It's Okay to be Unproductive
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- Опубліковано 2 кві 2024
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What book are you referring to here? Would love to check it out
Deep Work?
I think this is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
Cal Newport is a great author! Been reading his materials for years.
That's one of the things I love about programming: even my "failures" are successes in some regard!
Most things in life work this way tho. Failure is the proof you are progressing :)
wow then im such a successful programmer! /j
It's like that quote from Thomas Edison: "I never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one."
“There no success like failure, and failure is no success at all.” - Bob Dylan
@@gusslx While that's absolutely true, IMO failure with programming feels less defeating, demotivating, and punishing. In fact, it actually makes me want to learn more and try harder.
It's something where the reasons for your failure are generally clear and direct and are often entirely caused by and also fixable by you, and I think that makes the successes feel more tangible and rewarding. The sense of control and sense of progress are empowering in ways that most other things I've failed at are not.
It’s almost impossible to qualify if someone is productive. When I was a wage slave I sat with my feet on the table reading a book. A new customer came in and I heard him whisper to my manager: “is he just reading?”
My manager said: “when he’s sitting like that then I’m at ease because stuff is working and under control. I start to get worried if he’s hunched over his keyboard.” And even that book I was reading was I think Qt which we used so so much after I read that book.
In my current work as consultant for a big bank. I literally get paid to just give possible solutions to try out and to give suggestions to look into. And often one person can shake awake a whole clump of people, because there’s a new novel insight.
Had a coworker who felt like he needed to be coding all day in order to “be productive”. As such he spent a lot of time writing ether code that no one asked for, didn’t consider requirements or constraints, or was totally bloated for no reason. Most of our job as programmers really is about thinking and communicating.
The most productive programmer does not code 100 or 1000 lines a day, but deletes 1
(Disclaimer: I can't code)
Seriously, spend some fucking time turning vague contracts into complete ideas.
states the obvious.
I'm a firm believer that even when I'm drinking a beer on the back porch and not sitting at the keyboard, the gears in the back of my head are spinning on a problem. So many times I've done nothing almost all day and the solution just pops in my head at some point.
I'm *never* not working
This is the part of work that is entirely missing from the whole modern equation. If you don't add "moments of peace" into your day to process things such as how you feel, and why you're doing what you're doing, then you're eventually going to run into a backlog of those emotions and thoughts, and this is how you run into a burn out.
Social media and games and tvs and ready to eat food... all make it extremely easy to not find those moments, and because the brain assumes that "hard work" pays off, it will categorize any laying around as being lazy, especially because that's how most employers will treat labor, which is to say if anyone is laying they're disciplined for it, and then you wonder why nobody wants to do labor work.
I find it funny that almost all of the headsmashing problems that I had during work were solved when I was hiking in the middle of nowhere or during workout in the gym
I hate it when I wake up at night like that.
@@andrewyork3869 happens to me too. some of my ideas just come out of no where when I I'm trying to fall a sleep.
Ten lines of code that are part of a well-thought out and soundly designed architecture will be orders of magnitude more valuable than 1000 lines of jank. But those ten lines can take several "unproductive" days to arrive at.
When you feel that you did nothing during the day.
Stop a little bit and try to write what exactly sht did during the day(what you did, and reason for it), and you see that u did so many things.
Doing nothing is literally not even getting out of the bed in the morning.
I had problems with this and my therapist help-me deal with it using this strategy.
This is why sleep and other forms of taking care of your health, and not overworking, is super important. You're really at your most productive when you're at max clarity of thought and making the right decisions, and especially not over-engineering in a tiredness-fueled panic mode of sorts. This is also why proper tech leadership is crucial to see where the time is getting spent vs. what needs to be getting done. An engineer will become blind to the priorities, and make decisions based on feelings and ego. They will start making it a framework, not an app, and it needs to perfect, because they want to almost make art that leaves impact, not understanding that its all, I repeat, all, shovelwork that will get replaced eventually. That is why you also should have fun doing it, and fun just living meanwhile in general, because what is the point otherwise.
Bushel is such a fun word
Its bushels of fun
Bushels is also a great song by Frog Eyes.
Needed to hear this as a security analyst, thank you
I so luv you for this shout out. This applies not only for the programming. I have several things in mind it applies for
I'm in the the devops/systems engineering side of the world. I've had *weeks* of attempting to gain traction/acquiring/developing knowledge on the situation. And then it comes to a head with an insane amount of deliverables accomplished in a day.
Have you read Andy Hertzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley? There is a great chapter titles “negative 1000 lines of code” 😅
Great name
Thinking about reducing code or code complexity is really hard but it can have such a value in the long term.
Another angle to this is that I've had plenty of days that were very productive and where I got a lot of metric-based tasks done (closed out lots of tickets, finished a feature, etc) which were, arguably, retroactively made unproductive because the next day I realized something and tore it all out and redid it in a better way. The days where you write "negative" lines of code are sometimes the most useful, haha.
Oh, I have a very objective metric of unproductivity: it's when I don't do shit for the whole day
Excellent take on the matter! I've found walking away from the screen, going outside, getting some fresh air for 10-15 minutes actually has me solving problems too.
It might look horrendously unproductive on the outside, but if I've taken 15 minutes to not only create a robust approach that might've taken me much longer (or been much less effective) without the breather, and I get to ride the wave of the 'flow state' from having an approach I'm happy with, that's a productivity multiplier, far from unproductive.
You go outside? That's crazy.
Very wise words. I can probably use this to benefit myself. Mostly I feel bad because I did't do "enough work", but the fact to flip it to knowledge gathering.
This will be helpful. Thanks.
Definitely learn this 40 years ago, rare but my first computer purchased before Apple Corp was formed came from People born on a Farm without electricity
God damn the timing of this is perfect. I’m literally sat here not understanding why I can’t seem to get focused today.
More often than not, knowledge work requires creativity, which is not correlated to productivity. There are no metrics that measure how creative you are.
That's a very well thought on viewing today's measurement of productivity in software development, Will now gonna use this argument with POs, SMs, and anyone who dares to undermine the effort and output of our development team's productivity. Fight me!
Mental health days are productive. It's far less productive to let yourself experience burnout than to skip a day and allow yourself to recover mentally.
Also, measures of productivity are almost universally measures of control or obedience.
"A metric fails to be useful the moment it becomes a target."
- Goodheart (paraphrased)
My employer is amazed at my productivity. He asks how I can do this. The answer is actually simple: if I don't want to work, I don't work. Therefore, when inspiration strikes me, I do much more in one period than if I sat and squeezed out one line at a time.
If I had a nickel for every time some hotshot stuffed suit pressured me to give an ETR when I didn't even know the cause of the problem, I could retire. So tired of these old school metrics. It's not just me either. A buddy worked in a call center. They got graded for getting customers off the phone as quickly as possible, problem fixed or not.
Realistically when you're "unproductive" as a creative professional - programmers, artists, musicians, 3D designers, writers etc. - you're either resetting your mind and it's general creative ability or you're working on your knowledge in the background with your subconscious acting like a web crawler, you're always learning from past experiences and it's only our expectations that make it seem like it's a bad thing to get no physical results out of it, the majority of your effort is learning how to create with confidence
Any metric of performance becomes inaccurate the moment it becomes tied to rewards as people figure out how to cheat it.
This is great reassurance
I honestly think it’s incredibly unrealistic to expect to get something done literally every day, especially as the complexity of your work increases. Sometimes it’s just a ton of planning and trial/error
For knowledge workers, it's important to know that the brain has two mode of thinking "focused" and "diffused". When we are working on a hard problem, we first use our focused mode to concentrate on solving it and most of the time we don't arrive at any reasonable solution and that's okay because after that when we take our mind off of that problem, rest or focus on something else, our brain's diffuse mode began working on that problem, finding novel ways to look at it.
For more information, check out the work of Dr. Barbara Ann Oakley. There is also a UA-cam talk of hers titled : "Learning How to Learn".
Coding is problem solving and problem solving is often unproductive in quantifiable output (marketable code in this case)
Programming is more of an art, so finding "inspiration" for your problems or just getting your head free is also productive as long as you make progress over some time and don't lose track.
I have unproductive decades
I programmed 2534 lines of code for Vulkan and i don't feel productive, because i didn't make what i want and i made what i need to do what i want.
I can't believe this popped up in my feed. I needed this video today.
Even the word productive has the word product in it.
Really true especially in Software
Reminds me of the IIRC ten years that one of the key silicon semiconductor researchers ((Schottky?) worked fruitlessly on copper oxide as the expected material.
Coding and software engineering are at different levels of skill work. E.g. Forth.
I've worked with people who have negative productivity every time they turn up to work.
absolutely, its such a new field and the nature of the industry with new technologies always around the corner consistently raises the bar for what productivity looks like
I know it's okay, and that's why I'm unproductive.
MBA management people: "I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that and keep stressing you out over how many lines of code / hr you're writing"
Thank you! This in an awesome take. Pinned in my notes for those days I need to hear this!
Thanks man
Issue with this is that, when I say I had an unproductive day, I mean, I have spent 3 hours watching netflix, youtube or reddit instead of working or learning
Way back, "number of lines of code" use to actually be a productivity measure for software engineering. And of course it doesnt matter if it was assembly or pascal or c or now days c#, that metric makes zero sense. The weight of a simple x = y + 3; is not the same as for instance doing a lambda. Of course this example isnt taking context into consideration.
Consoling words 😊
Great point
And they want resumes to show quantitative percentages of past work.
Programming is just like research and mechanical prototyping. You can't possibly measure productivity. That's where story points come in, to give feelgood feelings.
Something ive noticed is if I step away from a problem for a while and not think about it, my subconscious is constantly mulling it over and will have either more things to try or a solution
I think it's important to know what you want to produce. If you break it down into small tasks and do one each day, it's easy to make progress. Otherwise it's too easy getting lost working on random things, that won't contribute to your goal
I can tell you exactly what days are unproductive for me. Like yesterday all I did was play HellDivers 2 during work hours.
Usually how it goes for me
I think about the problem for 2 months then code the thing in 2 hours
The good metric should be how valuable is the work in terms of how much time can pass in order the work should be maintained because it is not applicable with current hw or security standards , or even has is issues in testing or in production etc. This is the difference between a low level pneumatically - hard physically work and high level pneumatically - easy physically work. You basically sell your perception
C-level is like "YOU NEED TO BE SIX SIGMA LEAN IN YOUR EVERY MOVE TOO."
Me at the end of the sprint lol
A good metric, but a subjective one:
Have you meaningfully expanded on your capability to solve problems you are plausibly likely to encounter?
If so, time well spent. Even if you got nothing done.
And this is why PM's that track jira in units of hrs are clueless
My unproductive days are where I watch youtube and paly chess all day
In science is always like that
Recently Ive been having a bit of imposter syndrome going on, its such a coincidence I end up seeing this short
The problem is that you try to measure something intrinsically uncertain: the successes. What you should measure instead is the number of hypotheses you disprove.
Best channel i have found .beat any others.
Unproductive days to me is talking to a coæleague about random tech in airplanes for 3 hours because my brain doesn't want to concentrate right now. I would argue that those conversations don't fix (or get me closer to fixing) my deadlock issue 😅
It was unproductive coz I literally did nothing but scroll yt that day😂
I stop programming for a few days now because there is something that I do not know happen.
The problem is implementing multiple input handling on android using libgdx.
those days i call them 'syncing' days
Hmm that's a really interesting concept to think about
Yup
I have days where I get barely anything done because I'm too distracted... I'm getting better at focusing though
We vastly underestimate the subconscious as part of knowledge work. Your most ‘productive’ hours could be spent sleeping or having a walk in the park
This is not the co-signing of my bullshit i was looking for when i read the caption
Nice to hear that you are interested in our job offer. How many cars per hour would you say you can produce?
You say I'm unproductive? To paraphrase an American president, that depends on the meaning of the word 'productive.' My definition of productive is sitting around doing nothing the whole day.
Great, now tell the 20 idiots I report to
No bro i just scrolled my phone the half of my day😢
Instructions unclear. Spent all day writing factories to look productive for my next performance review.
how many patents and licenses can you produce. Boom: knowledge work measured.
When I have unproductive days it's because I got nothing done! 😂 Don't over complicate the fact. To your point though usually I am unproductive because I don't know how to solve a problem and spend the time figuring out how to solve it or studying then later when I approach the problem I am exponentially more productive
I was unproductive because I got depressed and decided to cope in an unhealthy way... yeah, no, I was actually unproductive
I moved the lines in draw_io until they looked good. It took 4 days.
I think work done in a week or so should be a good enough metric, surely one day you may not ach3eive countable progress but by one week you could've done at least one thing right
Shout out Cal Newport
>me telling the light company i made developments in my knowledge
I might be sitting there for like an hour, doing nothing but fidget around with something and stare at the code, but that's because I'm mapping the problem out on a higher, conceptual level than simply coding
It's okay to not reproduce!
What about the days when im laying on the couch knee deep in unicorn shit ice cream watching the roku screen saver pass by?
From where should I start learning C? and resources if any?
Kernighan and Ritchie’s book is quite good I’ve heard although I only partially read it my self.
If you know any c like language: java, JavaScript, c#, go, Lua, C++, the most important things you need to learn in my opinion are pointers, arrays and structs, as well as memory management, the rest is kinda similar.
Also you should probably have a project to immediately implement the stuff you learned, I found it fascinating to proof to myself that in the Monty Hall problem it actually makes sense to switch doors, I did so using a simulation that I wrote in c.
Obviously lines of code is the best way 😂
Does sleeping while WFH count as unproductive 👀?
processing planetwide problems and personal problems until they have the same simple solutions looks unproductive on my part.
No. It was unproductive because I decided to play a game all day instead of doing something…
Yeah that’s great. Anyway, hey I see you have a lower amount of jira points completed than the rest of the team. Just to let you know we will be taking this into account next stack ranking.
Yo, I am getting nothing done right now!
I'm da bess
What is being done on the lower half of the screen?
most work doesn't produce anything :)
can you pls post link of readme ???
No, it’s not, stop joking with us mortals