Usually I work in bursts. I do big crazy super productive bursts. Maybe because
when I was at school I was lucky enough of being able to resolve every problem
I had working hard in short period spans.
And that’s not a bad thing. Human attention usually can’t last longer than 45
minutes. That’s why working in bursts can make you super productive, but I’ve
been making a wrong distribution of my working units (1 unit = 50 minutes of
attention) all the time. Working units and burst working are not new, but
nobody told my that the way I was distributing those working units was wrong
nor important.
The distribution is as important as resting. Why ? Because of our memory. We
have different types of memories and being able to make all of them work,
it’s not an easy task and requires time.
TL;DR:
So what was I doing so wrong? I was doing all the working units for a specific
project in a row. And how bad can be that ? Really, really bad in my
experience. Why ? Because usually you are not giving yourself enough time to
make your Working-Memory store all those things into your Long-Term-Memory.
WTF Brain ? I was working hard !!
And that sounds strange I know. If I store something in a DB, it should be just
there (more or less consistently but there). But be careful, your brain is not
a DB, you don’t have the permissions for writing in your Long-Term-Memory. You
only have access to your cache (Working-Memory). And those things that stay
around enough time in your cache eventually are stored in the DB. This looks
like a super stupid analogy. But it’s true.
Every time someone tells me, I learned X just in a weekend, I feel sorry
for them, because now I know that if they didn’t keep working on that, they
know nothing about X.