A Promise for More Research
10,000 hours is the magic number to become an expert,1 which is supposedly a PhD of work (8 hours/day * 5 days/week * 50 weeks/year * 5 years = 10K hours). I worry that I am not doing enough deliberate work to reach 10K hours. As a result, I want to focus on doing more work. But not simply sitting in front of my computer more. I want to have more tangible outputs of my work. This doesn’t have to be accepted papers, or even submitted papers. But it should be things I can both control and quantify, like:
- Blog posts
- Number of experiments
- Lines of code committed
- Reproduced papers
- Technical reports
- Submitted papers
All of these things are things within my control and can be counted. I’m not committing trying to make these numbers go up. But as Peter Drucker supposedly said, “What gets measured gets improved.” So I will measure these things. I’ll put them on my website and on my bulletin board in my office.
And hopefully, I will have more tangible outputs, and my intuitions arounding research will improve.
This post is in part inspired by Michael Nielsen’s Principles of Effective Research.
As of Dec 2024
| Output | Number |
|---|---|
| Blog posts | 2 |
| Experiments | 0 |
| Lines of code | 0 |
| Reproduced papers | 1 |
| Technical reports | 0 |
| Submitted papers | 0 |
Yes, apparently this is not true. But more practice certainly leads to improvement.↩︎
[Relevant link] [Source]
Sam Stevens, 2024