Our friends understand us through half-sentences and poor phrasing and assume good intent. Talking to strangers requires accurate wording and well-formed, generally understood tone and facial expressions. At the very least, it's very good for learning to speak well. This is not mentioned in the article.
I am just speaking from experience. I can go on about these for days. I do exercises that keep my posture decent despite sitting all day. Takes a minimum of 15 minutes (3 sets of glute briges, 3 sets of planks, 3 sets of stretches, neck stretches, etc). There is NOTHING that "atomic habits" works for.
I am saying 40 minutes a day is an absolute minimum sufficient for simple maintenance tasks (aka walking, cooking healthy meals, etc) and a far greater amount of time is required to actually accomplish anything meaningful, let alone novel or groundbreaking.
I do. I have accomplished a lot of petty things (at risk of humble brag, which this is not) - decent lift numbers, few skills at competitive level, new things like GCP/AWS/Azure/K8S certs at work, etc. None of them are achievable through anything other than hours a days for months. Even things that seem basic like "do a handstand" or "drive a stick".
I also have friends who have accomplished petty things - none got results until they started sitting down with it for 3+ hours a day.
I will be more concrete - if you sit down to learn a language for 20 mins a day, it will fade before you get anywhere (without constant repetition, the amount of material for which builds up). If you workout, you need warm up, cool down, travel time, shower, nutrition - it can't be a micro-habit. Even if you WALK for fitness, that's 40 minutes right there. Coding? No one here is going to tell me you will learn all the search algos and such without sitting down for 40 minutes a day. Hell, it takes 40 minutes to do a difficult hackerrank/codewars problem that you don't really understand. Not talking FizzBuzz here.
A failed example? I spent an hour a day for several months learning ML. Passed that famous Andrew Ng Machine Learning course. Because I don't apply it, I barely remember anything other than a general understanding of the overall process.
edit: Another obvious example that comes to mind - working on cars. If you don't dedicate an hour to it, you won't even have the time to get your tools out. It takes something like a day to just change out calipers, pads, and rotors on all 4 wheels, and it's about as basic as it gets in terms of repairs, other than an oil change, which is maintenance.
I feel like this notion is complete trash if you want to be anything but mediocre.
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.
Same with the gym - I constantly have to change up the routine, adjust to injuries, think about diet, etc.
That's not even talking about doing something significant like learning a language outside of work.
It's also the reason things like "atomic habits" are complete bs - you aren't going to get anything significant done in a minute OR an hour a day.
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"It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding."
Lie / 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.
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 "compounding" improvement.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/s...
To me, this is an interesting discussion. I can't see a single argument for Java anymore except "devs knows it".