Ask HN: What short activities/projects have had the highest yield in your life?
Long projects can obviously have high returns, but what have you done in less than, say, 5-10 hours, that’s had an outsized (positive) impact in your life? Can be in terms of satisfaction, or something more pragmatic.
Couple examples for me: - writing a blog post - learning countries of the world and their locations
Probably more like 30 hours, but learning to touch type has been a tremendous benefit.
Learning Clojure and Emacs from the free online book Clojure for the Brave and True!
I can’t imagine second order effects learning a lisp will have on my life!
I think about coding completely differently even though I have barely written anything sizable in Clojure.
Leaving unsatisfactory jobs is probably the biggest one.
Also touch typing although I’m still getting used to doing it properly.
Learning Haskell, ok took more than 5 hrs but takes 5 to get started!
Going through vimtutor two times increased my editing speed significantly.