The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

If you haven&#x27;t read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1]<p>It&#x27;s a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things over time.<p>This reminds me of another great book about beating procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2]<p>In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping graduate students complete their dissertations. I can&#x27;t cover all the great points here, but when working with these students he has them create an &quot;unschedule&quot; where they have to schedule guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but as I&#x27;ve applied this to different projects, it&#x27;s amazing how much more I&#x27;m able to accomplish.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;15799151-daily-rituals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;15799151-daily-rituals</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;95708.The_Now_Habit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;95708.The_Now_Habit</a>

One of the more interesting sayings I have come across lately is: People overestimate how much they can get done in the short term but they underestimate how much they can get done in the long term.<p>I see this all the time with friends who pick up the guitar as a hobby. Often someone practices intensely for one week or one month and then gets frustrated at their progress. That frustration often causes people to give up. Now I see it as a mismatch between short-term estimation&#x2F;expectations. The frustration is caused by overestimating how much progress they think they should make in the short-term. The quitting is caused by underestimating the progress they could make in the long term.

This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don&#x27;t know how big the problem is, everything feels like progress.<p>Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it&#x27;s hard to just do a little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it&#x27;s hard to peel off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success.<p>This curses me in my startup attempts but it also curses me in my work. It&#x27;s hard to think like a founder anymore. I always overspec projects because I can easily guess <i>what demons lie on the horizon</i>.<p>I miss my early startup days when I could just write some code every day and feel successful. I want that back.

Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities.<p>Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it’s much more satisfying to do something productive with that time.<p>I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.

This worked wonderfully for me when prepping for interviews the last time I searched for a job. I just committed to 3 months of doing the Leetcode monthly challenge at a minimum. Some days I did more, yes, but only when I felt like it.<p>By the end of the experiment, I&#x27;d seen the majority of algorithms and data structures problem classes that I&#x27;d likely ever see in an actual interview. Just doing the daily practice was enough to keep my muscle memory sharp, and in an interview setting, being quick to bang out an algorithm almost always gives you good marks.<p>To test it out further, after I did my first interview (and felt I aced it), I did not do any daily practice for about 3 weeks between that and my next one. The difference was shocking. I was noticeably slower at answering very similar questions, and occasionally got stuck on things I knew I should know.

Effectiveness of just showing up works wonderfully for fitness as well.<p>How much ever unfit one is, just showing up for a long period of time changes oneself. All one has to do drag oneself to the class, day in and day out, and then universe takes over..

I&#x27;ve written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I&#x27;ve learned. There is an <i>incredible</i> power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.<p>The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus, inspiration, and genius 90% of the time.

Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there&#x27;s your &quot;Oh wait, I&#x27;ve seen a solution to this problem before...&quot; superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that&#x27;s easy to acquire.

Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day.<p>Since then I&#x27;ve tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I&#x27;ve got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my weeknotes.

I&#x27;m taking a course on how to build and grow a YouTube channel. The main advice they give is &quot;just commit to making a video once a week, every week, for 2 years, and you&#x27;re life will change.&quot; It&#x27;s a tautology, no guarantees on how well your channel will do, but it&#x27;s such a simple idea, and nice motivator to build momentum and keep going.

20 minutes a day is over 100 hours a year. 0 minutes a day is 0 hours a year.

I made a similar decision nearly two years ago when I bought a fixer-upper of a condo: just do a bit of work every day, doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s half an hour of sweeping, make sure you show up every day. Time will pass and work will progress.<p>It&#x27;s been a massive project (fully gutted, subfloors removed and joists levelled, whole new floor plan, the works), it&#x27;s still ongoing, but what kept it moving was that simple commitment. An hour or two in the evening, each god damn evening, for 682 days in a row. New drywall is up in a few places already, and the end is in sight.<p>I am a firm believer in this approach now. The march of time is ruthless and inevitable, the little effort that you regularly weave into it will pay off big in the end.

This is a terrific model but it&#x27;s not the only model - another highly effective model is to develop useful skills+resources, then strike with full force at the perfect time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27835163" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27835163</a>

Couldn&#x27;t agree more. Tangentially, this article came to mind: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnsalvatier.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnsalvatier.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;reality-has-a-surprising-...</a><p>You don&#x27;t fully appreciate the details for what you&#x27;re solving until you naively take it all on and show up everyday. Slowly uncovering every nook – solving an annoying bug over the course of a week, while implementing core pieces of your product you thought would take months within a day.

No more zero days. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;getdisciplined&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1q96b5&#x2F;i_just_dont_care_about_myself&#x2F;cdah4af&#x2F;?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;utm_name=iossmf&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;getdisciplined&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1q96b5&#x2F;i_ju...</a>

I learned this lesson in a completely unrelated domain. I started lifting weights seriously about two years ago. Since then, I&#x27;ve averaged at least 5 days of training per week and now my physique is that of a completely different person. The lesson is if you do something everyday for years, whether it&#x27;s body building, learning a skill, or bootstrapping a company, after several years you will see outstanding results.

Everyone always writes these and yet I&#x27;ve seen very few ever talk about how to decide what&#x27;s worth showing up for or how to get a working hypothesis of an animating principle for your own existence. It&#x27;d be remarkably useful to have a working framework for how to figure out what to want, especially targeted at smart people with top level talents in several areas.

I learned this with my email forwarding app (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hanami.run" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hanami.run</a>) as well. I have tried to bootstrap a few ideas, and just like the ops, I got married, I got kid, family problem, change jobs.<p>Then COVID happens and I promise myself to wake up at 3-4AM everyday to write code and ship <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hanami.run" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hanami.run</a> during that period.<p>I don&#x27;t even worry about competitors, I just want to build a platform that I enjoyed to use and iterate every single day. Many small features were take for granted.<p>Such as we auto refresh DNS constantly so users with like 100 domains don&#x27;t have to check DNS one by one to activate domain. I then supported cloudflare auto config dns to make thing even easiser. And auto refresh DNS means we&#x27;re easily to got block by CloudFlare DNS servers, but I put the cost on me to make our user&#x27;s life easiser.<p>Another effects of this showing up everyday is you are allowed an unlimited time budget and can try out cool thing.<p>Such as I recently expriment with OpenResty autossl to make our URL redirection work with HTTPS. Other day I experiment with leaky bucket rate limiting.<p>With a time budget, I&#x27;m probably won&#x27;t work on that, but sometime I feel down, and knowing I have tomorrow I can use today&#x27;s time on something that make me happy.

I think the worst part about being clinically depressed is how it feels impossible to do a little bit for a few days at a time, and then all my context&#x2F;momentum&#x2F;enthusiasm burns up by the time I come back to a project.

I feel like this notion is complete trash if you want to be anything but mediocre.<p>In IT, I constantly have to work OT and take on challenging projects to advance and improve. This has NOTHING in common with showing up and closing tickets, which I can easily do with existing knowledge.<p>Same with the gym - I constantly have to change up the routine, adjust to injuries, think about diet, etc.<p>That&#x27;s not even talking about doing something significant like learning a language outside of work.<p>It&#x27;s also the reason things like &quot;atomic habits&quot; are complete bs - you aren&#x27;t going to get anything significant done in a minute OR an hour a day.<p>---<p>&quot;It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding.&quot;<p>Lie &#x2F; marketing gimmick. There is start up time and cooldown time that people who have never done anything completely neglect. There is also the fact that one big chunk of time is far more efficient than little chunk of times.<p>Aka you can shoot a bow for 10 mins a day or for an hour once a week and you will see zero improvement, let alone &quot;compounding&quot; improvement.

This is great advice and has made me think how I can squeeze out 30-60 minutes every day to do something similar. I think one area might be just making my setup more portable - instead of having a fully built out development environment that is on my desktop tethered to my desk, it may make sense to move to a laptop that I can move around the house, take with me on trips, etc. so as to not break the streak. Or even using one of the browser-based code editors or IDEs so that it&#x27;s available anywhere, even from a tablet.

This is excellent advice. Just by doing something, the habit gets created and the longer it gets, the easier it is to get started.

I got a government job about 10 years ago by simply showing up to work every day, even though I didn&#x27;t yet formally work there. It was incredibly awkward, but I&#x27;d just find people to have coffee with each day. Many of them would ask, &#x27;So...I&#x27;m sorry to ask, but do you work here?&#x27; and I would just hit them with brutal honesty: &#x27;No, but I would like to.&#x27; After about 5 weeks of this, a department head had a vacancy and I naturally came to mind and was offered the job. I&#x27;m not typing this out as life advice for anyone, but more as a case study that supports the argument that showing up can be an extremely effective way of producing results.

Nit pick: I think they mean &quot;every day&quot;, not &quot;everyday&quot; which is a synonym for commonplace. See this person pushing back against inane Coca Cola slogan :<p>Treat The English Language Well. Everyday. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.happyrobot.net&#x2F;words&#x2F;thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.happyrobot.net&#x2F;words&#x2F;thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385</a>

I highly recommend this same approach for schoolwork&#x2F;studying. Just simply doing <i>something</i>, everyday, keeps topics fresh in your mind. It&#x27;s so much better than forcing activity into giant chunks. I feel it reduces stress as well.<p>It keeps feeding your brain to subconsciously churn over topics during downtime like showers and sleeping.

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don&#x27;t.<p>I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the wrong lesson. Even if you do it for an entire school year, there can be really only one type of winner: the investor that stuck all their money into a stock that happened to blow up, the opposite of a solid investment strategy.<p>I bring up this example to point out that feedback can be a poisoned apple. Start-ups are basically this exact scenario. The only optimum strategy is to go &quot;all in&quot;. Either in the short term by quitting your job and warming up your pitch deck, or in the long term by have some multi-year side project draining all available free time.<p>So that&#x27;s the bar, the vast majority of start-up likely had founders that went all in, it&#x27;s table stakes. So what&#x27;s the secret sauce? It is the equivalent to the fantasy financial league of picking an overperforming stock, it&#x27;s not going all in.

I really am out of words to describe this article. The title should be made the first commandment in the laws of programming (or any field).<p>It is so effective that you don’t need to read the article the title says it all.<p>Most people fail at keeping this rule because their mind perceives it to be too simple to keep and falls prey to overconfidence.

These kind of stories should be on the front page more often!<p>It&#x27;s always about hypergrowth, hyper-everyhing, billion dollar exits, and seems like everyone chasing those dreams.<p>To me personally, this way is much more appealing!

I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me.<p>I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I struggle to do 500m a day.<p>Same with programming. I&#x27;ll start with a few good days but then it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line then closing it straight after.

I feel like HN should have a special flag called &quot;survivorship bias&quot; that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs&#x2F;week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction.<p>Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn&#x27;t think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.

I had a tool I worked on a little bit every day for over a decade and for a while it was pretty popular with a large following. Persistence is what got me from nowhere to somewhere, but after a while persistence offers a diminishing return.<p>Persistence is necessary to build something from nothing to establishment. That is more than just working. It means you have pushed through into something that works well enough that other people will use it and strongly recommend it.<p>That is the point where a trickle becomes a flood, but the flood analogy is a bad analogy. Actual flooding, with water, is an explosive phenomenon where a large area achieves maximum saturation in unison and so the trickle becomes a serious concern almost instantly. When all water over a large area has nowhere to go suddenly at the same time there is an immediate change like the flip of a switch.<p>Growth and adoption don&#x27;t work like that. It takes time to build adoption. By the time a product reaches critical mass many early users may have already moved on. The very thing that made your product special or unique may be gone and you probably don&#x27;t know it. This means the thing that cause adoption could be code while you are still building traffic because of a lag between network effects and incentives. That means adoption could be dying while you are building traffic and you won&#x27;t know and until the future once traffic catches up and begins to decline at which point you are having to catch up.<p>If you are passionate enough, beyond mere persistence, you will figure the traffic&#x2F;adoption cycle out to keep forward momentum, but only if you are properly incentivized. It takes tremendous effort to reach a large critical mass, especially for a small team (in my case a single developer). To want to pivot past your personal motivates to keep your product alive takes something more, something different. Persistence won&#x27;t buy you that.

I used to think like this. At it&#x27;s core, it&#x27;s a variation of &quot;never give up&quot;, mixed with &quot;the power of habit&quot;.<p>I agree with &quot;the power of habit&quot; part.<p>From the &quot;never give up&quot; point of view, I&#x27;ve changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.<p>The bottom line message seems to be &quot;keep insisting and you&#x27;ll be successful&quot;. I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time?<p>Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don&#x27;t mix it up with the concept of &quot;don&#x27;t give up and you&#x27;ll be successful&quot;.

Shout out sleep, bc that ~33% of our lives is actually not wasted time in any way.

This crosses into many aspects of life:<p>I train Brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA. In our gym, we have a giant sign that says:<p><i>&quot;A black belt is a white belt who refused to give up&quot;</i><p>Basic translation: You can achieve the highest possible rank [Black belt] if you just keep showing up and enjoy the process.

They started in 2015 and wrote their first blog post in 2021.<p>My unreasonable admiration of remaining focused and get stuff done instead of social media bragging.

Is it generally easy for people to get permission from their day job to code on the side, without assigning all rights to the employer?

One thing not discussed much here is time of day -- I have a few daily practices (exercise, meditation, painting) I do every single day, and I try to do them all before work. Occasionally something comes up and I have to do them in the evening, but my focus is usually diminished then.<p>Of the people featured in the Daily Habits [edit: Daily Rituals] book mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many described doing their most important work in the morning, though there were notable exceptions (night owls, no consistent pattern, etc.).<p>What works best for you?

Joel Spolsky said something similar. Paraphrasing: You find motivation by just committing a little bit every day: 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Once you get into it, you&#x27;ll most likely do more.

Reminds me of these equations:<p>1.01 ^ 365 = 37.78<p>0.99 ^ 365 = 0.03

Just showing up everyday to work on a side project on top of a day job and your other life commitments is no small feat, and personally that kind of consistency and perseverance is not something I find easy to do.<p>On the other hand, procrastinating from a task by overly planning and reading&#x2F;thinking about the best way to get it done, now that is much more natural<p>Seriously though, this is a hard thing to keep up, so congrats to them. Most people fail to even consistently show up each day to brush their teeth.

The musical instrument practice app Melodics has a streak mechanic that extends your streak if you play at least 5 minutes that day. The interval is NOT adjustable. At first I thought this inability to change the minimum practice time required to continue the streak was a UX bug, but as I started racking up long streaks and finding myself practicing for longer than the minimum five minutes on many days, I realized it was a brilliant feature

<i>Life kept throwing various curve balls at me: I got married, had a daughter, lost a loved one after a prolonged battle, underwent major health issues, battled COVID…</i><p>^this made me cringe a bit. personally, it makes me sad when i hear someone describe family or commitments as obstacles to work.<p>i&#x27;m sure i&#x27;ve done it in the past, but personally, i think it warrants examination.

This is great advice and one that I&#x27;m using in my own side project.<p>I have a macOS&#x2F;iOS app out in the App Store and spent several months of my spare time working on it. Once it was released, I&#x27;ve pulled back a bit on how much time I spend on it, but I do manage to spend a few hours here and there during the week to add more features to it and to fix up bugs. I don&#x27;t have specific goals, like &quot;must release new feature X by 7&#x2F;20&quot;. I just tend to ship a new version every 2-4 weeks depending on how I&#x27;m feeling and how much work I&#x27;ve actually done.<p>I&#x27;ve been amazed at the steady progress of improvements I&#x27;ve made on it. This pace feels a lot better than when I was working hard just to ship the darn thing. I&#x27;m not burnt out on the project, and the lack of pressure gives me time and space to reflect on what to do next and how best to achieve it.

Reminds me of a bo-jack horseman quote: &quot;everyday it gets easier but you have to do it everyday&quot;.

AKA the war of art[0] and I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s many, many other books in the same vein.<p>To dichotomize: those that show up every day anyway are likely doing something they love (even if the thing they&#x27;re doing is showing up itself[1]). Those that don&#x27;t likely perceive the way fwd as something they don&#x27;t like. We can change that perception but it&#x27;s hard.<p>Likely, it&#x27;s best to think in a continuum of interest and that we need to move the perception or act into a realm that is self-reinforcing.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stevenpressfield.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;the-war-of-art&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stevenpressfield.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;the-war-of-art&#x2F;</a> [1] This is an illness; a life without refuge.

Once I was taking a weekend trip down to San Diego with my now wife, and we decided to look at some open houses. It started raining - not super hard, but a fair bit. Most of the open houses we showed up to ended up not happening as a result.<p>One of them did, though, and I spoke to the agent showing the house for a while about San Diego real estate. When I moved down to San Diego, he helped me buy a home and find a space to lease for my new business. I&#x27;m almost certainly going to have him help me find some real estate investments in the future as well.<p>Unlike everybody else, he showed up that day, and it&#x27;s made him tens of thousands of dollars with more to come.

Counterpoint to this: a lot of the programmers I admire all have an uncanny ability to just sit and work for long periods of time. Like, sit down and hardly move for 10 straight hours. They achieve a huge amount in that time - much more in a single 10 hour stretch than they would in 10x1 hour sessions.<p>And that applies to other things they do: playing video games, reading a book...when they do something they go &#x27;all in&#x27;.<p>I feel like this level of focus is much more of a superpower than small amounts every day (although that too is powerful, and both approaches are infinitely better than what most of us do, which is very little)

I agree this is the way to do something, keep at it consistently. But at the same time the story tells me it took a long time, many YEARS, from 2015 to 2020.<p>It takes a long time and but it also helps that you don&#x27;t use the whole day for it every day. That means you have time to think about what you&#x27;re doing while riding on a bus or doing something else.<p>The end-produce is beautiful and simple, but it took a lot of effort to make it simple, to know what exactly it should be.<p>Now had there been a clear spec to start with I assume it could have been done much faster. But then again creating the spec takes its own time.

Working from home, I discovered that my evening commute was part of my shutting off the work at the end of the day. I have a set of about four things I do when I lock my computer at the end of the day. Early dinner with the family, watch entertainment, engage in a hobby, play computer games.<p>Before it got hot out I was at about 50% for hobby stuff, and I made so much progress over the last year that it’s difficult to look at, in the sense that when something stops being a struggle you can experience feelings of loss for the past. Why didn’t I figure this out before?

That piece reminds me of my doctoral thesis and its creation. It took me quite some time as I had a full-time job during the day, but in the evenings, on the weekends, I worked on my research. It was long, it was tedious, and I had my share of detours and fuck-ups, but I managed to finish it, defend it and graduate.<p>Please note: this approach is not for the faint of heart - working on one topic for years means that you can never really relax. There is always something to think about. So you should really consider if that&#x27;s your cup of tea.

It’s a way better mindset to just expect to work on something a few hours each day than to try to set milestones and deadlines because you won’t burn yourself out moonlighting

Reminds me of our attempts to get various contractors to come and do tasks. Sometimes they keep promising to come and don&#x27;t show up repeatedly. Other times they show up, write down our requirements, plan the work, and then vanish. My builder friends who are actual general contractors also complain of this about their subs. Makes me think if I wasn&#x27;t already doing well in software I would kill it in the trades just by showing up when I say I will!

One weird trick for techies nonsense. &quot;I just showed up everyday and built this company, so can you!&quot; All of what, 500 words of content, too.

&gt; Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well.<p>Apparently, software is similar to soft drinks :) That is, the soft drink market is massive. So massive that even a small slice - and you most often have to start looking to &quot;corner&quot; a small slice - can be fairly lucrative.

SEO tactic: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of using the phrase &quot;unreasonable effectiveness&quot; in a blog post. ;)

2 Questions:<p>1. I see you&#x27;re on v.0.21 - how stable is this? I know the point of the article is that you don&#x27;t set deadlines, but I&#x27;m anxious to implement something that may have breaking changes.<p>2. How can I pay you? I&#x27;m implementing search now, considering Algolia or PG_Search. I want to give you a shot, but I also want to pay you.

Inspiring post! I am sitting here right now working on my side project, which I try to do for an hour or two before work every day. It really is amazing how much I get done in this tiny block of time vs. the 8 hours I spend at my full-time job. Just &quot;plugging away&quot;, hoping to go from 1 user to 10 to 100.

I&#x27;m not sure what all this pedantic nonsense is regarding the grand canyon and flooding. But I can tell you from personal experience that this indeed works beautifully well. And the more progress you accumulate, the more velocity you experience. It is a virtuous cycle.

<i>Drops of water falling, if they fall consistently, will bore through iron and stone.</i> -- Chinese Martial Arts saying.<p>Nice and pithy on the importance of daily practice. The key is to not be competitive, set a time limit and focus only on the &quot;doing&quot; with no judgement.

I don&#x27;t have a side project, but this is basically the approach I take at work. Try to do one useful thing each day. Doesn&#x27;t even have to be a big useful thing. It adds up.<p>I guess that&#x27;s really the whole point of the tortoise and the hare, now that I think of it.

I think probably it&#x27;s better to think of this as &#x27;reasonable effectiveness&#x27;.<p>Unreasonable effectiveness would be better communicated with a success metric that isn&#x27;t also highly dependant on luck.<p>As in grinding vocabulary in a foreign language every day.

Reminds me of the book atomic habits. It emphasizes the compounding gains of small wins.

Sorry to be a downer, but at this rate of speed isn&#x27;t it possible that their tech will become outdated before it becomes widely used? Maybe they&#x27;re 5-10 years away from being widely used? Machine learning is advancing rapidly.

True that. Also we all plateau at it. That is where time and effort stops yielding satisfaction or usefulness. Unless, unless, you are really in love with yourself and thing that everything you know is amazing...just kidding.

Picasso said this, &quot;Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working&quot;

People hate this because it’s not the all-in-one all-nighter over-the-weekend hacker stereotype I think we all want to be; rather it’s a slow movement towards success over a much much longer period of time.

It worked for Seinfeld, too! [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strateg...</a>

Consistency is a super power if applied right.<p>Most people don&#x27;t do things consistently and of those who do only a few do the right things.<p>In the long run, you outrun everyone who doesn&#x27;t keep doing the right things.

I just wish people on the internet would discover the difference between &quot;everyday&quot; and &quot;every day.&quot;<p>(Bonus points for &quot;setup&quot; vs. &quot;set up&quot; - a common foulup.)

I wouldn&#x27;t call the effectiveness unreasonable. I would instead say that incorporating something into your routine is the most reliable way to make sure it gets done.

I also had a failed HN launch, glad to see that pushing through pays off. I’m not giving up, that’s for sure :) Happy for typesense founders!

The unreasonable effectiveness of &#x27;The unreasonable effectiveness of &quot;The unreasonable effectiveness...&quot;&#x27; title.

2 crappy pages a day is the Tim Ferris standard

The trick is to aggressively dive headfirst into a project, such that it becomes unconscionable for you to give up :)

I wonder if this is an argument in favor of the five-day workweek - at least from management&#x27;s point of view.

What does a &quot;Hacker News launch&quot; refer to? Is that simply announcing it in a Hacker News submission?

See &quot;Turning Pro&quot; and &quot;War of Art&quot; by Steven Pressfield. Good books on this topic.

The power of consistent effort over time is staggering. Small choices compound into dramatic gains.

I didn’t see James Clear’s Atomic Habits book mentioned — what’s the opinion of HN on that book?

For me this habit is going to hackernews every day for sometime and it is working great!

I love this post and the approach. It’s worked for me during my life on lots of things.

It&#x27;s all fun and games until they take your red Swingline stapler, though.

Very helpful learnings, looking forward to seeing TypeSense grow!

Good stuff! How many hours per week did you put in on average?

Absolutely this works. I&#x27;ve been doing it for decades.

This site triggered an XSS warning from noscript for me.

Every TIL runner: &quot;See. This is the result.&quot;

It&#x27;s necessary, but not sufficient.

Interesting and inspiring story.

I don’t see others mentioning it so I thought I should. This reminds me of DHH and the creation of Rails. He followed essentially the same method: chipped away at it over a long period of time, little by little, day by day, with no specific deadline in mind. Works like this can have a huge impact on a person’s life and the world around him.

Cool.<p>But why is it unreasonable?

that&#x27;s how I graduated college

thus, consistency is a key

This reminds me of what I heard of buses on Madagascar. A bus leaves not at specific time, but when it&#x27;s full.<p>Maybe we attach too much importance to the saying &quot;time is money&quot;? It can be money, but there are other approaches.

Excellent advice.