Category Archives: productivity

I like to imagine that my brain runs on mentons. Mentons are tiny particles of mental energy that move through the brain producing thoughts, intuitions, and insights. The more mentons you have, the more ideas you are able to produce and the better the quality of those ideas. When you run low on mentons you [...]

The brain runs on fuel. I discover this every evening when the night looms black through the windows and the pillow beckons. After a long day of thinking and typing and talking and listening and programming and parenting and the rest, I start to run out of steam. And yet I’m convinced that steam is [...]

In the last couple of posts I’ve talked about a programmer’s greatest enemy: getting stuck. I talked about the various levels of how stuck you can get, from getting stuck while trudging through documentation to getting stuck because you don’t have the resources—passwords, files—that you need to perform a task. This leads me to my [...]

A programmer’s worst enemy is getting stuck. Getting stuck on a problem hurts your productivity. Worse than that, it hurts your joy, your confidence, and your soul. Therefore learning how to avoid getting stuck, how to recognize when you’re stuck, and how to get unstuck is a key skill in the quest of becoming a [...]