1. Knowledge

Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write. Sometimes it wasn't even a paragraph, just a list of this happens then this then this. This simple change, these five stupid minutes, boosted my wordcount enormously. I went from writing 2k a day to writing 5k a day within a week without increasing my 5 hour writing block. Some days I even finished early.

2. Time


Even if you don't have the luxury of 4 uninterrupted hours at your prime time of day, I highly suggest measuring your writing in the times you do have to write. Even if you only have 1 free hour a day, trying that hour in the morning some days and the evening on others and tracking the results can make sure you aren't wasting your precious writing time on avoidable inefficiencies. Time really does matter.

3. Enthusiasm

Those days I broke 10k were the days I was writing scenes I'd been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the scenes I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days where I was struggling to break 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn't that crazy about.

If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn't want to write them, then there was no way in hell anyone would want to read them.

Every day, while I was writing out my little description of what I was going to write for the knowledge component of the triangle, I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I'd look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn't find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and there that, no matter how useful a scene might be for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels.

Objectively speaking, successful people flock together. You really don’t see highly successful people all by themselves, surrounded by those who have a negative attitude towards success. The movers and shakers in any field tend to be friends and often hang out together.

www.fourhourworkweek.com

Work in a field you love, take advantage of audio learning, eliminate interruptions, log your time usage, use timeboxing.

Performance tweaks, different update servers, OpenOffice.org 3, Dropbox... Windows fonts and codecs

A similar finding is that experienced outsiders, who know less of the details, but who have relevant memory to draw upon, are often much less optimistic and much more accurate than the actual planners and implementers. So there is a fairly reliable way to fix the planning fallacy, if you're doing something broadly similar to a reference class of previous projects. Just ask how long similar projects have taken in the past, without considering any of the special properties of this project. Better yet, ask an experienced outsider how long similar projects have taken. You'll get back an answer that sounds hideously long, and clearly reflects no understanding of the special reasons why this particular task will take less time. This answer is true. Deal with it.

Sometime in the next week, I suggest you hold a New Day, where you don't do anything old. Don't read any book you've read before. Don't read any author you've read before. Don't visit any website you've visited before. Don't play any game you've played before. Don't listen to familiar music that you already know you'll like. If you go on a walk, walk along a new path even if you have to drive to a different part of the city for your walk. Don't go to any restaurant you've been to before, order a dish that you haven't had before. Talk to new people (even if you have to find them in an IRC channel) about something you don't spend much time discussing. And most of all, if you become aware of yourself musing on any thought you've thunk before, then muse on something else. Rehearse no old grievances, replay no old fantasies. If it works, you could make it a holiday tradition, and do it every New Year.

Get Up Earlier, Read the Right Material, Extinguish All Sources of Light, Sweep Your Mind for Stray Thoughts, Avoid Computer and TV Screens

Do you ever...
..let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less. This site dedicated to sane parenting. Share your stories, tell your tips and maybe one day I will try to collect them in a book. Meantime, let's try to help our kids embrace life! (And maybe even clear the table.)

In high school I was comfortable within certain social circles, but I was still introverted. Starting at college, I decided to become more extroverted; I just dove in and attempted to be as social as possible. I accepted any and all opportunities for social interaction. If anyone invited me to go out, I always said yes. I made a huge commitment to elevate this part of my life, and I stuck with it for my entire freshman year. This strategy actually worked. I hadn’t read any books on social skills at the time, but I quickly calibrated my social skills via trial and error. Within a few weeks, I’d made dozens of new friends, and I was going to parties every week. I created an absolutely amazing social life. In the beginning, it seemed like I was always the one to initiate new connections, but soon additional connections began flowing into my life almost effortlessly. Eventually I had so many invites coming to me passively that I didn’t have to initiate. I probably went overboard.

The natural sciences have a reputation for posing special challenges to the way we think and learn: they are a form of “extreme thinking”. In this essay physicist Michael A. Nielsen discusses some of the challenges facing researchers in the natural sciences, and how those challenges shed light on other tough learning situation

FRENCH IN ACTION!

I once saw a show on new learning techniques. They took a first or second grade music class and told the students they were going to play them a song and that they should come up with a way of remembering the tune. Each of the children came up with a different method mostly using crayons and construction paper. They created different ways to designate the notes and loudness and spaced things to indicate the timing, etc. Then they showed each student how the method they came up with mapped to sheet music. According to the program I was watching this was really effective in teaching children how to read sheet music