What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?

Eyerollingly boring advice, but quitting (and deleting!) reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe even HN. Anything designed with the explicit goal of occupying your attention. Maybe you've noticed that you haven't managed to read a book in a year. There's a reason for that. And none of those sites can give you knowledge of the depth found in even a particularly crappily-written book.

People get all worried about losing their followers & social connections. The social fabric is very adaptable. It does not require public technological codification. You realistically only need fewer than five good friends to be happy; text them. I can guarantee your followers don't care about you at all. The ones who do will reach out to you in other ways.

Since the OP also listed a fallacy, one in the same vein is the endowment effect - where people value things more simply because they already possess them. Consider the example of you holding a stock priced at $200. Now consider an alternate universe where you didn't own that stock but had $200 cash (plus some extra for transaction costs). Would you buy the stock? If not, you should probably consider selling it. This same thought process can be applied to nearly anything in your life: job, significant other, city in which you live. It's good for keeping you out of traps.

Bicycles.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well."

http://www.bikeboom.info/efficiency/

Iteration speed is magic. The faster I can write and deploy code the more motivated and energized I am to do more of it. Compile time, local source control, one-click deployment, phased rollout, monitoring, solid roll-back story, anything that gives you confidence to just roll it out. It's magic, I'm telling you.

Static typing. It's like having a secretary who is doing all the writing, and you only have to think big things. It's a relief.

Higher-level abstractions such as query languages (SQL, LINQ) or markup languages (eh...). Forest for the trees etc. Also DSLs (consult someone with experience first - far too easy to get bogged down).

The most productive way to write software is to borrow something already written. Don't hesitate to buy components from professionals - you're paying for better support, longevity, and less version churn.

Habits. Pretty much all of the comments here boil down to habits.

Sleep, diet, exercise, attention, focus, productivity, knowledge, workflow, socializing -- anything we do repeatedly is a habit. Right now, in each and every moment, we are all the average/sum of the daily habits of the past few years.

So, the "level" we achieve in each domain is a lagging indicator of our habits; fat stores up over time, dirty dishes stack up, lack of knowledge is the result of lack of learning habits, etc.

If you make weekly improvements to your habits, that means small changes are sticking each week. While 1% better doesn't seem to matter much in the short run, if you stack 1% every week, in one year you're now 50% better in your routines.

How to do so? Here are some ideas:

-Make the bad habits harder to do. Keep the snacks, games, distractions out of reach, so you have to expend extra effort to get to them. You want high-effort barriers to beginning bad habits.

-Make good habits easier to do. Prepare yourself for workouts in advance. Commit yourself to things that will be helpful. use daily streaks, motivation, positive thinking, and imagination to encourage your good habits.

For more information, check out James Clear + Sam Harris' conversation on the Making Sense podcast (or the Waking Up app).

How you speak. It's something that almost all of us have to do everyday for work and our personal lives and how you speak has a huge effect on how your message is perceived, and each of these interactions over time shapes your relationships.

Since many of us are taking online calls now, this is a great time to record your side to hear how you really sound like. You may be quite surprised - it's not just that your voice sounds different, how often you use filler words, repeat yourself, ramble and the tone that you used can be quite different than what you thought it was. From there, you can identify your weak points, practice (speak on your own and record it) and improve.

Having 2 (or more) completely unrelated skills provide a shitload of advantage to yourself. The intersection of those skills helps a lot. I run 2 businesses, software and a property renovation business. Local independent trademen are for the most part great at the actually doing the job, plumbing, electrics, tiling, fitting, joinery, etc. What they suck at is running the business, finances, marketing, customer service, reliability and anything to do with computers.

I can use my tech skills to MASSIVELY enhance the trades side of the business. While i can do enough of the trades myself to cover my employees sick days, emergencies, etc, i dont do it day to day. I run the business and make sure i'm using my primary tech skills to grow us. Its working well so far.

Learning in public I think [1]. That is asking things on social media, starting a blog or even better, digital garden [2]. Removing all kinds of friction between sharing, creating and learning.

That assumes the essentials of proper sleep, nutrition and basic fitness are taken care of [3]. Aside from this meta 'help' stuff, the one tool that was a 100x force multiplier for me is Karabiner [4]. Share it on HN all the time but no one uses it. :|

1: https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/

2: https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden

3: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/health

4: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/karabiner

A work journal.

I know this one seems a bit obvious, but in the workforce, I rarely see people with them.

Work journals are not very exciting. But just writing things down really makes a difference somehow. Those boring meetings become slightly less boring when you take notes. That thing from six weeks ago doesn't slip by you as readily. That person's name on that one call isn't a mystery. Your year end report is chock full of stuff, not just a few .ppt bullet points of a few highlights.

It's pretty straightforward, and just takes about two weeks of practice to get into the habit. For the effort, it really does multiply.

Consistency.

Achieving ambitious goals is much easier when you break it down into weekly or daily habits.

Practicing something once per week means 52 times per year, or 520 times per decade.

Practicing something every other day becomes 182 times per year, or a massive 1,825 times in a decade.

Just imagine how your life would be different if you had 500 x 30 minute workouts over the next decade. Or 1,825 x 30 minutes of reading another book.

Putting 30 spare minutes to use once a week isn't as difficult as it sounds if you make it a priority. The results add up over time.

Get enough sleep every night that you wake up naturally before your alarm goes off. Drink enough water that your pee is clear. Merely not being chronically sleep deprived or dehydrated greatly improves every aspect of productivity, learning capacity, and subjective experience.

Most workflows can benefit from multiple monitors. it's a silly thing to be bottlenecked by screen area on a fancy computer when used 1080p monitors are nearly free in 2020.

Take regular walks and use that time to think. There is something about a steady walk that seems to improve problem solving, especially for more abstract/creative things.

When working, put the cell phone out of view and out of reach. It's too easy to subconsciously pick it up and start scrolling a feed before realizing focus had been broken.

Super powers for me include:

Pareto distributions: start with hypothesis that any attribute you are looking for in a given sample is Pareto distributed in the whole. Applies to everything. It's more than the 80:20 rule. The shape of probability distributions in general (s-curves, bathtub curves, etc) is a useful filter for a fast path.

Negotiation: I recommend starting with the classic, "getting to yes." The level of confidence you can bring to a discussion when you have a clear idea of what the outcomes look like, and to have pre-accepted them, is a form of charisma. Learning it is also good for the culture in general.

This torque multiplier lug nut remover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vesBDXCWrUw

All jokes aside - Learning a section of domain you interact with regularly just enough to be dangerous.

Example is, as a programmer, doing product management job for 6 months or vice versa.

Danger here is it's easy to wield that new found knowledge as a weapon for evil - such as talking down at people, when really you want to be using it to be more effective.

But thankfully, most people have seen it done well in one form or another - a product person who can speak technical and not be jerked around or an engineer who has a keen eye for product flow or growth efforts.

Might sound cheesy, but cultivating love and passion for what you do, especially targeting the tedious aspects of it.

Most people tend to assume that they have a fixed amount of energy, motivation and ability for their work, and don't realize how much these can be inflated by positive emotions.

This is where a musician finds the perseverance to do the technical exercises that get her to playing a piece. And where a budding scientist finds the patience to work through a complex topic in spite of all the overwhelming conceptual hurdles. And where a programmer gets the motivation to learn arcanes of some obscure tool.

How to structure your writing.

Not talking about your style, prose or grammar, but how you structure the points you want to come across. It's not just useful in the context of "business writing", it's useful whenever you want something from someone else: to take an action of any kind.

I see it every week at work where people put a presentation together at first glance seems to be coherent, but if it had been written out as a document / memo, you'd easily see the gaps in their thinking. Forcing yourself to write out full sentences (not bullet points) into paragraphs and those paragraphs having a logical connection to each other, shines a spotlight on places where your thinking is weak or there are unfounded conclusions.

Here's the good news: there's one book that will teach you this thoroughly: Barbara Minto's - "The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking". Bad news: the book is out of print, since the author wants people to either buy her courses or her updated textbook which she charges $150 for (not a typo): http://www.barbaraminto.com/textbook.html

The book is insanely useful, so find a used copy of the 1987 or 2002 edition in a used bookstore.

An integrated debugger. Writing code without a editor with integrated debugger is madness to me. I think a lot of people who are used to using text editor/command line, don't appreciate how effective its is to debug in something like VS/VSCode. Its also the thing people dont talk about enough when choosing languages: Does the language have rock solid debuger?

Creating something. I am not a maker/creator but I have seen gazillion examples of people building/creating things that ultimately gives them an exponential push in life.

Creating can be blog posts, photographs, videos, software anything, doesn't matter as long as atleast one other benefits from it, just one.

You may find the collected set of the most popular articles from Harvard Business Review to be a treasure trove of force multipliers, various types of success mechanisms, well written compact general solutions rolled into a pithy sentences and paragraphs easily quoted. I was skeptical at first, but HBR is a surprisingly engaging read that rarely suffers from hubris or conceit, as one might expect from a publication with "Harvard" in it's name.

This is the entire collected set, but individual collections for each specialization are also available. https://store.hbr.org/product/harvard-business-review-guides...

It is shocking how fantastic this series is and how little the tech world knows about it.

Here are a few that I find especially helpful:

1. iOS Shortcuts - Lets you perform repeatable actions in the tap of a button. Most of us do the same thing over and over again every day. The few seconds you save not having to re-do something everyday really adds up over time. I'll give you a personal example. I've been trying to maintain a journaling habit for a while. None of the existing tools fit my need. I now have a Shortcut that creates a journal entry in Bear (https://bear.app) every afternoon for me to fill in. This simple automation helps me maintain my journaling habit because I don't have to use another journaling tool. I already use Bear for everything. Bear doesn't have an in-built journaling feature but Shortcuts lets me use it the way I want.

2. Learn keyboard shortcuts - you probably use a bunch of different software every day. Take some time to learn and get used to using keyboard shortcuts. The instant gratification you get from being able to rapidly navigate through the UI boosts your productivity.

3. Use checklists - checklists are useful for your personal and professional life. I have a Todoist project called #checklists where I store a bunch of different checklists like: start of the month, everyday checklist etc. In my everyday checklist for example, I have tasks like "Drink 3 litres of water", "Read for 30 minutes", "Workout", "Top 3 priorities for today", etc. I set these lists to repeat monthly, every day etc. (something you can do very easily in Todoist). This helps me form habits easily. A huge part of habit forming is to have someone (or some tool, like Todoist) nudge you to get started or remember to do something.

Someone already mentioned sleep so I’ll mention the next most powerful force multiplier: Kindness.

Kindness in your workplace and home is a huge force multiplier. Machiavelli asked is it better to feared or loved and my answer is loved 1000x over. People will do for one they love things that couldn’t be imagined for one they fear.

Furthermore it’s relatively easy to be kind. Kindness comes in many forms: remember someone’s birthday, give them a ride home, try out their app, buy something cheep from their side hustle , check their mail for them when they’re gone and water their plants, be honest about their performance at work and what they can do to improve, buy your team donuts one morning. All these are easy ways to show a little kindness.

Don’t try and take the shortcut and try to be nice or liked that’s not the same as showing kindness. It’s so easy when someone asks how they’re doing at work to brush it off and say “you’re doing fine!” all cheery but it’s another thing entirely to say “hey you’re doing good but you can improve on x and here’s the way I did it”. It doesn’t cost anything to be nice but true kindness can cost quite a bit and be uncomfortable.

Social skills. Nobody can achieve anything worthwhile completely on their own [0]. Successfully cooperating, motivating and especially inspiring people allows to achieve lots more than working on one's own, no matter how skilled one might be.

[0] Of course there are exceptions to this rule, especially in e.g. mathematics. I bet Terrence Tao can eat almost everybody's lunch in math.

Print stuff.

Its like multiple monitors, except its cheaper. Like $0.05 a page. A lot of paper-style documentation is still a gross force mutiplier, even in the age of multiple monitors.

Learn to use paper tools to create booklets that are useful to you. I like 2-hole punch (2.75" US Standard) and comb binders. Spending a few minutes honing your paper documentation for your current task can make you grossly faster.

Stop Drinking. You can still eat like crap, and not exercise, but if you stop drinking you'll feel better. The force multiplier is that most adult have a few glasses of wine a night and Alcohol is up there with cigarettes for problems it'll cause you.

But exercising and eating well are also good to do.

Feedback. The more you seek it out, the faster you can improve. People tend to shy away from asking people to tell them ways they fall short. Don't be one of those people.

Read more here: https://gridology.substack.com/p/how-do-you-incorporate-feed...

Finding and working with mentors. Learn from their successes and mistakes.

Learn and understand a niche business or industry. Gain expertise in a knowledge or industry domain. Software is just a tool that brings a means to an end.

Develop an intuitive understanding of the key mental models mentioned by Charlie Munger in his classic speech given to a Harvard class 25 years ago:

"The Psychology of Human Misjudgment," by Charlie Munger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws

http://web.archive.org/web/20151004200748/http://law.indiana...

If I may paraphrase Mr. Munger, you never want to be a one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest of life.

Exercise. Your body and mind (brain) are not separate, they are one highly integrated system. The performance capability of one will impact the other.

Furthermore, getting a solid workout in the beginning or middle of the day can do wonders for clearing the mind and stimulating creativity & problem solving.

With all of this workflow advice: Favor EXPERIMENTATION over "reading threads like this and trying to analyze how they will work for you beforehand." E.g. If you've used one smallish monitor over your life and you're deciding between adding one more or one bigger one -- there is NO objective answer. To the best you can, try them both.

“The only rules that matter are the ones that matter”

Most of the rules that most people live by are bullshit and only serve to hold you back. The key is in figuring out which is which. In the extreme, many laws are not even enforced.

I’ve mad my living breaking all the “rules” and by doing everything wrong.

The pearl clutching rule followers equate rule following with ethics. They’re often wrong.

What helped me,

•Staying in present. Philosophers called it 'optimal state of consciousness', Psychologists call it Flow, Rich kids call it as Mindfulness. What ever it's called, its just simple focus on the present and it works wonders on mental health.

•Using DND/Aeroplane mode more i.e. limiting phone calls to absolutely when needed. As a side-effect saves battery as well & good for privacy too.

•Using email over chat, improved the quality of communication & again good for privacy too.

Deep work time. I heard about it through an meditation app. I basically block four hours per week on my work calendar for a time when I don't take any meetings, turn off slack, email or anything else that might distracting and try to give my full attention to a problem or a project or reading a technical paper etc. This has helped me improve my knowledge over time and has improved my ability to focus on a problem for a limited amount of time.

Margin of error. In financial matters, this can be savings or a relative lack of leverage. In planning, this can be extra time for unforeseen circumstances. In construction of buildings or software, it is that little over-engineering that saves you when people do unexpected things with what you built.

The general principle is never to go all out and gain the maximum efficiency, for then you lose the slack you will need when something unexpected inevitably happens. Even the best can so easily lose themselves in competitions where their desire to win drives them to take unwise risks and forego a reasonable margin of error. This is not so much a force multiplier that people don't know about, but more one that they disregard because it never seems important until you need it.

2nd degree contacts in social network. You don't realise how many influential people you are weakly connected by 2nd or 3rd degree. Harnessing this network for mentors, benefactors, investors advisors is hardly done.

Secondly, breathing.. everybody breathes , very few people learn how to use breath control to direct attention, calmness, clarity of thought,

Lastly, mindfulness, when we eat, indulge in binge gaming sessions, basically when we give way to our immediate gratification instead of being in the present and doing the right thing.

Doing many small things right compounds.

Learn to communicate efficiently and directly in writing.

I personally like McCaskill's handbook from NASA Langley because it's focused on practical matters:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900017394/downloads/19...

"Effective writing involves far more than following rules of grammar. There is a craft to creating phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that ensure communication."

Prompt and heartfelt attribution of contributions + thanks/praise that helped you get your work done in public or to the donor's manager. Tacit feedback to the person in private as necessary.

Even as the greatest developer, in most settings you have to work with people. You can get very little done all alone nowadays - The basics of making people feel appreciated takes you really far.

I am not very socially adept - so this was a revelation for me when I stumbled on it after years of 'reward for good work is more work' philosophy.

Giving away material things, especially directly to a person. Our local FB BuyNothing group is excellent, and the sole remaining reason for my FB account. The receiver is happy, I’m happy at the time of giving, and my house (and the world’s) environment is better with less crap in it.

Asking questions when you don't know what's going on. If you are willing to "look dumb" you will end up saving yourself hours struggling to understand something when you are lacking key information / context that a simple question/answer would provide.

Passive income.

The problem is, most easily accessible passive income sources aren't enough to live from, so people don't start investing time/money into them.

But multiple of them can add up over the years.

Exercising regularly and eating/drinking clean

YAGNI. This is not so much as a force multiplier but as greasing the wheels, and I see it all the time

Shipping and revenue should be your goal. Sure, aim for a polished product, but don't waste time with things that don't further your goal (unless it's a security/correctness/legal issue, sure)

- You don't need to rewrite your frontend in the latest .js library just because. Ship first, think about rewriting later

- You don't need to apply those 5% micro-optimizations if your site is working fine (at least not before shipping)

- You don't need your resources in a global redundant CDN right off the bat. Use existing CDNs (for .js for example)

- The thing that will break is not how you initially thought it would go. Avoid premature optimization unless it's really obvious (example: front page optimizations).

You might not even need code at first. MVP your thing.

You only have time to read 300-3,000 books in your life. Pick wisely.

Investing in promising people that are new to the industry - the easiest way to do this is through Twitter. I've found some amazing new developers which have great mindsets that I knew would do well in their careers, which I've capitalized on by following them early on and having regular chats with them about what they're working on, etc.

It allows you to maintain leverage in your field because once they're successful, you both already have a relationship and it becomes a lot easier to network and strike deals.

It has a huge upside with almost no risk - all it takes is a Twitter follow.

Programming itself.

That click of understanding the basics and being able to develop problem-fitted solutions although not perfect/professional is a game changers for most of the people. Specially people with jobs outside IT.

Hacker Newsletter. The best* of Hacker News, delivered once a week. Each newsletter contains a few useful articles that have helped me in work and life.

* not sure how they figure out “best” but the articles are general good.

Learn how money works. This means learning how to save money effectively, how much to save, when it’s appropriate to spend and when you’re better off either waiting, borrowing, or going without.

Write down your tasks and ideas. Find a method which works and stick to it. Not forgetting things is the side benefit; the primary benefit is not worrying about forgetting things.

Car safety features that make driving way less stressful and less dangerous. Example any advanced cruise control / auto pilot system.

bash or any substitute.

Knowledge of a scripting language and general idea of what libraries are available for use.

Relationships with non-toxic people.

Ability to defer rewards and pleasure sometimes if needed to achieve goals on a different time scale.

Getting clues early by learning from the mistakes of others. Making your own mistakes leads to strong learning but sometimes the cost is very high and a lot of time is lost.

Hiring help for things that you can't or won't do but needs to be done. Other people helping you with tasks is the biggest force-multipliers human society has known.

Worm gears, centrifugal transmissions, bridge rectifiers, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_converter

Might be a little clichéd but I'd say a simple for-loop is super powerful and can cut down the time spent processing a dataset by a large multiple. I'd go as far as to say recursion too but then that might also be a little clichéd so I'll say that a simple for-loop is super powerful and can cut down the time spent processing a dataset by a large multiple. I'd go as far as to say recursion too but then...

Tune your push notifications for need-to-know information. This directly influences how many times I pick up my phone (usually needlessly) and get distracted. You can disable push on most apps that just use it for marketing or to get your attention into their app daily. Ecom and news apps are the worst offenders.

I found that when I started to write about a module in LibreOffice I started to understand it much better.

For instance, I’m currently trying to understand how UNO works, I have a chapter I’m writing:

https://chris-sherlock.gitbook.io/inside-libreoffice/univers...

The other thing - very programming specific - is to understand a long confusing function I found extracting if, while and for constructs to their own functions with decent names suddenly explained what was going on far more clearly.

Quit caffeine from time to time. Then it’s way more effective when you need it.

1) Take a deep breath 2) Hold for 4-5 seconds 3) Exhale slowly 4) Repeat

Traditional troubleshooting techniques that seem obvious, like "half split" or "rubber ducking", are often not used.

Teaching some of these can dramatically reduce downtime.

Touch typing.

> All software is a force multiplier, but some tools, like Zapier/IFTTT are in a class of their own.

I have been looking through both sites but could not find one actual force multiplier for my life or work, even though I would love to automate workflows. Would you have suggestions for someone doing a PhD project and communicates with a few colleagues and the occasional student?

Write down what you plan to do each morning and why you’re doing it.

To create any sort of impact it takes effort. Effort is your input, and impact is output.

Prioritize impact/effort first. Automate and delegate things that take effort but don’t have much impact.

Easier said then done, but incrementally moving in the direction of where the puck’s going to be makes all the difference in the long term.

Typing, touch-typing, writing shorthand will make transcribing speed match the speed of speech.

This thread is predicated on the value of time, but ICYMI:

https://fs.blog/2017/03/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-time/

Constraints. Using simpler, less powerful tools; self-imposing arbitrary design restrictions; publicly committing to tight deadlines; etc. Makes your brain go into must-beat-this-game mode, stimulates creativity, and channels your energy.

Markdown! It has helped my writing so much

VerbalExpressions

Not for short regular expressions, but if you need to write longer ones you probably would want to use it.

Keeping track of the little things. And of course saying no.

If you take 30-60 minutes a day to be sure that little things that are easy to take care of are actually complete, over time your coworkers will think you're 5x as productive as you are now. I have to work at this; I instinctively bury myself in 1 problem and put every single other thing aside.

It's really the same trade-off as working hard on a low priority issue, but being careful not to neglect the smaller, easier, but more important issues as they come up.

As someone with a military background and experience working for contractors, I really hate using this kind of jargon for non-military stuff.

These tools are not force multipliers. Adding in concepts like "compound interest" or "sunk cost fallacy" stretches that meaning even further. Just stop.

Getting married.

Learning how to use the trackpoint properly.

Learning how to use a good dictionary instead of just banging something into Google / Bing / DDG.

Meditation.

However, a good butterfly is a bad worm.

Pulleys

Nonverbal communication.

Ego death

'Force multiplier'??? I've never understood this peculiarly American obsession with military metaphors, and I'd say this one is particularly ridiculous.

Is this a GPT-3 post?

Buy rental property with the bank's money, pay bank back with renter's money, rinse repeat.

This is such a garbage question. "force multiplier" in this context is a meaningless phrase cribbed from military jargon. You may as well have asked "What is something useful that most people don't know" The answer could be literally almost anything.