Debunking the "1,000 hours of practice" myth

Posted by Chris Murtland
Nov 13, 2011 at 05:26 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>- 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…

Investing in this sort of self-awareness and self-management is exactly the type of thing that seems to have a higher payoff for me currently than any specific tool, because I have mostly ignored it in the past, just trying to plow through things with no regard for it. Like Dr Andus, I hit a wall in terms of productivity, and the bottleneck for me was not a software issue.

>- 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.

I agree completely - it seems that it would be possible to have one underlying data store of atomic items that is then viewed and manipulated in different ways (calendars, network graphs, timelines, outlines, pin boards, concept maps, spreadsheets, checklists, et al.). I think Evernote is on the right track here, by providing a ubiquitous storage and synchronizing mechanism and then an API where anyone can build different views on top of that data (there is a tool in beta called TuskTools that allows displaying your Evernote notes on a calendar, for example). Unfortunately, it’s really still in its infancy when compared to the speed and power most of us are used to from dedicated info apps. Evernote is already great for having certain info automatically accessible on all of your devices, but I wish the native desktop client was much speedier and that more innovative third-party tools for it would develop more rapidly.

Chris