Training hard to live the American Dream.

Benjamin Hardy has a fantastic blog post on how to take a results-oriented approached with 100% focus.

Here are some fantastic quotes from the blog post:

If you’re like most people, your workday is a blend of low-velocity work mixed with continual distraction (e.g., social media and email).

The best time to do your best work is during the first three hours of your day.

Don’t check your social media or email until after your 3 hours of deep work. Your morning time should be spent on output, not input.

“Recovery” is the process of reducing or eliminating physical and psychological strain/stress caused by work. One particular recovery strategy that is getting lots of attention in recent research is called “psychological detachment from work.” True psychological detachment occurs when you completely refrain from work-related activities and thoughts during non-work time.

The American Dream Workout is a community of programmers that follow Benjamin Hardy's advice to deliberately practice and get better at coding.

You can create a YOUR-NAME_training_log.csv file to track the hours you spend traning to be a better programmer. Study hours need to meet the following criteria:

• Must be timed
• Cell phone, Slack, and social media sites must be turned off
• The study period must be continuous and focused (e.g. no breaks to chat with coworkers)

Just like athletes need to train to achive their physical potential, coders should train to achieve their progmamming potential. Runners have training programs like this to prepare for marathons. Programmers should have similar training programs to deliberately practice and continuously improve.

Training requires complete focus. It's easier to completely focus on athletic training because the physical exertion commands your full attention. When you're sitting in front of a computer, it is easy to get distracted from training by reading news, texting, or watching kitten videos. We're becoming increasingly accustomed to living with constant distractions. Read this article on addiction to distractions and this article on distraction junkie coders.

You'll need a lot of discipline to shut off all distractions and study, especially when starting out. Start with 20 minutes and then progress to 30 minutes or an hour.

The training log can only be updated with study hours that had a specific start time and were uninterrupted. For example, if you start at 4:30, put a hour on a timer, and stop at 5:30, you can add an hour to the training log.

If you get interruped while training, you shouldn't count the study hour. It just like how atletes cannot count two sets of 5 as a set of 10. Interruptions / breaks matter and we need to fight against them in an increasingly distracting world.

If you aren't sure what to train, focus on a core technology like Bash, Git, or Vim. You're bound to switch technology stacks throughout your career, but the core technologies usually stay the same.

To be continued...