It is directed towards a person who would write some software with clear expectation of money and release it for free.

It is directed towards himself.

If I delegate something urgent and non-important to another, doesn’t that:

1. Urgently interrupt someone else?

2. Set them up to urgently ask me questions about something unimportant.

3. Burn some of their trust in me when they complete it and I’m not grateful.

?

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It seems the bottom two should be:

Urgent & Not Important: Drop

Non Urgent & Not Important: Maybe Play

Part of the problem is that I've been burned by enough hours spent on 30-second tasks.

No, we allowed people to change their own dietary habits and they chose to do so.

> There's no reason we couldn't change them back.

There is a reason: The probability that they would respond with violence that would spiral into a massive humanitarian crisis.

Remember that the Syrian civil war was kicked off in large part by the prices of food in the Arab world putting pressure on pre-existing fault lines.

> Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.

You're not wrong about the destination...but the path to get there matters if you want to avoid making things worse. Also, there is a massive difference between freeing up the alfalfa fields of California and the grazing lands of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The word "just" in this sense is a signal that you might easily be underestimating the difficulty or cost of something.

> We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.

If you were talking about persuasion, this would be fine.

When you start talking about forcing people to change their habits, it is time to take a step back and get curious about those other people's perspectives. In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.

Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#Tot...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...

2. Go for a walk outside while listening to Brené Brown audiobooks.

3. Talk to humans who can actually calmly listen —- Not people as disconnected as an internet forum nor someone as intertwined as a life partner.

1. Conclude that its 90% likely to be what happened.

2. Not burden someone by asking a question you don’t need the answer to.

3. Disclaim credit for work you don’t lead.

Blue: Come up with my intended outcome. Set a duration from 10 to 45 minutes in proportion to my intuitive confidence that I am “on the right path”.

If I am spending too long in blue, then say the thing I’m most anxious about. State a hypothesis about it and frame my intended outcome as a test of that hypothesis.

Red: Execute at speed while still noting any surprises in a notebook.

Blue: Reflect on what I’ve produced and what I’ve learned. Notice any errors I made and think (without typing) about what led to them.

Green: 2-5 minutes meditation. Reconnect with my breath and body. Control my internal sense of time pressure.

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Sidenote: I highly recommend both Leadership is Language and the Huberman Lab podcast to ADHDers and folks who just have struggles turning their intentions into action.

- "Learning a wide range of skills is useful and can let you combine them in ways others cannot."

- "You should not let your current path in life unduly limit your curiosity."

- "Sometimes life throws a curveball at you and a wide range of skills can unexpectedly be very handy."

- "There is a small subset of this list which, as an adult, you really should know how to do."

Unhealthy interpretations of that quote:

- "You are as unworthy as an insect if you specialise."

- "Time spent on one thing does not come at the cost of time spent on other things. You can manufacture time."

- "Developing a deeper understanding of a craft you're deeply curious about is not worth the time you give up learning other things."

- "A person who knows how to do all of this list of things competently has ever existed in human history."

(I assert that any person who has competently planned an invasion and died gallantly in the age where they had access to program a computer would be listed on wikipedia.)

(Also, if people didn't sometimes need specialised knowledge to make competent decisions, then central economic planning would have a hope of working.)

1. Treats people's intelligence as 1-dimensional, which it is not.

2. Gives no clear direction to an engineer who is passionate about UX, recognises that humans are multidimensional, and is trying to ask about what their users really need.

You might say I'm arguing semantics, but communication matters!

Without it, you can write code at high speed, but you won't learn what direction to go in order to present information appropriately and contextually to create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.

The problem is that the term is _inaccurate_ because it is _overly precise_.

---------------

When you find yourself arguing over details you find pedantic, then it is a sign that you either:

A. Are failing to realize why some detail actually _does_ matter in that context.

B. Are using overly-precise terms and should see if you can "go up one abstraction layer", likely by asking "why does someone care?"

As someone who has inattentive-subtype ADHD, I must say that this sort of pattern can result in a great deal of loneliness. It is far better to watch the course "learning how to learn" and use something like the Pomodoro technique to explicitly decide whether to be in

- focused mode

- exploratory mode

- actually relaxing and paying attention to your relationships mode

No I do not mean Photoshop/InDesign/Balsamiq/Dribble etc. I mean user experience design. Like https://fishshell.com/ or https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/databases/postgresql/quick...

For an engineer, it absolutely does.

How? By giving a broader range humans the ability to shout "This problem matters to me. Please build something to solve it" into the economy.

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Suppose it is 2013. I build a tool that helps a luxury hotel in New York do bespoke guest relations slightly better. They have customers who have money, so they have revenue, so I get revenue.

Suppose it is 2013. I build a tool that helps a food truck in Flint, Michigan run their operations. Their customers don't have money, so they don't have revenue, so I don't get revenue.

Helping people get fed and create community, or polishing a luxury experience for a very few -- Which job has more meaning and purpose?

> you need to be the one to say something

This implies a moral duty to learn rhetoric.

I think this part is definitely true for me...

I have let "notice when you are confused" and "understand the impact of your work" and "make sure you are building the right thing" and "make sure you know stakeholder needs" get kinda etched into my identity. I keep wanting to _understand_ the systems I work with and I keep getting distracted by noticing problems with its UX or implications to business process.

I can turn that voice off with deliberate effort, but I don't know how to get it to stay off.

Does anyone else have any methods for more permanently-silencing UX-worries and just cranking out code?