[dkopi]

I'm pretty sure this has worked for the author, and it will work for a lot of other people as well, but a lot the benefits raised can still be achieved when working more than 3 hours a day.

A few points are raised in the post: 1. If you only work 3 hours, you're less tempted to go on twitter/facebook/hacker news.

True - but that's really a question of discipline, work environment and how excited you are about what you're working on. It's perfectly possible to perform for 10 hours straight without distractions, just make sure to take an occasional break for physical health.

2. Better prioritization.

Treating your time as a scarce resource helps focus on the core features. But your time is a scarce resource even if you work 12 hours a day. Programmers are in shortage. They cost a lot. And the time you're spending on building your own apps could have been spent freelancing and working for someone else's apps. Always stick a dollar figure on your working hours. Even if you're working on your own projects. You should always prioritize your tasks, and always consider paying for something that might save you development time (Better computer. better IDE. SaaS solutions, etc).

3. Taking a long break can help you solve a problem you're stuck on.

Personally, I find that taking a short walk, rubber duck debugging or just changing to a different task for a while does the same. If I'm stuck on something, I don't need to stop working on it until tomorrow. I just need an hour or two away from it.

[geographomics]

On the topic of work environment: in one job I worked at, we had the Internet machines completely separated from the work machines. If you needed to check something you had to physically walk over to the Internet desk. Great for focussing on the task at hand without distraction, and considering carefully what information you need.

[dkopi]

"Air gapping". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)

It's common practice in classified environments, as a necessary security precaution. But it's a true productivity killer imho. Better to just install an extension that blocks twitter/facebook etc, than completely cripple your ability to search for technical information as you need it.

Also - good luck installing tools and plugins when you have to start copying things from the internet computer to the classified computer.

[geographomics]

After the initial period of adaptation, I found it actually increased productivity. Perhaps it was just preventing already-established bad habits that arise from having the internet constantly available.

[wtbob]

> Better to just install an extension that blocks twitter/facebook etc, than completely cripple your ability to search for technical information as you need it.

With godoc, man pages, info pages, a local copy of the Common Lisp Hyperspec and Usenet, what more does one need?

[bpchaps]

At the last place I did sysadmin work, this was basically how I functioned. Just about everything was done to prevent having to use google, stackoverflow, etc. It was absolutely amazing in terms of learning and gaining confidence in the tools and documentation, etc.... but nah. After about 3 months of that, I gave up. It's possible, but it led to so may "time wasting" rabbit holes in trying to figure things out. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but in hindsight, it probably wasn't the best use of time while at work (and should be frowned upon if management ever suggests it)!

[bdcravens]

But then how do you copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

[hanniabu]

You can download the information to use locally, it's only about 35Gb last time I checked

[sleepychu]

On a serious note, this is a terrible habbit. SO code is questionably licenced.

[dkopi]

Any questions about the license not answered by this? http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-licen...

[tossaway1]

I don't think that answers anything. Just because some anonymous poster put code online doesn't make it usable under the MIT license no matter what the ToS of the website says. The poster may have copied that code from a GPL code base...

[dkopi]

That's true even if you find code on GitHub explicitly labeled as MIT, CC or Apache.

If you're worried about using code from stack-overflow, use it as inspiration only and write your own code. Or conduct a short search first to see if it WAS copied from another code repository.