Dark Time-new book by Liu weipeng, Microsoft Asia Research Institute

Original post address: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4caedc7a010183o3.html

Author: Liu weipeng

Liu weipeng,The mindhacks helper spent eight years on this field. He published his first technical article in programmer magazine in 2003 and began to write a technical blog on csdn. At first, my blog was short, trivial, and contains some translated articles. Later, I began to have some experiences and opinions. In the past eight years, although he has written one or fewer articles per month on average, he has never stopped. The biggest experience of blog writing is that if you can stick to one thing for eight years, no matter how low the efficiency and frequency are, in the end, we can always achieve some considerable benefits. Another experience is that as long as you stick to it for a long time, "persistence" will gradually become "habit ". Previously, it was a common practice to drive things with great effort.

 

At the end of June, a collection of "dark time" selected by Liu weipeng's eight-year blog article will be published soon. He said: "People who are good at thinking time can spend a lot more time than others ." Here, "thinking time" is what he calls "dark time ".

Author: Liu weipeng

If you have a computer, you put it on hold all day after installing a system. Do you think this computer is actually used? No. Because the CPU runs idle processes all day long. It is also a day to run idle processes and a day to run large data computing programs. The value of the same day for the CPU is completely different.

The same is true for the brain.

People who are good at thinking time can spend much more time than others, so that they can live more years than others. We often hear the word "psychological age". People who think more often tend to be older. It takes 10 years for someone to understand the truth, because they are passive comprehension-they feel pain only when the reality hits his face. After the pain, they still do not remember to remind themselves from time to time, as a result, I quickly forgot my mind when I encountered the same pitfall for the second time, and I forgot my mind when I fell down, unless I fell into a trap every day, otherwise, the efficiency of forgetting is always greater than the loss of long memory. People who are good at thinking time can take the initiative to remind themselves of important things and turn temporary memories into hard-coded behavior habits.

Everyone's watches go as fast as they do, but their lives are not. To measure how many years a person has lived, he or she should use his or her thinking time. To give an extreme example, if a person stays in a sterile protection room specially built for him from the very beginning, without social interaction or knowledge acquisition, he has spent 18 years, do you think he is an adult?

I think that time is equal to everyone. I think that if someone else has one day and I have one day, this is not the case. If you are learning a major and you are measuring it by the number of days you have invested, it is easy to come up with the illusion that you have invested a lot of time. However, in fact, the "input time" statement is absurd. The actual input is the product of time and efficiency. You can "invest" a lot of time on one thing, but find that there is no progress, because you didn't keep what you want to do and what you want to learn in your brain all day long, always give it the highest priority. When you eat while walking, you dream about it, and your CPU is always allocated to it. At this time, your thinking time is used to the extreme, the amount of time you spend is equal to the amount of time actually elapsed, because your CPU is fully loaded.

If you have the habit of summing up, after a while, you can sum up how much time you have invested in a certain field, it is recommended that you never roughly calculate the number of classes in the world and pick up the books to read them, because you may find that the books are often flipped, but the understanding is not much deeper, on the surface, it took a lot of time, but the benefits were not as big. Because reading and remembering what is in a book is just a memory and does not involve reasoning. Only by reasoning can we deeply understand a thing and see what others cannot see, this part of the reasoning process is your thinking time. It is also a significant proportion of people's lives.Dark Time", You walk, buy food, wash your hands, take the bus, go shopping, go out, eat, and go to bed, all these times can become" dark time ", you can take full advantage of this time to think about and digest things you read and read at ordinary times, so that your understanding can be separated from the level of the original xuanke. This time seems insignificant, but the accumulation of time will produce a huge effect.

People who are able to make full use of the dark time will have a huge life. You may find that such people seem to play less than you, and you may not see more than you, but somehow it is farther than you. For example, I often find out why not only do some overseas cool-men learn, but even the "amateur" stuff is awesome, I am not amateur at all (the last time I saw one of Stanford's coolders in "how we decide", a theoretical physics doctor, and the first six winners of the World Poker competition, so far, you have earned more than 6 million yuan in total), you will be surprised,How long can these guys excel in more than one field??

Programmers know that task switching requires a lot of extra costs. In general, you must first save the current context so that the next time you can switch back smoothly, and then load the context of the target task. If a system keeps switching between multiple tasks, it will consume a lot of time on context switching, which will waste a lot of time.

In contrast, if you only perform one task, there will be no such loss. This is why people who are focused are much more efficient than people who are not focused. The dark time of task switching seems very insignificant. Many people even think that "multi-task" is a good thing (sometimes it is, it takes more and more time to switch.

In addition, the brain must have time to warm up when starting a task. This time varies from person to person and can be changed through exercises. For example, after reading a book for a while, you suddenly felt bored and couldn't help opening your browser. After ten minutes, you remembered to continue reading the book, but would like to return to the desired status at that time, however, it takes some time to concentrate on activating all the knowledge in memory so as to enter the "status ", this is because these memories have been suppressed after you have been online for 10 minutes. If the "warm-up" status takes a quarter of a minute, it may take 25 minutes to stroll online.

If the examples you read are not vivid enough, there is actually a better example for programmers: you write a program at a high level, and you are suddenly called to open a meeting, where half of the Code is written. How long will it take for you to return to the status after the meeting? Alternatively, you are debugging the program. You have spent 20 minutes understanding the code that may be related to this bug, and have built a rough map in your mind, at this moment, er, you were called again to open a meeting (: d). After the meeting, you can imagine that it would take some time to review what you just learned.

The ability to quickly enter the status can be exercised. Based on my personal experience, it can be reduced to at least 3-5 minutes. However, to completely enter the status, it is difficult to achieve it in such a short period of time. For example, after reading a book for three hours or debugging a program for half an hour, you are often full of related things, all this knowledge is active. In other words, all the associated memory neural networks in your brain are activated, it's not three or two minutes to reach such an "immersive" state that forgets the passage of time (psychologically called "stream experience. Once this state is damaged, the intangible efficiency will be greatly reduced. This is also why I always tend to create a large amount of time to read important things, because it is conducive to "immersion", so that new knowledge can be fully integrated with the existing knowledge in the brain, association, the latter is very helpful for deep memory.

To make full use of the dark time, we should not only be able to quickly enter the state, but also an important habit is how long the state can be maintained (Physical Thinking ). The psychology of semantics in the mathematical field contains a very representative introduction to the thinking habits of Pang galai. Panggalai often goes on vacation by the sea or on the road to think about mathematical problems in his mind. Many times the answer is just a flash of time. Although I can't compare with panggalai, I often come up with answers on the road. This is a pleasant experience.

Being able to quickly enter the focus state and stay focused for a long time are two of the most important habits of efficient learning.

Many people have such experiences (including myself). After work, there are many more things to deal with, unlike on campus, simple environment and simple life, be able to do one thing without being disturbed. The problem after work is that more tasks need to be processed first, resulting in switching between multiple tasks from time to time. On the other hand, even if the priority of tasks can be reasonably assigned, it is inevitable that when you do one thing, you will suddenly think of the anxiety that you haven't done yet, because what you haven't done will leave a "hidden process" in your brain ", send a message from time to remind you of interruptions to what you are doing.

Therefore, this involves the last efficient habit: Anti-interference. Only with strong anti-interference capabilities can we effectively take advantage of the various dark periods mentioned above. Anti-interference ability can also be practiced. When I was a bachelor, I often took this big part and watched it in the car, sitting or standing, facts have proved that reading in an interference environment is a very hard way to exercise and focus: D. In addition, reading and thinking through various fragments of time is often used, it is very helpful for rapid attention and attention. I remember that a long time ago, on toplanguage, everyone once discussed the use of "toilet time" with great interest, including putting a small bookcase in the bathroom. (It is estimated that many of my colleagues are very worried)