Alex Vermeer writes about productivity, motivation, procrastination, and learning, and is known for his annual review guide, 8,760 Hours.
Commenters call the 8,760 Hours guide immensely valuable for annual life reviews, and praise his book summaries and mindmaps.
Warning: rambling comment. A rambling post deserves a rambling answer, particularly if the rambling is in the wrong direction... http://xkcd.com/386/
> Every morning, I wake up, drink a glass of Soylent and recite the following: “Today, I will solve challenging problems. Tomorrow, I will also solve challenging problems. Every day, I will solve challenging problems, and then the robots will take over, and I will die a fulfilled man, and someone will post my obituary on Hacker News.”
That's this guy: https://alexvermeer.com/life-hacking/. Pretty sure he occupies a unique niche in the world though.
> I am creating
This statement is clearly false, as writing blog posts is in no way related to writing a transpiler. Typically all coding posts are post-mortems.
> a JavaScript to Rust transpiler in Haskell,
I guess this is a takeoff on the C-to-Rust translator (https://github.com/jameysharp/corrode)? (and all the compile-to-JS projects such as GWT, emscripten etc.). But those have actual use cases, whereas going from front-end to deep back-end / systems programming seems like a stretch.
It's true there are a lot of programming language and toolkit posts / flames on HN, and I admit they're often kind of shallow. But a small discussion is better than none at all, and it occasionally gets someone knowledgeable to contribute. But there's a qualitative difference between lots of people spending a little time on a subject versus a few people spending a lot of time on a subject. The…
Hi,
I want you to tell you a litte story about my self and my struggles. We should be about the same age. A year ago, I was going strong, working my job, having side projects and getting things done. I was doing a lot of sports and was on the level of a marathon runner. Then I had an injury. Due to the lack of sport, I fell into depression. I was unable to concentrate on a single thing for even five minutes and had no motivation whatsoever. I have had then set goals for myself and after I failed to accomplish them, I beat myself up. Rinse and repeat.
Now, about 9 Months later, I am still in the recovering process. Like you I tried pretty much every productivity hack out there. From pomodoro to bullet journaling, habit forming and so on. What I want to say: There is no quick fix. It takes time.
So I regularly try to niche down on the cause. Is it a motivation, concentration or multitasking problem? Then I try to fix the cause with experimenting with different tools and strategies. At different stages in your journey, you will have different bottlenecks, asking for different strategies.
At the beginning the things that worked for me, were building up from my principles and core beliefs (Minimalism, Freedom, Simplicity). Then I started dreamlining with a monthly timeframe. But it is important, that the goals are measurable and attainable. Then I broke them down, to weekly and daily tasks. I also have daily todo lists, which I still fail way too often.
Currently the biggest…
Author here. Wow, fantastic feedback! Thank you for taking the time to read it and respond.
I have a few responses. As an undergrad, I won't assume my background is strong enough for direct opinions, so apologies in advance as my responses are mostly pointers to other people.
Professor Patrick Winston[0] at MIT would argue that the expert systems, the successes of the '80s also about making money. Obviously not as much present day, but that is due to the tech sector infiltrating more areas/markets simply because of the exponential growth processing power. It would be very interesting to compare AI's value-add to the world between 1980 and today when adjusted for the "inflation" of moore's law.
It's true I didn't consider the number of people in the field currently compared to the past, and that's an interesting point.
The instructor of the class that I wrote this paper for, Joscha Bach[1], would argue that real physical world results are not very significant, since the real world can be thought of as a simulation itself.
The idea of "what happens next? What could go wrong?" with self driving cars is interesting. A question arises, should you be able to ask the car, "why did you just stop short?" and receive an answer? This is a question Gerald Sussman has been discussing recently[2]. If we do want systems that can explain their behavior, then they must speak in human-language and therefore must be symbolic at some level. In general, the idea of "Common Sense" seems too…
Actually I've already changed jobs/teams two times in the last ~2 years. But I wasn't even talking about "work" alone. I also procrastinate, to an incredible (to most people) extent, on: exercise, chores (laundry, dishes, taxes), which I guess everybody procrastinates to some extent on, and on personal fun projects (those I've told others about, and those that are only ideas in my head), and things as simple as sending a short "hey how are you" email to a very dear friend -- all with serious consequences over the last couple of decades. For instance, when you look forward with eagerness and anticipation all week to doing some particular thing on the weekend, and then when the time comes you just scroll Twitter all day for two days in a row. Basically anything I wish my future self would do: my future self doesn't seem to like getting messages from its past self :-)
Yes the reason for procrastination can often be some kind of "not wanting to do it", but it can also be perfectionism (wanting it too much / to do it to a very high standard), counterproductive habits/addictions, and it turns out on reflection (checking in with emotions), that it is even possible to be "uncomfortably excited" and not know how to handle that discomfort. Whether and how much you procrastinate is a function of both your motivation and your basic efficacy (I guess "executive dysfunction" is a clinical version of this problem) -- or to put it another way, it's a function of not just "value" but also…
A very useful and quick reference to be productive at Anki itself is Anki Essentials and after working through that, I find my useful using Anki the right way. Though I don't think having multiple decks is a good idea and have found using single deck to be much more mimicking how consolidation of what you have learnt happens in real life, randomly across different subjects.
Does anyone here have tips to memorize the standard library of the programming language you use say Python using Anki? While yes there is the quick look up to the lib using a standard dev environment, what I am pointing to is having to lookup for details for the library function assuming that you know the function is the right choice because you have added it your long term memory. If this is useful for nothing, it will be useful at least for the algorithmic interviews which should be aptly named harakiri :-) [2]
[1] https://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku
It took me several attempts to ascend the learning curve of Anki, but once I did, it changed my life. Anki Essentials by Alex Vermeer [0] was the introduction that got me over the hump.
Now I use Anki almost daily for learning programming, math, vocabulary, and retaining books I've read.
On books, I originally wrote a script that scraped the Kindle highlights page and converted them into a file that could be imported into Anki. I'd Cloze delete passages and review maybe 20 a day. That practice was so beneficial that I've since started developing it into a standalone product called Readwise. [1]
Readwise doesn't yet incorporate hardcore spaced repetition and active recall principles, but it will soon.
[0] https://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/
[1] https://readwise.io