Category Archives: Deep Work

7 Hard Problems, Deep Work

Work and Study, Week of Jan. 6, 2019

Happy New Year!

Resuming work this week on 7 Hard Problems. I’m continuing with the partial vomitouts. Maybe even call them “extended outlines”. The point is to get some words on the page, maybe even words that could be used in the final of the chapter. With liberal partial credit.

This week the antinomy is “Local vs. Global”. The Master Anecdote for this chapter is a straightforward one: climate change. And digging into it will get us started with most of the issues of concern for “local vs. global”, including a trend I call “Global Balkanization” which is a reaction to globalization — hardly an unmixed blessing for ordinary people — taking the form of “Balkanization” everywhere. My tribe. My ethnicity. Me.

(I identified this trend maybe 5 years ago, and obviously, sadly, it’s playing out in Trump, in Brexit, in Brazil, in China. I wish it weren’t so.)

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for Work and Learning, Week of December 23, 2018

It’s going to be a short week with the holidays and family coming in from out of town, but, still…

In the the time I do work this week, I want to try to break through on the depth of “project” and “task” nesting that I complained about last week. That’ll be the software part of the week’s work.

And I want to reflect and maybe generate something on the topic of using Todoist as a fresh start in terms of fitting the work I want to do into the life I have available. For this, I may review some of the stuff the Todoist folks have written on how to use their system, as well as just a bit of navel-gazing.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Summing Up The Week’s Work

Not much to say here.

It continues to be fun to code (yes, I can hear the professionals saying, “Yeah, I’d have fun coding too if I didn’t have to worry about deadlines and layoffs and burnout…”).

I’m surprised how much trouble I’ve had with the following problem:

  • Increment a “Project” count every time we go into a sub-project, with the wrinkle that a sub-project need not be a child of a super-project; it could be a grandchild or even a great-grandchild
  • Call panic() if the Project depth gets to be greater than 4
  • Unwind the Project count as we backtrack on the XML tree

I’m not doing justice to it, but that’s the gist of the problem.

Probably just hyper-rustiness. Can anyone help/

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for Work and Learning: Week of December 16, 2018

I had originally thought to spend another week on the MLO Parser front end.

I wanted to really get an elegant abstraction of the division of labor between the parser guts — which presumably would be independent of output and dependent only on input — and the app itself, which might use the input data to generate XML for updating MLO views on multiple platforms, for example, or might use the data, as in the current use case, to port the data over from MLO to Todoist.

But, as Einstein said, “If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”  I thought it over, and I thought better of it.

In the first place, I’ll learn the most about the various use cases for the MLO input data by actually working the cases rather than by mulling about them in the abstract.

Plus I know that, left to its own devices, my mind over-abstracts.  There’s an old FORTH cartoon I love (which I couldn’t find online) showing a device labeled “Processor” with a keyboard, a “system unit”, and a bowl.  On the front of the device is a three-way switch which says “DATA/WORD/FOOD”.

That’s where I was headed.

So, to ground myself, to gain experience with one definite use case, and to actually get closer to my goal instead of messing around, I’m going to focus this week on parser output for Todoist from the MLO data.

There are a bunch of sub-problems here:

  • Generating the actual bytes that Todoist needs as input.  These are mostly in JSON, so 
  • Dig in to the JSON library in Go
  • Todoist makes a distinction between “projects” which are higher in the hierarchy and tasks which are lower.  Projects are allowed to have sub-projects up to four levels and Tasks are allowed to have sub-tasks up to four levels, so I have to somehow split my lovely MLO hierarchies into higher-level “projects” (with multiple levels) and each project ultimately owning a bunch of “tasks” with sub-tasks.
  • Set up a streaming connection to the todoist sync server to load the data
  • Regulate the flow of the data so that it doesn’t overload the server (or, what is the same thing, break any of the server’s load-throttling rules).

Should be fun.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for work and Learning — Week of December 9, 2018

Continuing this week with work on MLO Parser.

It turns out I had gotten a basic parser turning over which could echo some fields to the output and visit every node of the XML, but not much more.

Task this week is to turn that raw prototype into something a bit more robust.

First order of business?

Many years ago a software mentor told me, “Dan, the problem with software is that entropy seeps into it, and so you always have to be pumping the entropy out.”

She hit the nail on the head.  Of course, entropy probably seeps into everything, but software is nothing but entropy-waiting-to-happen, so the seepage is much more obvious.

“Refactoring” is part of entropy control, but really only a part.

In this case, the main thing is going to be getting the parser to visit every node, and getting it to do something uniform at each node.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for Work and Learning, Week of November 18, 2018

Because of the holiday this coming week, I’m trying something different.

Instead of working on the next chapter of 7 Hard Problems I’m going to give myself kind of a treat and flip over the Deep Work to learning how to program in Go.

Actually, I’ve been at this for a while.  I’ve done the basic tutorials.  I’ve carved out a project — writing a parser to take input from MyLifeOrganized and use it for a variety of outputs — and I’ve got the bare bones of the parser turning over.

I ground to a halt by “death of a thousand cuts” because I basically wasn’t very fluent in the language.  Each time I hit a snag — and they were often basic snags about syntax — the wind would go out of my sails and I’d lose time on the project.

So I decided it was time to read The Go Programming Language, as near as I can find to a definitive reference, from cover to cover.

I’m about halfway through.  In Chapter 5 (“Functions”) to be exact.  I’ve been fitting it in around the edges of the work on 7Hard.

Well, I’m going to shoot my Deep Work wad this week on Go, and hopefully bull through the rest of the book.

Where will I be at after that?  An expert in Go?  Maybe.  What I’m hoping is that I’ll now be fluent enough that I can work away on the parser in smaller dribs and drabs — a Pomo or two at a time, say — and not lose my gumption every time I hit a snag.

Because I have a mission.  My next weight-loss treat.

I’ve been using tech toys to spur my weight loss.  An Android tablet.  An Android watch.  A Sonos sound system for our house.  Etc.

Well the next tech toy is not going to be a product, it’s going to be having permission to finish the MLO Parser.

Why reward myself for writing software?

  1. It’s off-purpose.  I’m supposed to be mainly about 7Hard this next six months or so.
  2. It’s a treat.
  3. It’s not harmful

So off-purpose treats that aren’t harmful are great weight-loss rewards.  And that’s what I’m going to do.

7 Hard Problems, Deep Work

Themes for Work and Learning, week of November 11, 2018

So, I didn’t finish the vomitout for Chapter 2 last week either.  There seems to be a pattern.

I’m going to persist with my scheme, though, and continue vomiting out with Chapter 3, “Cooperation vs. Competition.”

In terms of reading, I was idiotically ambitious about my reading last week.  I did a tad of reading in Black Reconstruction, not a word of reading in Capital in the 21st Century, and a solid amount of reading only in Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

“Solid”, but not definitive.  I still haven’t finished Debt.  Sadder but wiser, I’m just going to aim to finish Debt, this week and let the chips fall where they may.

So, finish Debt and personfully try to vomitout Chapter 3.

Honestly?  Sounds like a recipe for fudging whether or not I got to the finish line.  But so be it.

Another issue coming up.  I’m starting up teaching a course, my Winter 2019 MOOC at University of Maryland on “Validating a Business Model”.  I’ve had the luxury the last couple of months of no teaching responsibilities and was able to do Deep Work four days a week (and many of those days got up to a decent # of Pomodoros of Deep Work, so all to the good!).

That’s going to change now.  I have to think how to schedule my Deep Work in the week (which may affect my blogging schedule).  The course starts up Monday the 26th so I’ll have some new conclusions by then.

Deep Work, DIY, Entrepreneurship

Themes for Study and Learning in May

Here were the April themes, together with April results:

So my project for April is to fan out from here and see what research can tell us (me) about the “success factors” for entrepreneurs.

At least some of them are:

  1. Effectual thinking and opportunities  I read maybe ten papers from the literature on effectual thinking, and I continue my strong suspicion that it’s a fundamental requirement for successful entrepreneurs
  2. Purpose and greed  Didn’t read much here.
  3. Always replace yourself at every step of the enterprise Didn’t read much here
  4. I’m almost through Schumpeter’s book on “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy”  As one of my sources said, most of his wisdom is contained in a couple of very catchy quotes and a lot of the material in CSD is dated.
  5. Started to read “Ecce Homo” by Nietschze
  6. Finished “Burn the Business Plan,” by Carl Schramm (longtime head of the Kauffman Foundation).  Lots of ideas about what does and does not make for a good entrepreneur (he does not like business plans, ecosystems, or incubators, for example), but there is almost no pointers to substantiation for any of his points.  I’ve got a query in to him about research backing his conclusions, but haven’t heard back for a couple of weeks.
  7. Halfway through Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial”
  8. Not for “study and learning”, but I read Ta Nahisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years in Power” with great interest.  In particular, I was quite interested in the case he makes for the centrality of white supremacy and slavery in U.S. history.

I think the plan for May is

  1. Continue with the entrepreneurship readings: Finish Simon,  read “Built to Last” by Collins and Porras, and “Grow”, by Jim Stengel.
  2. I’m going to try to read “Origin of Species” by Darwin, because I really should before I die.
  3. I’m trying to do a raft of DIY projects around the house in May, so I’ll do plenty of task-oriented reading (or maybe mostly YouTube viewing) in pursuit of that.

Always welcome your thoughts and comments.

 

Deep Work, Lifehacking, Mindfulness

Feeling Better

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OK, I’m a slow learner.

But it’s only dawned on me slowly that at least half my problems come from not feeling better.

I don’t mean “feeling better” in the sense of “feeling good.”  I would love to feed good all of the time, but it’s probably not in the cards.

I mean “feeling better” in the sense of “get better at feeling.”  I learned from Jung years ago that you either get absorbed in your feeling — bad! — or you remain mindful while a feeling passes through you — good!

So the aim is to remain mindful even while the feeling is taking place.

So far so good.  So how do you get better at something?  Well, I’ve been reading a lot about Deep Work and deliberate practice, so it was only natural to google about “deliberate practice for feelings.”

Well, pretty thin gruel: there’s a lot about getting better at expressing your feelings (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose) and a lot about deep feelings, but nothing to speak of about using the “deliberate practice” technique for improving your ability to feel.

So I’m reviewing what I know about deep practice:

  • It’s systematically identifying weaknesses in the area and correcting them by repeated practice
  • It’s unpleasant, because you’re always doing stuff you’re not very good at
  • It benefits enormously from having a teacher or coach, although some people (Ben Franklin, e.g.,) seem to have done OK without one.

As I’m toting up this info, all of a sudden it dawns on me: deliberate practice of feelings is nothing but psychotherapy.

In psychotherapy, you are essentially going over feelingful situations again and again, minutely re-rehearsing what you could have done, or what you were really doing, or what you wanted to do.  You are doing this under the watchful ear of a coach — your therapist — who is correcting your self-delusions and forcing you to look straight at what happened internally and externally.

It’s deliberate practice of feelings.

OK, so I’ve been a huge lifetime consumer of psychotherapy services.  And I’ve also been a lifelong skeptic that you needed the therapist (although it’s proven itself time and again: I’m just a cheapskate, in part, and in part a non-joiner of things; I joined plenty in my youth).

So I’ve got to ask: is there any Ben Franklin-style hacks you can do to get the benefits of deliberate practice with feelings without the expense and, yes, cultishness of psychotherapy?

An ongoing question.

Deep Work, Making, Modern European Thought

Themes for Study and Learning in April

Themes for March, with my self-assessment:

  1. Continue with Fascism and Totalitarianism.  Will be helpful to an essay I’m trying to write this month, as well as inherently useful.  I didn’t write the essay in March, and probably won’t in April, so the theme is a little moot for my immediate needs.  It continues to be an important issue for America, but so far kleptocracy and incompetence seem like worse threats than fascism (although it’s waiting in the wings).
  2. Read about Intellectual Property.  I have to teach the topic at the end of month, and I’ve always — as a self-respecting software guy — kind of hated and dissed the subject.  Time to know more.  I read a few things, somewhat thin gruel, and had a couple of great conversations.  Probably not on the docket for April.
  3. Read about plot and suspense.  I’m trying to get better at this in my own writing through “deliberate practice”, so I’ll be actively researching the topic as well.  I’ll continue this one in April.  I had a hard time doing this deliberate practice (as all the shills for deliberate practice say one will), but it’s very helpful.  I’m going to keep it up and try to notch it up.

So the April themes will be:

  1. Read about plot and suspense, per above.
  2. Read about Phenomenology and Existentialism .  I got halfway through “At the Existensialist Cafe” this month, with great pleasure, and it inspired me to have a go at Heidegger’s “Being and Time” this month.  Wish me luck.
  3. Learn more about DIY (“do it yourself”).  I’m a moderate DIY-er around the home, but want to learn more, especially about woodworking and plumbing.