, write a blog post, etc. Every time I cross something off the list I know I am working towards my goals.
Humans are notorious for achieving things no other species can achieve. However, this is only achieved through our consciousness and our ability to see and reach for long-term goals.
No one can achieve every long-term goal, but to achieve one just set aside 20 - 60 minutes a day to work on it. Cross it off your list, and accomplish great things. There's no shame in not writing 40K words in five months if that's not your goal.
Well, the competitive nature of humans is both a curse and a blessing, in the end few if any of the things we do will have any long term impact on humanity, most of those will be desctructive, like depleting the resources of the planet or destroying the environment. If you set yourself the goal to have a meaningful impact, then lots of those "achievements" become meaningless.
Everyone is different. Most people don't feel the need to be productive and improve every hour of every day.
My co-workers are all nice and fun people, I enjoy working my 7-8 hours a day. But when i get home I don't want to keep working, learning new work-related skills and such, I haven't contributed to open source projects since I started where I'm working now.
I couldn't be more happy about how separate my work and non-work life is, I have a ton of fun with my own hobbies during my free time and have no stress whatsoever.
If you are very ambitious and have large goals, of course you do have to work hard for it though. That goes without saying.
You do not have to needlessly compare yourself to others all the time in this manner. Doing so invites an unfair comparison where you see all your flaws and only the strong points of others who appear greater than yourself.
Instead, you should focus on comparing yourself to yourself. Have you improved since you last checked up on yourself? That's really what matters.
Now, of course, looking only at yourself in a vacuum is impossible - but the opposite of constant comparison to others is detrimental if it leads to feelings like this.
> I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.
I've a very easy solution: you are the only meter. What matters is for you to try to be better to the yesterday's version of you. As long as you try to do this, without stressing, but in a constant way, you'll enjoy the results in the long run.
My solution is to not do any one thing every day, with the exception of common tasks, like eating and breathing. I try to do at least one thing to better myself each day, and that activity can come from a myriad of choices. Even on those days when I seemingly get nothing done, like sitting on the couch stuffing my face and watching football, I feel like I've accomplished resting myself to prepare for a more productive day tomorrow.
Life's to short to worry about doing anything that you don't want to do in the moment, as long as all of your responsibilities are out of the way first. By responsibilities, I mean commitments to others, such as family, friends, and associates. If I don't feel like doing something for myself, I just don't do it, and I'm much better off for it.
>I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.
The easiest thing is to be able to look at the achievements you have, and say truthfully, "maybe if I put my mind to it I could bike across India, but I like what I've done more and I'm better at it than I could be at anything else."
That said, spending probably an hour a day on the entire project, you could probably spend ten-minute blocks of writing (250 words in 10 minutes seems totally doable), language learning (I spend 20 minutes a day between duolingo and memrise), exercise (7 minute workout plus stretching), and other skills that are easily parceled into small chunks.
Doing this alone won't make you great, but it'll be a baseline and a foundation you continue to lay. You can build on that.
Here's how to kill two birds with one (gamified) stone : If you host your static blog on GitHub Pages, you'll get a 'contribution' point for every day you post (or even commit) to it. Thus building up your GitHub streak, and post count/size consistently.
This only works if you value your github streak number/commit stats. "measure your self-worth by" implies that all other values are secondary, which would just be silly.
I think the point of "do X every day" is getting over the physiological hurdle of starting something. If you want to write more but find yourself watching TV all evening because you fell burnt out from working all day. Maybe you should be relaxing in front of the TV, but you are in a better position to make that decision once you have force your self to get over the initial hurdle by writing n words. That n should be sufficiently small that if if are burnt out and want to back to relaxing you have not overly burdened yourself, but you will likely find many occasions when you want to keep writing because its something you would rather do than watch TV.
Therefore I'll give you one anyway: Work on that game if you still like it, and otherwise do some truly fun and relaxing and "unproductive", far away from any computer.
I think we just need to prioritize. The world is becoming each day more abundant of interesting things to do, just ask o yourself what is the most interesting to you at the moment.
The only way to not feel guilty is to drop desire to do what other folks are doing or have done. Important thing is being able to create a space for you to enjoy something that you want to do for love of it.
However, it seems that some people think that achieving a high word count is a good thing. Please try to use as few words as possible to get your ideas across. See this as a friendly gesture to your audience, saving them time.
Obviously, this does not hold for novels and fiction, where the reader actually likes to read. Perhaps I am a bit misguided in thinking that (technical) blog posts do not belong to this category.
As a matter of fact it should hold especially for novels and fiction. I hate it when I have to read 600 pages to reach the end of a book that could very well be written in 400. Most novels my dad has in his library dating back a few decades were between 250 and 350 pages. Nowadays they’re 50% bigger and the trend keeps going. War and Peace was 1.200 pages long and now the average fiction trilogy is way beyond that.
As both a novel writer and blogger, I actually recommend going for sheer word count first, but still editing vigorously afterward. I find it much easier to edit after I've dumped everything from my brain.
Case in point: I only reached this concise comment after drafting two other, much longer versions of it.
Yes and no, it's more nuanced than that. An analogy would be that LoC is not a great way to judge the quality of a program, but a good developer will produce millions of lines of code in many different applications before they master their craft.
What hitting a daily word count does is force you to produce something even when you don't think you have anything to say. Or more importantly, when you are stuck and have to painfully work through how to express a tough idea. 250 is quite low for a daily target, honestly.
That said, blind word production obviously doesn't do much unless you're going back and fearlessly editing your work, identifying what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong.
This is one of the reasons why I love the draft (draftin.com) writer: you can track both words added and removed words, so refactoring your writing causes your score to go up that much faster than just writing.
I actually did the same thing, but I use it solely as a way to expand my knowledge (as opposed to writing better, feeling better, etc.).
It actually helped a lot and my memory is very sharp when it comes to articles I have written. Writing it in a blog style, I could link articles and in turn (I imagine it like this) in my brain link the knowledge in a given article to other articles. It actually has worked quite well because I can remember what articles I have written, and what are linked inside each one, giving me excellent recall.
Writing doesn't just make you a better thinker. It turns you into a different person. Writing daily turns you into a different person daily.
The most interesting result of writing daily is you start to have different kinds of thoughts. You start to pay attention to things you didn't consciously think of before, come to conclusions, and that habit changes what you think of from thereon.
The most surprising result is this way of thinking subconsciously becomes second nature within a year. It doesn't feel like trying.
> I truly believe that getting into the habit of writing consistently was one of the best decisions I’ve made this year. This post explores the reasons why I care about writing and keep doing it every day. I hope it inspires you to write (more) too.
I agree!
I've written every day on my blog since January 2011, nearly 1,600 posts. Technically, I post every day, so during my trips to North Korea I wrote and scheduled two weeks of posts before going, for example. The benefits are huge -- beyond thinking differently and more discipline, finding clients and developing new ideas, which have led to the classes and seminars I lead, etc.
I've also done burpees every day since December 2011, passing 1,000 days without missing any. I started at ten per day and worked up to two sets of twenty-five per day and find myself as fit at 43 as when I competed in Ultimate Frisbee at Nationals over a decade ago.
Writing and burpees are great, but nearly any daily challenging activity you choose to do will bring great benefits. I call such activities SIDCHAs, for self-imposed daily challenging healthy activities -- http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/self-imposed-daily-cha.... Most of what the author wrote about writing applies to other SIDCHAs in their way.
Meditation, yoga, lifting weights, practicing social skills, writing ten business ideas per day, cooking a fantastic meal per day, taking cold showers (which I also do, though every fourth day now, after doing thirty days straight of them), and so on all qualify in different ways.
Your habits define major parts of you, all the more the daily challenging ones, as does their lack. SIDCHAs train you in discipline and dedication that you end up applying everywhere else.
This is where "environment structuring" becomes very effective - if you want to establish the habits but you find yourself missing days or being sporadic, it's most likely because your environment isn't structured to support it.
That can mean everything from having a comfortable place conducive to {writing | reading | meditating} to making sure you create time from friends / women / family to do your thing. Mornings have always been the best time of the day for me - waking up early is pretty crucial to this I think.
When you set the tone of your day with discipline, the rest of the day seems to fall right into place.
Hey, don't give up on that dream. You can write a book. You're only a want-a-writer if you fall into the trap of believing that. And there's nothing wrong with wanting something.
I often find that if I'm not making any progress in a given area I'm practicing, a change in process helps. There are at least two components to skill: practice and strategy. Strategy is what you choose to practice, and skill can't be had without both. If you find your practice ineffective, what's probably needed is a change in strategy.
If you want to write a book, then perhaps a revision of "don't break the chain" is in order: If your writing wasn't coherent, practice making it coherent. One idea would be to devote each week to writing a different chapter of your book. That way, you're still writing every day, but the focus changes each week, so that if you're unhappy with the current week's output, you have a higher chance of feeling better about next week. I realize it's hard to write a book in a nonlinear fashion (earlier chapters guide later chapters, almost by definition, so it's tempting to try to perfect each chapter before moving onto the next) but the goal is to practice writing a book, not to write a good book on your first try. Forcing yourself to hammer out a chapter per week will bring coherence, if not quality. But quality is simply a matter of practice, so keep at it!
I have to agree. I always want to start a somewhat personal blog, but I can't think of many topics. My thoughts are often half-baked, not very original and once I wrote them down, they tend to be obsolete again, more or less.
I never got paid for writing directly, but then I figured that in a certain way, I am already a writer. Because I write articles for my business and they make me money. I didn't rank for a certain keyword two years ago. Then I ranked. I have this little code snippet that checks which landing page converted to paying users and I figured that my writing made me a lot of money, because Google is a major traffic source. So this one article took me 10 hours to write and made me 5,000€ so far.
Odd, isn't it? I can't think of stuff to write about personally, but I do make money with writing indirectly through my business.
That is why I use beeminder to track the things I want to do. I get really nerdy looking graphs and if I don't follow through with my goals I have to pay them money, which is a nice way to check if I really don't see the value in what I am doing, or if I just don't want to do it that day.
I gain no financial benefit from this endorsement, I just really like their service.
I use it as a brain dump to think about what I want to write, and it seems to work. I write better when I have a decent plan about what I want to write, and I use 750 words to work through that plan. At 10-11 minutes for an entry, it's not a big commitment and it pays large dividends. That said, writing at 750words.com for me is different than "real" writing.
This reminds me about an idea I had but never really followed: For all you writers out there, do you think a device with an e-ink display and a normal keyboard, similar to a laptop, but designed for the sole purpose of distraction free writing, is something consumers might want?
I think that depends on your expectations... I lived the days where you would connect to a computer hundreds of miles away through a 1200 bps modem. That was pretty laggy sometimes but always manageable...
I'm not even much of a writer, but I want this for general computer use. Battery life and heat generation would be way better. If the Kindle's web browser was a bit better and the device came with a native text editor, I would use it as my general computing device. I want this so badly.
I rather like the idea, at least in theory. It turns out that nature can actually be rather noisy, not to mention filled with mosquitoes and the like, so I've found it less productive than hoped in practice.
I wrote 750 words a day for over 400 days and http://750words.com played a huge role in motivating me. Not wanting to break the chain kept me coming back to write on days when I didn't feel like it.
I'd do that if I had any inspiration in the morning. But I find myself completely empty when I've just woken up. I feel that I lack emotions and input to write anything good.
The part that i really connected with is:
"The biggest problem I face, though, is that I’m a perfectionist. I have a hard time writing shitty first drafts and postponing editing until after getting something down on paper first. Instead, I often try to get it “right” the first time, thereby making the writing process unnecessarily painful. The number of blog posts I’ve published this year is evidence enough of my struggle."
I've struggled with this too - not necessarily just with writing but with other undertakings too. I did read the reference that was linked and other literature connected to this phenomenon. It'd be very interesting to learn from the OP (or others here), some techniques to overcome this barrier?
I would recommend not to concentrate on quality too much. Just hire corrector to do final polishing. Be being perfectionist one can easily build anxiety and procrastination.
I write daily as well. I have personal wiki I use for planning, diary and keeping notes. Right now it has about 1 MB of text and 50 MB images. I use ZIM, they have some nice workflows:
http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Usage/Getting_Things_Done.html
Over time it kind of grows. My main project TODO list has 1500 items. I even have check list for packing luggage :-)
It makes a lot of sense. I like to write documentation (!) but only once I have the publication flow setup. The knowledge that "someone" will be readin my docs makes me a but more explicit and more "explain-carefully"
Luckily this means the next time I come back to it amazingly that person who benefits is me.
But yes - write docs every day, write summaries of your docs every day, write summaries of the summaries every day. Eventually you have a decent body of work to draw on.
Heinrich von Kleist wrote some 300 years ago an excellent essay titled The Expansion of Thought whilst Speaking [1]. Recommended read. Having to communicate with an external entity expands ones own understanding in ways that they could not with internal thought alone.
I'm now going back to my daily writing routine that I've scantily kept up with. But I have some concerns. How does one improve their quality of writing when they are not at school? What I mean is, I can write, write, write and I know after a period of time I'll "better" than I was before. But without having people who scrutinize your work, who critique your grammar, and do all the things that teachers used to do for us in our school years, we might only be able to get so good before we plateau. Am I wrong about this? How do you know you're writing "correctly" if you don't have the feedback mechanism that we had in our schooling days -- aka grades, peer reviews, draft 1, draft 2, etc etc...
I plan on writing for myself and for my blog. But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".
>But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".
I'd reconsider that position for a number of reasons. Not the least of which being that it is a logical contradiction.
Nobody is born knowing how to practice things. This is something we learn as we acquire skills, learn about goals, learn how to channel our energies towards meeting said goals, etc.
Thus practice is itself a skill that requires practice to develop.
Since our practicing of practicing will necessarily not be perfect, we will not be "practicing practicing perfectly". So we will never achieve the state of "perfect practice", and thus we will never be able to make our practicing "perfect".
Thus the statement "perfect practice makes perfect" becomes equivalent to "perfection is impossible, since we can never achieve perfect practice".
In my experience people who think like this end up paralyzing themselves with doubt and never produce anything of value -- not because they are incapable, but because they think themselves into a cage of inaction. They become so terrified of not doing things in the "correct" or "perfect" way that they just end up doing nothing at all.
You can't practice anything perfectly, as you unwittingly proved, so just do something. If you require external feedback to validate your work, put your work out publicly and feedback will come. The process is write -> publish -> critique -> polish, not become perfect writer -> publish -> everyone loves me.
I've read similar posts about writing everyday, and I decided to pick it up a little over a year ago.
I quickly realized that as a student my day's were simply not that interesting and my entries looked more and more like "went to school. studied. went home. slept."
Instead I started writing every week.
This is much more manageable and forces you to take time to reflect on your life. I look forward to writing every week.
I now have the last year of my life documented in these entries (by the way, I create a filter and email them to myself with the subject line Write: MM/DD/YYYY) and it's SO rewarding to go back and read them. It really doesn't take that long - maybe less than 30 minutes per entry.
Once I started an exercise that was to take, at least, one picture every day. That time I realized how much interesting things happen in just one month.
Now, after reading this article, I'll try to write everyday. I'm still not aware of the benefits, and if it will be really worthwhile, but in the long term, I think this can be really really interesting.
Most people cannot do it everyday, but I have got a solution -- pick up everyday. It means you keep the thing you find helpful in mind and try to do it everyday. Once failed, don't be frustrated, because most people will fail. What makes sense is that someone can pick that up afterwards to become someone.
I'm tempted to try this exercise for the remainder of the year. Can someone recommend a way to not just write, but also learn to write better in the process. I'm thinking of using Hemingway App.
Find writing that you love and deconstruct it. What techniques do they use? How do they tell stories? How do they start/end their writing?
Reading great writing will also influence your own writing as well, especially if you read before writing. It "primes" you to write in a similar style.
Someone has written 40K words in five months, someone has created a kernel at the age of 18, someone has made 365 days streak on github and someone has done a biking trip across India. I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.