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abitrolly/entrypoint.md

Last active December 2, 2018 09:33
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15 Minutes Framework
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entrypoint.md

One of my friends once told me his idea that every task in the world should be achievable in 15 minutes. In a world of information overflow and constant dopamine overstimulation by mobile apps, we just don't have other choice. Our attention span shrinks to less than 3 minutes, and we can not battle it, because it is still the same dopamine loop which can be released faster when we can just check mail or Facebook. Medical industry tries to monetize on it with terms like ADD, OCD, ADHD etc., but the cause that lies in our environment can not be fixed, and the best thing we can do is to understand and use it.

15 minutes is easier said than done. Writing this snippet already takes more. So I asked him, how do you do anything in 15 minutes if some tasks inevitably take longer. He said that if something can not be done in 15 minutes, you take and spend 15 minutes trying to automate some things that will allow you to make this task faster. This leads to my favorite XKCD strip:

While this kind of automation may sound like a perfect source of procrastination, it makes a lot of sense in a network connected world. Time to complete any task includes time to pick up the task, to prepare environment, to learn something, to fix, to debug, and to report back. If 15 minutes are spent setting up the environment or trying to understand where the person left off, there is no chance it will be completed in this dopamine addicted world where video becomes boring if it failed to grab our attention at some point. But if you spent next 15 minutes trying to make it easier to bootstrap, or understand, or fix, or write a report on your findings so that the next person could pick it up right from the error message that you've received - this way we can still make the world better even with our curious jumping minds.

Call this "15 Minutes Procrastination Framework to Change the World". :D How can we make it work in practice? First, a convention that you need only 15 minutes to read. How to pass the baton. We need:

  1. version control system (I use git)
  2. entrypoint file that gives details about the task
  3. if the entrypoint is longer than 15 minutes, it should be split into entrypoint.lvl.1 etc. until there are .79 entrypoints
  4. there could be various entrypoints for various approaches entrypoint.lvl.2.nopython - something to do if somebody finds Python from entrypoint.lvl.1 difficult, next level is connected to previous

WIP

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