Programmers working 4 hours a Day (reprinted)

English Original: Daily Routine of a 4 Hour Programmer, translation: foreign periodicals It review

Everyone is familiar with this routine: 9 in the morning to work, sitting in front of the computer, compiling a day of the program, 5 o'clock in the afternoon home from work. Now, thanks to Timothy Ferris (Timothy Ferriss) for working 4 hours a week, I began to rethink how I should work and how to become a more efficient programmer.

Recently, I made a big adjustment to my routine from Monday to Friday. I've been working and resting like all the other programmers for a long time. But in the second half of 2011, I started an experiment to see what kind of schedule would make me more efficient. The experiment is still in progress, and I'm not strictly following the rules of the experiment like a military soldier--for example, I'd like to get up 20 minutes early or 20 minutes later--but the current rules are:

4:30 to 7: meditation, writing, target review, and family breakfast.

It's not as hard to get up 4:30 as you think. Everyone's personal situation is somewhat different, but the human body basically needs 7-9 hours of sleep a day. One way to make sure you have enough sleep is to wake up without the alarm clock. You just have to go to bed early and you can wake up at 4:30.

When I get up, I'll drink 16 ounces of water right away-not coffee! I don't drink coffee for a long time, and I don't want to drink it too much. In fact, I feel better about not drinking coffee. Then I'll take a shower, and it'll make me feel a fresh start to the day.

I meditate for 30 minutes every morning. The best time to meditate is before sunrise or sunrise, that is, before 6 o'clock in the Western world. I'm not going to explain why meditation is good for you, and there's been a lot of research on the web. If you want to find a book about meditation, I recommend meditation for Dummies. Although the title is strange, it is the best book I have ever read.

After meditation, I spend 30-45 minutes blogging. I usually write 500 to 800 words. I found that writing immediately after meditation is usually one go and smooth. In addition, the brain after a night of rest, the state is very good, before the attention to other matters, the accumulation of things in the brain to clean up is very good. A technique for writing: Use this time as a preliminary cleanup of the brain. Don't do research, edit, etc. These things will be done in the future.

Then it is time for the To Do List (Todo list). I will check the mail, Weibo, LinkedIn, and so on, as well as schedule the next task to be done. Speaking of tasks, I follow the GTD method of doing things, I use OmniFocus software to manage my life. I installed it in Ipad,iphone and MacBook Air (I'm a fan of Apple). Good, as a todo management software, OmniFocus is a bit expensive, but because my whole life is related to it, the price is also worth. I browse through to the list of things to do, and think about what is expected of everything-everything from small things today to long-term goals. Each entry in the list is set with a target, and if there is no target, I will delete it.

Then the breakfast time. On the question of when to eat breakfast and what to eat, there are plenty of health guides you can use for reference. I have tried all kinds of different things. I found that the cellulose-rich, low-carbon, high-protein stuff works best for me. Have you ever tried oatmeal and peanut butter? Great! I also like to eat some fruit, drink a little tea. Also, I try to have breakfast with my family. Sometimes things can be carried out in accordance with this desire, but sometimes not. My goal is to follow this implementation in the year to come.

Early 7 o'clock to 11:4 hours of programming time

This is the time I use to program. 4 hours a day you may feel less miserable, but I find that in these 4 hours I can do more than most people do in a week. Studies have shown that people with fixed work schedules are more efficient than those who work at random. For me, this fixed time is 7 o'clock to 11 o ' Day, daily. What I'm going to do this time is programming, not doing anything else. There are several basic principles:

First of all, turn off all communication facilities-phone, mail, chat tools, etc. There's nothing to distract you from. You can save a few people a way to get in touch with you in case something urgent happens. The people who really have urgent things to find you have a way of contacting you, and I haven't met anything like this. I even educate my wife, who is usually accustomed to responding immediately to all requests, and I tell her to respect me for this 4-hour period. You should only do one thing during this period. Don't do 5 or 6 things at the same time.

Second, don't leave a break in the middle to check your email or surf the Internet or do anything like that. The reason: In one hours, I can develop X function. If I had worked 4 hours in a row, I would have found that my output was not 4 times times, but 8 times or 16 times times. When you are absorbed in doing something, believe that you have experienced such an experience. This is what we call the flow state of the brain. I'm going to write more articles about flow in a future blog.

So why not apply such a system to the entire 8-hour working time? This is because there is a limit to the state of human efficiency. The human brain is the same as the muscle. Can you keep exercising for 8 hours on a treadmill? Just like our muscles, the brain needs to rest from time to time. Such limits vary according to individual differences. By trying and according to the mistakes made, I found that my limit time was 4 hours.

One more thing to mention is that I did not set the alarm at 11 o ' clock. I stopped working when I felt my brain was a bit tired and my productivity started to fall. Some days I only work 3 hours, sometimes I work 5 hours; 4 hours is the average.

I work at home to avoid interruptions. If you need to work in an office, see if management allows you to work at home at the most efficient time. The toss-up on your way to work will offset the benefits of doing yoga and meditation in the morning. After an early rush of hustle and bustle in the office, your nerves become tense and the effects of meditation disappear completely. Working from home must be more efficient.

Early 11 o'clock to 1 o'clock in the afternoon: fitness, lunch, shopping

I have to exercise every day. John J. Ratey's book, Spark:the revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, gives a good argument about the benefits of exercise every day, and if you want to know the scientific mechanism of exercise for improving brain function, you can read a Under this book. Do not do the same exercise every day, not even go to the same gym. I do yoga 3 times a week in a yoga hall, two days of spinning class in a spinning, two days of weightlifting in the gym, and I have a coach in the gym. The coach has helped me a lot, and someone who is urging you will give you a greater motivation.

I like to exercise in the gym because there are extra services. You can use 5 towels without worrying about your wife's complaints. It takes 30 minutes to take a shower without worrying about someone shouting "Aren't you done yet?" “... You will often encounter such a thing at home.

I also developed a habit of shopping every day, usually in whole Foods, a supermarket only a short walk from my home. Why shopping every day? In many countries, especially in Asia, people go shopping every day, rather than a 2-week store in their home refrigerators or freezers. In this way, you only buy what you need and avoid wasting it. Most of the time you will find something in the fridge that you do not know what it is, and suspect it has been there for half a year. I eat out at lunch, Whole foods a good salad buffet in the supermarket. Because I like Japanese food, sometimes I have a little Japanese sushi or bento.

1 o'clock in the afternoon to 6: Learning and communication time

I try to put together some discussion and dating time so that I don't have to go to the company every day. Usually, these things include meetings, interviews, reporting, mentoring, code reviews, and so on. During this time I do not do any development, unless there are urgent bugs or special circumstances to deal with.

I also use a large proportion of the time to learn. I spent a lot of time reading other people's stuff, from books to Borg, mostly with programming-related stuff. I have to learn new knowledge every day. The best way to keep this learning momentum is to make some notes about what you have learned, and to write the relevant knowledge to mark it. Software like Evernote is good for this kind of thing.

At the same time I will look at the market there are no other products, the most efficient software developers do not have to write a line of code to solve the problem. I don't want to do the things that others have done all over again. So it's good to spend time on sites such as CodePlex, GitHub, and Component Source.

I got a little revelation from my wife's experience in the hospital internship. The new doctor came to the hospital every morning, and in the afternoon, they came together to discuss the various symptoms and discuss how they were treated. For me, I'll reflect on what I've done, and I'll rethink what I've been through in the morning, what bugs I've encountered, or what I've done with my reports, or how I've hosted meetings, and so on. I try to learn from my mistakes and avoid them from appearing again.

6 o'clock in the afternoon to 8 o'clock: Family time

My wife is a doctor and she is very busy at work, but we try to spend the time together. We'll cook together. Then I will do my homework with the children. (A second grade student should have so much homework, this is another topic, I will talk about later.) )

8 o'clock in the evening to 8:30: introspection and subcontracting the brain

I do not meditate at night, but instead sit down and reflect on the day's life. If you spend 15 minutes in a quiet place to reflect on your day, you will be surprised to discover that you have learned so much from this day and gained such a great improvement.

Next, I set the brain to work. As we all know, the brain is constantly working when we sleep. So, you'd better arrange a little work for it. For me, these things worked well: I made an outline of what I was going to write the next morning. It's like writing a note. I found it more effective to write it on paper than to write it on a computer.

Or, I'll look at some programming/algorithmic issues. Similarly, the paper will describe or write the framework. Surprisingly, many times in the morning you will find that there is a solution! Things like this I wrote on a neat, non-linear, envelope-sized notebook. Writing on blank white paper will make me more inspired. I went to bed at 9 o ' 8:30. The sooner the better.

This is my schedule for the day. Of course, there will be some changes when I travel, and I will spend a lot of time on the way to work. I haven't told you what I'm doing on weekends, and I'll talk about it in future articles.

I'd like to hear about other people's stories about their schedules and how they can improve their work efficiency.

Programmers working 4 hours a Day (reprinted)