Debunking the "1,000 hours of practice" myth

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 13, 2011 at 10:43 AM

Some thoughts after reading through this fascinating discussion:

- Sometime ago Daly wrote a post on getting up early http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2817 I believe in circadian body/mind rhythms and know that, regardless of the tools, I will be best at doing different things at different times of the day: 5:00-8:00 for texts, 8:00-11:00 for organisation, 11:00-14:00 for focused discussions, 14:00- 16:00 for physical exercise, 16:00-18:00 for social communication, 18:00-... for delving on technical problems (whose solutions will probably be manifest after a good night’s sleep) etc. These are indicative times but for me they work. Many of my productivity problems have to do with doing the wrong thing at the wrong time…

- Re focus / concentration: it may indeed be a matter of discipline, but the surrounding conditions can facilitate it or make it more difficult. Is it surprising that many of us look back to DOS days, JB swears by Emacs Org-mode and full text editors like ZenWriter, Q10, WriteMonkey etc. abound? I only switched from WordPerfect 5.1’s ‘darkroom’ environment to Windows editors when I could no longer run it… When working on texts early in the morning I will disable PopPeeper’s auto-checking of mails, because I find even its tiny static flag notification distracting.

- I believe that software can indeed help as Dr Andus suggested, even without AI; much of the software we discussed here offers specific views to our data. IMHO, the ideal tool would provide (a) different representations of structured relationships, i.e. concept mapping, tabular, outline etc. and (b) zoomable views to those representations. The latter is very important and surprisingly missing from most offerings. Even more, when zoomable views are provided e.g. in TreeSheets, they treat all info at a certain level as of equal value. Yet just as on a geographical map there are landmarks and we will often visualise France with an out-of-proportion Eiffel Tower at its centre, so we may need to have such ‘landmarks’ in our data too.