When working on a thing—being at the Recurse Center, say—knowing what you want to get out of it helps with direction. Identifying clear goals keeps your focused. For example, I know that I want to know more about inter-process communication in Linux. I also want to be able to develop for the browser, which means learning JavaScript and CSS.

Knowing what some non-goals are can also help. For me, exploring new programming languages is a non-goal, as I’ve done enough of it in the past. Making that explicit simplifies turning down a good chunk of activities at the Recurse Center that would otherwise distract me from my goals.

But there’s another category: anti-goals. These are things I specifically do not want to work onspend time on while at the Recurse Center. I’ve identified a couple of these so far: installing Kubernetes on my CoreOS cluster, and tinkering with Google’s Bazel build system.

The distinction between non-goals and anti-goals is a bit unclear to me. In the context of self-directed learning, I have identified a couple of potential criteria. One is that a non-goal is still educational and could be useful, while an anti-goal is more like busywork and configuration; the other is that anti-goals are more tempting to work on. This makes them more likely to interfere with my goals by drawing me away.

Putting this helps clarify why I had such an unsatisfying first week. I started off with working on a small patch to someone else’s project. It seemed simple enough, but it turned out to need some fussing with build and testing configuration. This put most of the time I spent closer to anti-goals than to goals. Realising this after lunch today, I decided to simply dump that patch—however close to done it seems—and move on to exploring IPC.


Thanks to Danielle Sucher, David Albert, and Olivia Jackson for conversations that set me on the way to this categorisation. I feel like my next few days will be better than my last few for it!