Weekend Update

11/08/15

I am still waking up around 0330 in the morning! Feels pretty awesome.

Saturday morning was mostly wasted, productivity-wise. I didn't break any of my rules or anything, I just didn't use or work on my productivity system, and let myself wander quite a lot.

I believe the main trap I fall into is research. For instance, all the stuff I looked into today and yesterday:

• Jasmine
• Selenium
  • Jenkins plugin
  • In-depth Selenium/Jenkins integration
• CoffeeScript
  • Testing
  • Is it still worth it with ES6 coming soon?
• TypeScript
• Elm
• PureScript
• NodeUnit
• Mocha
• Grunt
  • Grunt Jasmine
  • Grunt JsHint
  • Grunt Coffee JsHint
  • Grunt Coffee
    • CoffeeScript has the ideal syntax for configurations
  • Grunt NodeUnit
  • Grunt Mocha
  • Grunt Mocha Test
• Node
  • IOJS has remerged with Node
• ES6 in node
  • Arrow functions
  • Import

And there was plenty of stuff inbetween all of that. Was a lot of it useful? Yes. Did I use much of it? No. Is a lot of the stuff I didn't use maybe worth exploring again later? Yeah. But I could have made note of random interesting things tangential to what I needed to look into in some sort of Spark File and moved on properly.

As it stood, I only started working on constructing something this morning, about 4 hours into waking up. Leaving me significantly less time to get anything done.

A much more effective strategy, I've found, is to work towards doing something, get stuck, plan a research time-block explicitly to solve my problem, and if I solve my problem early, only use the remaining time to explore the interesting tangents. After the time-block has ended, cease.

This way, I don't get caught up on tools and thoughts and ideas I'm not in any way ready to put to use, and thus more likely to only read ideas I'll use, and hopefully have a higher likelihood of retention.

I'll be taking a similar tact with my approach to TopPerformer

Research is an insidious thing. It feels productive, but easily distracts from really doing things. It's a necessary thing, but is only a few connections away from purely entertaining endeavours.

I must learn to use this tool carefully.