Here is a description of the daily commute by Michael Milken, 1980s junk bond king, as told in "Predator's Ball" by Connie Bruck:
At 5:30am each weekday in the early 1970s, a bus pulled up to a stop in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a young man lugging a bag that bulged with papers mounted its steps. He was making the two-hour commute to New York City, where he worked at the investment banking firm of Drexel Firestone. The train would have provided a more comfortable and faster ride; but, for those very reasons, it also offered more opportunity to meet other Wall Street acquaintances. They would want to engage in the kind of idle small talk that commuters share to pass the time. The thought must have been intolerable. He did not wish to be rude, but he wanted no interruption.
As soon as he had settled into his seat, being sure to take one with an empty one adjacent, he unloaded a mountain of prospectuses and 10ks (annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings) onto the seat next to him. On winter mornings the sky was still pitch black and the light on the bus was too dim for him to be able to read. He wore a leather aviation cap with the earflaps down; he had been bald for years, and although he wore a toupee his head always felt cold on these frosty mornings. Now over his aviation cap he fitted a miner's headlamp -- strapped around the back of his head, with a huge light projecting from his forehead.
Unfortunately I can't program on a bus, I get motion sickness. Subway works very well though! It insulates me from most distractions. The only problem is that the longest subway commute I ever had was about 45 minutes; solid 2 hours would allow for so much more! :)
A buddy of mine had the same thing. He started taking the light rail into downtown and purposefully parked at one of the early stops instead of taking the bus in. He said he would sit and code on his side projects for around the same amount of time. In the span of a year, he knocked out several small mobile apps and several social media plugins.
He said the benefit was being able to spend more time with his family at night when he got home. He knew he would have some time on the train, so not having to crack his laptop to get in some coding after dinner allowed him to spend a lot more time handling the kids and spending time with his wife.
"Work/Life balance achieved!" he used to proclaim with a big smile when we'd sit and chat.
My commute to work is quite long but there is no "sitting" in Tokyo's trains in mornings/evenings so I program on a smartphone. Yes, it's not impossible but it takes time to get used to it.
have you ever considered a nanote from donki? I've been using one as a paired terminal and with the right os (debian, no GUI) it stays cool enough and gets good battery, same with the gpd handhelds
I would go for some affordable AR glasses + a one-hand chord keyboard. No need to hold a device in one hand and operate it with another, while standing awkwardly bent down.
I generally just thumb-type on it with the hinge bent at 180°. I have a colleauge who tried the meta AR glasses and found the display smudgey with his 20/20 vision and my quest 3 I found very screen door-y, though I will admit I liked the apple vision pro's display, I have a fair bit of pessimism about the field as a whole atm, but would like to be proven wrong
I’ve recently learned to downvote/flag and not respond to green names. The number of new accounts coming in hot with inflammatory takes lately has seemed higher to me, but admittedly this is purely a “vibe,” I have no numbers to back it up.
In Vancouver in the 1990s, if you wanted to buy a six-pack of beer at 10pm after the government-run liquor store closed, you would walk into a local pub and ask the bartender if they did "off-sales". If yes, they would sell you a cold six-pack for a very small markup.
Also, in Ontario in the 1990s, one-eighth of an ounce of weed was called a "half-quarter", ha ha.
Check out the location of these condos in downtown Toronto built alongside the Gardiner Expressway, a very busy 90km/h (~55mph) highway: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TGLCBJGbrSEkAm7W6
Years ago I lived near a busy four-lane road with what seemed like a reasonable 60km/h speed limit. However, when it rained, the noise from the car tires on the wet road made it difficult to hear music from my radio. It was very unpleasant to leave the balcony doors open, as the constant din starts to work its way into your brain and make it very difficult to focus.
He builds his list from scratch every morning. The list is flat, so as you go about your day and subtasks occur to you, they are added to the list without explicit links to the main task.
I thought it might be risky to start with a blank list, because something important might be forgotten. But it turns out that a blank list is a great filter for what is truly important and motivating. If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
This system is also excellent for shorter periods of time. If I come home and want to get started on dinner, want to tidy up a bit and have a few other demands on my attention, I put my laptop in a central location, open up Notepad, and just start typing in everything I see around me that I need to do. Usually I start with maybe 5 items, but as I start doing things I quickly add tasks to the list, and it might grow to 15 or 20 items. But then at some point the list starts to shrink again as these small, granular tasks are completed. It is strangely satisfying to see the list initially grow and then shrink to nothing. It also leaves me with a feeling of having thoroughly attended to everything that was bothering me when I first walked in the door.
We're on the same brainwave. Literally thought to myself, "but I forget to eat all the time" and scrolled down to see this.
ADHD obviously can make stuff like this hard, and most neurotypical people seem to operate on a "if it's important I'll remember it" mentality, which I'm incredibly jealous of. I still haven't found a good system for tracking important tasks without getting "overloaded" with too many tasks and/or subtasks.
Serious question: in those scenarios, do you never have awareness about your need to eat? Or does it occur at some point, but then you decide not to eat at the moment, and after making that decision then you never revisit it?
I ask because I often realize I'm hungry or it's time to eat, but I'm too engaged in the task I'm doing and I think "I'll eat a bit later" and then once I've done that the first time I often never consider again, at least until the next meal time. I wonder if that's what people mean when they say it, or if the idea of stopping for a meal simply didn't even occur to them?
I don't usually forget to eat, but this happens to me all the time for tasks that don't have a physical feedback mechanism.
I missed a doctor's appointment today because I didn't remember to schedule a corresponding "you need to leave the house _now_" alarm to go with the calendar event, which I forgot about because I looked at my calendar once in the morning and the appointment was in the afternoon.
I will remember _some_ tasks if they "are important", but those are typically things that cause me enough anxiety that I just don't ever actually stop thinking about them until they are done. I can't really do reliable just in time recall of tasks unless it is for something I have deeply internalized into a habit.
How do you get so engage in the tasks you are doing so you forget to eat? I suppose most people here have the opposite issue, we do not engage in the task at all and once we start, we stop doing it after a short while because we find a more interesting things to do such as eating, grab a coffee or reading HN, news etc. We would love to be able to stay on the task and not go and eat.
Quite literally, my awareness vanishes into the task or nothing at all. The conscious experience of it is basically blinking at 2pm and discovering it's actually 7pm and I'm dizzy for some reason.
> It’s been my experience that any TODO list system I use will acquire an ugh field around it that gradually turns it into a thing I’m guiltily avoiding.
Considering that all of my tasks come from my to-do list and there's no way at all I could remember the dozens of tasks on my to-do list (I'm a manager, maybe that makes it worse), it's actually just impossible for me to avoid my list. Guiltily or otherwise.
The list doesn't make me anxious, having all of these tasks undone makes me anxious. Forgetting them makes me anxious. Having everything written down then doing everything and being on top of everything keeps me calm and sane.
> If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
Varies person by person. My memory is nowhere near good enough for this to be true.
It would do people a whole lot of good, if they start looking at a great day as executing well tested 'checklist' rather than a 'todo list' built from scratch every day.
No wonder some of the most productive people like Knuth, or people like presidents many times have fixed schedules, clothes they wear, food they eat etc etc.
If something is working, do it more often, you want to do more of what works, at some point things that don't work wont be on your check list.
You can't generalize. Everyone has things that work for them.
Taking a few minutes to recreate that todo list for the day from a blank slate helps my brain get ready for the day and makes me more productive. (akin to stretching before exercise). I don't need a checklist for eating, cleaning, etc, but maybe some do.
I'm going to try that too. An ongoing todo list just starts to slip from my mind. I have a whiteboard in my kitchen, where I figured I'd write tasks I needed to do and erase them off when I finished them, so it'd be a continuous todo list. But after a while, it'd slip my mind and I'd go weeks without even seeing the whiteboard in my awareness, and then when I did remember it was there, it'd be half outdated and I'd have to start all over.
Getting into the daily habit of using any tool/method in the first place is the hard part for me, so making it as tangible as possible and not-too-convenient might help.
A recipe has a great chance of success, there are few such recipes.
If you think you will try out a new recipe from scratch everyday it shouldn't be surprising if most of your days don't add up to much, or even add up to a negative.
I did not know about this article, thank you! It definitely goes deep into task breakdown, just like what I am proposing. But I have a hard time starting from an empty list in the morning, because I can totally forget that I need to work if I do not jump straight into my tasks (ADHD brain).
>it turns out that a blank list is a great filter for what is truly important and motivating. If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
I started using GTD, but due to sprawling list overwhelm, evolved it into nanoGTD, where I start each day with a blank page and recreate my projects and next actions from memory/imagination.
This works best on paper. To make sure nothing fell through the cracks, I just turn to the previous page.
The real value of paper year planner books is your todo list can't grow to infinate length - if you don't do something today you have to decide at the end of the day will you forget about it or manually copy it to tommorow.
it is easy to make todo items. The hard part is realzing you can't do everything and you must not do something
In particular I liked the section partway* through the article where he talks about using Anki to get up to speed on the AlphaGo paper for an article he was writing for Quanta.
Also, $16.95/month is $203.40/year, which divided by $4,000 is 5.09%. If you can earn more than 5.09% then you are better off paying the fee and investing your $4,000 elsewhere.
It is also pretty much impossible to keep precisely $4,000 in your account because of the lumpiness of day-to-day inflows (paycheques) and outflows (bills). If you keep say $10,000 in your chequing account to (a) avoid the $16.95/fee, and (b) provide a buffer against unexpected expenses, then the breakeven return on your money is $203.40 / $10,000 = a paltry 2.03%.
Here are the featured films for November and December:
11/3 - The Prisoner of Zenda (1922)
11/10 - The Dragon Painter (1919)
11/10 - The Tong Man (1919)
11/17 - Three Women (1924)
11/17 - The Doll (1919)
11/24 - The Scarlet Letter (1927)
12/1 - Scar of Shame (1927)
12/8 - The Life of the Party (1920)
12/8 - Fatty's Tintype Tangle (1915)
12/15 - Little Old New York (1923)
12/29 - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
At 5:30am each weekday in the early 1970s, a bus pulled up to a stop in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a young man lugging a bag that bulged with papers mounted its steps. He was making the two-hour commute to New York City, where he worked at the investment banking firm of Drexel Firestone. The train would have provided a more comfortable and faster ride; but, for those very reasons, it also offered more opportunity to meet other Wall Street acquaintances. They would want to engage in the kind of idle small talk that commuters share to pass the time. The thought must have been intolerable. He did not wish to be rude, but he wanted no interruption.
As soon as he had settled into his seat, being sure to take one with an empty one adjacent, he unloaded a mountain of prospectuses and 10ks (annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings) onto the seat next to him. On winter mornings the sky was still pitch black and the light on the bus was too dim for him to be able to read. He wore a leather aviation cap with the earflaps down; he had been bald for years, and although he wore a toupee his head always felt cold on these frosty mornings. Now over his aviation cap he fitted a miner's headlamp -- strapped around the back of his head, with a huge light projecting from his forehead.
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