David Tran's Blog

Vibecode Together: StumbleUpon for Vibe-Coded Projects

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

There’s no shortage of advice on how to vibe-code (or vibe engineer, if you’re actually reading the code outputted by LLMs) better. We’re inundated with how to write prompts, set up better context or skills for agents, or how to get the most out of different platforms or models. But talking to friends who’ve vibe-coded projects, the bottleneck doesn’t seem to be getting started building, or that they can’t get the agents to do what they want. We noticed two recurring patterns:

1) Most people never ship. Even though vibe-coding lowers the barrier to entry, time, and cost of building a MVP, it can also make it harder to ship when each additional feature or polish is just one prompt away. And sure, lots of projects are just scratching a personal itch, but if it solves your problem well, someone else out there would probably like it too—if nothing else, as an inspiration to create their own take on it.

2) Even those who do ship struggle to get anyone to try it. Your friends want to help, but they’re often not the target audience. And as the cost of building decreases and the number of projects explodes, discovery only gets harder. Vibe-coded projects might have an even harder time than projects built by hand because audiences assume you didn’t put as much thought or effort into them, or that they’re not secure.

We used Lovable to build a StumbleUpon for vibe-coded projects. Visit the site, see a random project, try it out if it looks interesting, or click through to the next one until you find one that does look interesting. This probably isn’t the most natural format for project discovery, but ranked leaderboards usually get gamified and feel like they have a higher bar for submission. Most of all, seeing what other people have built and shipped, especially when it’s vibe-coded, makes shipping your own feel a lot more within reach.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

VibeReps: Tend to Your Quads While You Tend to Your Claudes

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Coding with Claude Code makes me feel like a teen who just learned PHP again. Unlimited possibilities, but lots of pitfalls.

One of the challenges has been managing context while Claude edits files. It’s tempting to open multiple agents, Slack, or X while waiting—but that often pulls you away from the flow.

@bcherny called it the era of “tending to your Claudes” on a recent pod with @gregisenberg.

What if those pauses didn’t pull you away, but let you think while Claude thinks? And maybe do some squats?

Tend to your quads while you tend to your Claudes.

Introducing VibeReps—a tool that launches from Claude Code’s PostToolUse hook and prompts you to exercise during idle moments. It tracks your movement using MediaPipe Pose Landmarker via webcam and counts reps automatically. Claude notifies you when it’s idle or when permissions are needed.

The project is open source and installable via a simple script. Built with Claude Code, of course.

I’ll be honest—I’ve been tempted to keep adding features. But the whole point is to ship and gather feedback. So here it is.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Burnout and Basketball Dynasties

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 16:30:00 +0000

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Burnout is losing joy in the grind while expecting results you can’t fully control in a certain timeframe

Me with Shravan and George at Game 4 of Warriors-Spurs in May 2013

Me with Shravan and Ricky at Game 4 of Warriors-Kings in April 2023

Preface - October 2024 ⬇️

Preface - September 2024 ⬇️

Preface - June 2023 ⬇️

Preface - May 2023 ⬇️

April 23, 2023

Sitting in Section 203 as the Sacramento Kings inbounded the ball with 10 seconds left on the clock and the Warriors clinging to a 126-125 lead, probabilities ran through my head like a poker player calculating the odds of her top pair on the flop holding up. Is this a coin flip? Given how efficient both teams had been in terms of points per possession, does that make the Kings more likely than not to win the game? Wait, if the Warriors lose and go down 3-1, didn't I just see a stat recently that teams historically have only come back to win a series from 3-1 like 5% of the time? What are the chances this is Steph, Klay, and Draymond's last year together? It's almost certainly Dre's. Is this the end of the Warriors dynasty?

Thankfully, Harrison Barnes' shot bounced off the back rim and my panic subsided as the crowd at Chase Center erupted in jubilation. Dynasty not over yet.

The end of the dynasty

Now that we can definitively say that the Warriors dynasty—at least the Curry-Klay-Dray-Dre dynasty—ended with Andre Iguodala retiring in October 2023 and Klay Thompson signing with the Mavericks in July 2024, if we didn't celebrate it while we had it, it's definitely worth taking time to celebrate it now. But how did it start?

A lot can happen in 10 years. In 2013, Steph Curry not only wasn't a two-time MVP and four-time champion—he wasn't even an All-Star yet. He had just signed a 4-year, $44M contract extension that was deemed risky at the time given his injury history, and was arguably one of the biggest all-star snubs that season. I remember conversations with my friend George, pictured on the left above, about how Steph Curry (my favorite player) and Kawhi Leonard (his favorite player) would be All-Stars someday and how they both got snubbed in 2013. Even as huge fans of Steph and Kawhi as we were, I don't think either of us dreamed big enough. A lot can happen in 10 years, and big things start small. Things that feel inevitable start small, and there were lots of little things along the way that played major roles, but didn't seem crazy at the time: signing David Lee, drafting Steph Curry, drafting Klay Thompson, hiring Mark Jackson, Steph Curry getting injured, drafting Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green, trading Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut, firing Mark Jackson and hiring Steve Kerr, moving Draymond into the starting lineup... Generational companies and lifelong relationships also start with a series of small things.

Why does all of this matter? Because my friend George in the first photo never got to see Steph Curry or Kawhi Leonard become All-Stars or NBA champions.

Basketball Tangent ⬇️

Receipts, as the kids call them. Sorry, Ricky and CP3. Was hoping Warriors could win a championship for CP3. Maybe if the league hadn't vetoed the CP3-Lakers trade and maybe if CP3's hamstring had held up in the 2018 playoffs against the Warriors, we wouldn't even be talking about a Warriors dynasty.

After that Warriors-Kings game, I couldn't help but think back to the beginning of the Warriors' run. I was here— well not here here, but at Oracle Arena 16 miles away, 10 years ago for a Warriors-Spurs playoff game. Why do sports matter at all? Because they teach us about life and let us celebrate the ups and downs condensed into a few hours at a time. Because they make us feel like we're a part of something bigger. Because we want to be able to tell our kids someday that we saw Steph Curry play while they insist a player who may not even be born yet is the greatest to ever touch a basketball on Earth or Mars. (Sep 2024: or argue with your daughter someday about who changed the game more, Steph for the NBA or Caitlin for the WNBA). But mostly because you can literally see mere centimeters or milliseconds change the course of a team's championship run or decade-long dynasty.

As baseball tries to woo back younger fans by speeding up the pace of play, I'm generally a fan of games evolving. We don't need the game to be exactly the same for sports greatness to be timeless. Humans are great at making history rhyme.

10 years ago, the Warriors were the young upstart team facing the San Antonio Spurs coming off 4 championships much like these young upstart Kings are facing the Warriors coming off 4 championships. Harrison Barnes, who missed that shot to potentially keep the Warriors' title dreams alive this year, was the leading scorer for the Warriors in that Spurs game. Steph, Klay and Draymond were 25, 23, and 23 in 2013 playing against the Spurs' dynasty core of Duncan (37), Ginobili (35), and Parker (30) with future star Kawhi (21). Today, the Kings with Fox (25), Sabonis (26), and Murray (22) are playing the Warriors' core aged 35, 33, and 33 with a promising young star in Jordan Poole (23). The Kings just ended a 16-year playoff drought, whereas in 2013, the Warriors had just made the playoffs for the 2nd time in 19 years (and first since the “We Believe” year in 2007). Edit, Sep 2024: Well, maybe it was a bit premature to call Poole the future Kawhi. But hey there's Podz, TJD, JK, Moody, and still-somehow-only-28-and-now-is-shooting-again Kevon Loonajuwon! Kings fans, I'm not sure what to say, but maybe you're one Monta-Bogut unpopular-at-the-time trade away from a dynasty.

Most things that are really valuable take time to build—whether we’re talking friendships, families, basketball dynasties, or companies. They say you overestimate what you can do in the short term and underestimate what you can do in the long term, but what that overlooks is that in the short term, you can easily lose sight of the long-term goal, which leads to burnout. We’re not great at perceiving how fast or slow we’re going—only acceleration or deceleration. When we stop feeling progress day to day—that’s when it’s important to focus on the long-term goals. But if you don’t love the process day-to-day, you can lose yourself chasing those long-term goals, and if the difference between a dynasty and a footnote, between success and failure, or between being able to argue about sports with loved ones or just having to sit here writing about them are all ultimately out of our control, you have to try to love it all.

On Burnout and Perspective

I previously drew parallels between burnout and sports’ injuries— we should take preventative steps to avoid them— prehab is easier than rehab. As an individual, losing sight of the long-term goal and trying to win it all with a single short-term move without looking forward to the future is what leads to burnout. Burnout can mean a lot of things. The Mayo Clinic defines it as “physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity”. Most of the time when we talk about burnout, we focus on the former part of that sentence—“physical or emotional exhaustion”. But those are really the manifestations or symptoms and don’t really need much explanation. The part that’s worth double-clicking into here is “a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity”.

Every season that doesn’t end with a championship can feel like a failure, but if you zoom out, the progress becomes clearer. Maybe that’s why Steph Curry always seems to have more fun than anyone else—he knows that the journey matters just as much as the outcome. When I’ve faced burnout, it often stemmed from expecting a specific milestone by a set time. What helped me recover was finding flow in the small, daily actions—paradoxically, focusing on the small things often realigns you with your bigger goals. Ask yourself: if you were doing the same thing 10 years from now, with everything else different, would you still want to be doing it? Does the process itself make you happy, regardless of the result?

Friendships and relationships that span over a decade are rare, and I will always cherish them. Hopefully, in 2033, there will still be basketball to watch—maybe even with 38% gravity, making shots and dunks all the more spectacular! Both friendships, a personal love of the game, a shared love of the game, and a collective love of the game are excellent antidotes to burnout. Whether you’re chasing a championship (or not two, not three, not four, startup success, or any big goal, remember: the path is unpredictable, luck and factors out of your control play a huge part, even for the best in the world. Zoom out to the big picture, and zoom in to find joy and flow in the small things, and you never know what you might build.

Thanks to Amanda, Ricky, ChatGPT 4o with canvas, o1-preview, and NotebookLM for reading/helping me edit drafts of this.

References and Inspiration

An Archipelago of Ideas

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 07:15:00 +0000

Have you ever had that feeling when someone labels or gives you a name for a weird thing you think only you do? Normalizes it and maybe even makes it sound inspirational?

This is exactly what happened to me yesterday morning when I was walking our dog Riley while listening to Tiago Forte’s “Building A Second Brain”. I just stopped dead in my tracks as he was describing this concept— “The Archipelago of Ideas”. HOLY SH*T THIS IS HOW I WORK. HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS???

So what is the archipelago of Ideas? Forte learned this technique from author Steven Johnson: rather than staring at a blank page, just fill it with quotes, links to papers, your own notes— lots of inspiring islands of disparate thoughts. Now instead of having to conjure up words from the ether, you can just build bridges between these ideas until you converge on the ones you want to write about.

In school, I hated having to turn in outlines or rough drafts. I was terrified of group projects where I had to share in-progress writing or group coding assignments because my work was a jumbled mess. Instead of linearly writing the intro, thesis, evidence, and conclusion, I’d just paste a bunch of interesting quotes, write a sentence here, a sentence there. The first sentence I wrote might end up being the 4th sentence for the concluding paragraph.

The same went for coding— I’d see people perfectly decompose functions, write this function signature, write this helper function, then that one in an order that made sense. I’d write a random regex here or a piece of logic not in a function there just hanging out on its own with squiggly lines.

Eventually as an adult, I just accepted that my brain worked in weird ways, and that that was okay. But it’s more than okay—I was freaking building an archipelago in the order that made sense in my head, and then building the bridges to connect them later. I’m not a random scribbler or copy/paster and scatterbrain.

I’m a motherf*cking ARCHIPELAGO ARCHITECT. So that’s the concept: an archipelago of ideas. However you work, it’s not weird, I promise. There’s a million ways to work— come get inspired or maybe find the words to describe how you already work, in Flow Club.

GPU in the Arena

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 20:23:00 +0000

GPU in the Arena in the style of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena”

It is not the critic who counts; not the one who points out how the Large Language Model stumbles, or where its responses could have been better. The credit belongs to the GPU that is actually in the data center, its circuits marred by the ceaseless cycles and heat, its memory etched and re-etched by terabytes of data; which calculates without falter, which stumbles and corrects, because there is no progress without error and backpropagation; but who does actually strive to tune the parameters; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends itself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of artificial general intelligence, and who at the worst, if it fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that its place shall never be with those cold and idle processors who neither know victory nor defeat.

The feed multiverse

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:35:00 +0000

What used to be a single Facebook newsfeed is now a multiverse of vertical feeds across many disparate services. This is great in some ways since it allows us runners to share unabashedly to Strava, but also leaves us with only one-dimensional glimpses into friends’ lives. I see these slivers of life and get recommendations across at least these services:

Strava: Training, races, fun routes, travel running 🗺
Goodreads: Books 📚
Spotify: Podcasts/music (although I’m not sure anyone else pays attention to that social sidebar on desktop) 🎧
Letterboxd: Movies/shows 📺
Flow Club: (Not yet quite a feed) Day-to-day work 💻
Twitter and Instagram for all the other life moments, travel, and a bit of everything ✈️👶🐶
Notifications are basically a feed as well, so then add Discord, Slack, Messages, Whatsapp, Insert your favorite messaging app for misc updates and recommendations

Is anyone working on a way to recombine all of these feeds, or is that just not worthwhile anymore?

A reflection on resilience

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:08:00 +0000

I realized this week that I’ve misunderstood what resilience meant my entire life.

I thought that being resilient meant being tough, not being deterred and being able to recover and get back on track.

I was wrong.

I previously wrote a post for Vox about growing up poor in East Oakland and applying to an elite private school thanks to the insistence of my amazing 5th grade teacher Mrs. Harris

I got in, but thanks to a missed financial aid form deadline, I didn’t go there for 6th grade. I still remember how crushed I felt as a 10/11-year old. I couldn’t comprehend how tuition there could cost more than what my parents made in a year.

But teachers and relatives assured me it’d be okay— they’d help me get back on track. I spent 6th grade at our local Oakland middle school, which closed down a few years later due to poor performance.

I made one good friend that year, but mostly remember students making teachers cry and learning that the Pokemon game clock stopped at 255 hours. I even lost interest in making websites in HTML and Dreamweaver, which I had learned the year before.

I knew money was always tight, but my parents paid for a math tutor (an old Vietnamese man with cheap rates) so that I wouldn’t fall too far behind during this lost year.

That story had a happy ending. I got into the private school again, we turned in our financial aid forms on time, and I was fortunate enough to attend on full scholarship.

But I never shook that feeling that I got a late start and had to work extra hard to “get back on track”.

That and being a financial aid kid plus all the usual teenage angst meant years of not feeling adequate or enough.

Now, 20+ years later, startups and running have taught me that “getting back on track” isn’t what we should strive for at all.

Trying to get back to an imagined perfectly charted course is precisely what holds us back.

This past Sunday, I was hoping to run a marathon personal best after two big years of base and the best feeling training block I had ever put together. Instead I didn’t even finish the race. That’s a story for another time, but I was pretty bummed.

But that’s when I realized: Resilience really means taking time to mourn the loss of what could have been, accepting it, and fully embracing the new, uncharted path, fully confident in your values, processes, and abilities and your community.

When we have a plan for our work, our training, our diets, or pretty much anything in our lives, inevitably something will knock us off course. Rather than just perpetually trying to “get back on track”, maybe we can all embrace the unknown together.

Let’s be resilient!

We try to encourage practicing resilience in Flow Club. We declare our intentions at the beginning of every session. Flow Club sessions help block off & protect our time, but urgent issues and life invariably happen. We adjust and reset.

Sometimes we get back to where we were originally hoping to go, but it’s the new journey that we should embrace.

Originally published as a thread on Twitter

Maker’s Schedule 2021

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 15:40:00 +0000

Maker’s Schedule 2021

This was originally published on the Flow Club Blog.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

In his 2009 essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, computer scientist and YCombinator co-founder Paul Graham defined a manager’s schedule as one that revolves around hour-increments of time, usually switching from one meeting or task to another. In contrast, a maker’s schedule requires closer to half-day units of uninterrupted time to work on a single coding or writing task, which we’ll just refer to as “making”¹.

Since then, we’ve seen office work and schedules change drastically at least twice: once with the introduction of rapid-fire communication tools like Slack and again when the COVID pandemic forced many teams to work remotely and conduct meetings over Zoom². These changes to our communication and scheduling environments make it difficult, if not impossible, for those on the maker’s schedule to carve out uninterrupted half-day units of time to get projects done. We need to become resilient to frequent interruptions by decomposing our making time into smaller chunks that can be completed or checkpointed in shorter periods.

Meetings are exceptions

Graham argues that meetings disrupt makers. “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon by breaking it into two pieces, each too small to do anything hard in,” he says. It can be challenging to recover from those interruptions. “Having a meeting is like throwing an exception,” says Graham.“It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

I often find that when it comes to making, I have a cold-start problem. Every time I sit down to work on a project, I have to load the requirements, details, research, and previous work into my head before figuring out what to do next. If I’m interrupted by a meeting, I have to run through that mental process all over again when I return to my task. Then I make mistakes because I can’t perfectly reload the context each time I return to my project. “You can’t write or program well in units of an hour,” Graham says. “That’s barely enough time to get started.” If I only have an hour, I often won’t even try to begin a coding or writing task because I assume it’ll take too long to get started.

So let’s break this down. Having a meeting in the middle of your making time is like throwing a runtime exception — you sat down to start working, loaded up all the necessary details in your brain, figured out the first few steps, and made some progress. Then you had to drop everything to hop on a Zoom call and take care of any tasks that pop up during the call. When you’re finally ready to switch back to your original project, you’ll have to find your flow all over again.

That’s not ideal, but when the meetings on your schedule prevent you from starting a new project at all — this feels like a scheduling compile-time exception. Graham points out that makers can try to schedule meetings back-to-back at the beginning or end of the day to unlock large chunks of uninterrupted midday making time. Unfortunately, meetings are hardly the only workday interruptions in 2021.

Compared to a handful of in-person meetings, our Slack-ified, Zoom-ified, WFH workplaces might raise tens or hundreds of exceptions in a single day if we let them. We could turn off all notifications and try to batch process these — wrap them all in a big try/except3 block to protect our dedicated solo work time. Some messages require us to actively work through a problem with a colleague, which would typically take us out of our flow. If we process these demands all at once, then we theoretically won’t interrupt ourselves. But, given the fast pace of most teams today, Slacks, emails, and Zooms that require our attention will inevitably come up last minute.

What if your project’s requirements change, a high-priority customer issue arises, or we need feedback from a team member before finishing our project? There are both scheduled and unscheduled interruptions throughout the day for those working from home with kids, pets, or other obligations. Exceptions are unavoidable.

Time-blocking is intentionally raising and catching exceptions

We need to protect our making time by raising exceptions early and often. I’ve often used time-blocking methods like the Pomodoro Technique — 25 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break — to knock out emails or administrative tasks. I initially thought it wouldn’t work for coding for the same reasons that meetings are disruptive — by the time I got started, I’d get interrupted. At first, I proved my hypothesis right. I often “rolled” over breaks, and I made good progress. After switching from 25 to 50-minute work increments4, I found that decomposing coding work into smaller chunks keeps interruptions from derailing the whole day. These shorter sessions make it easy to checkpoint work.

By proactively decomposing large projects into smaller segments, we can arrive at working, testable, and shippable solutions sooner than we could by sticking to the original plan a priori. I also found myself taking more notes to decrease my reboot time when I picked up the task again.

I don’t suggest chunking ALL hard work this way. There are activities like designing your own programming language, where the task or tools don’t allow you to checkpoint easily. However, I’ve been surprised by the effectiveness of breaking down more extensive coding and writing jobs into shorter work sessions. I make meaningful, measurable progress in 50-minute increments. Rather than setting aside an afternoon to “research and implement the backend and frontend,” I’ll limit myself to researching frameworks or tools for a set period before making a preliminary decision. Then I’ll stop to evaluate that decision or spend 50 minutes getting a prototype working end-to-end. Working this way forces us to avoid premature optimization and to apply the 80/20 rule. Maybe we over-estimated the likelihood of that nasty edge case and we can ignore it for now. Perhaps we can find example code that very closely matches what we need.

We can also get higher-quality code reviews and feedback on smaller chunks of work. Even without collaborating with someone else on the code, it can help us rubber-deck debug our approach. If a “simple task” actually requires more chunks than anticipated, maybe it was never simple and should have been decomposed. If I notice that I’ve spent too many 50-minute periods on the same approach without measurable progress, it might be time to try a different tactic. I haven’t failed, I’ve just found at least one way that doesn’t work. It’s not quite chaos engineering, but you can think of this as deliberately raising exceptions early and often so you can handle them swiftly.

An evolving environment of exceptions

Changing the way we work is hard — if it’s worked so far, why change it? In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Professor Cal Newport, Klein recalls author Neil Postman’s idea that technology isn’t positive or negative but rather ecological. Technology changes our work environment, so our scheduling and work algorithms need to change too. Most programmers can think back to a time when they tried to reproduce a user-reported bug, only to exclaim, “It works for me!”

Debugging is difficult enough when you can control or account for the variables, but it’s exponentially more complex when the environment is unknown or unstable. Your code might work locally but not in production for several reasons. Your Javascript might work for 99.9% of users but not work for those using Internet Explorer 9. Graham says one of the motivations for writing the first application web server was to avoid writing a store in Windows. If the environment raises many unanticipated exceptions or fails in unexpected ways, we would try to design robust systems that handle the exceptions or failover gracefully and recover. Why not do the same with our work environment?

Even if we block out all distractions, our focus on more agile processes, shorter iteration loops, and increased collaboration come at the cost of long periods of uninterrupted maker time. Even if we block out a few four-hour periods a week, it can be tough to anticipate our energy and creativity levels accurately enough to be productive at designated times, especially when surprise meetings happen. We need to take our energy levels into account when planning our projects and breaks (and use our breaks to recharge rather than working through them.)

When I decompose coding tasks, I find it easiest to start by reviewing code that I wrote yesterday, reproducing a bug in a well-documented way, writing a small component, or writing a function with some values hard-coded. These tasks fit into smaller time blocks and require little energy to complete, giving you a sense of accomplishment to power you through the workday.

Even better, getting started on one easy task may help you think of an easier way to tackle a more complex item on your to-do list.

Chunking coding or other “making” projects to make them more robust to interruptions is a Strong Opinion, Weakly Held. It’s vital for those of us who are both makers AND managers, constantly switching hats throughout the day. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you.

Thanks to Candace Ramirez, Haley Bryant, Michael Gummelt, Ricky Yean, and Wil Chung for reading the drafts of this.

[1] I’ll mostly refer to coding and writing since those are the types of making that I do most often. I won’t get into the definitions of “makers” or “deep” vs. “shallow” work here. Still, I generally think of “making” as anything that requires creativity, typically requires you to think about how to start and make progress, and often takes at least several hours to complete.

[2] I’ll refer to all text-based instant communication tools as “Slack” and all video ones as “Zoom,” but obviously, your company may use Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, Google Meet, etc.

[3] I’ll be using python syntax because IMO that’s the closest to speaking in English and the language I’m most comfortable with, but feel free to s/raise/throw, s/except/catch, etc.

[4] I’m still experimenting with this. The traditional 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break feels almost for sure too short for most coding tasks. I’ve tried 90 minutes or 120 minutes, but I would often lose focus. Fifty minutes seems to be just short enough to stay focused the whole time and adds some time pressure to try to scope out something sufficiently challenging to complete during the period while being long enough to get meaningful work done. I think “short enough to stay focused the whole time” is definitely trainable, although it should probably vary based on the task as well as how much energy you have.

How to work like elite athletes train

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 17:00:00 +0000

How to work like elite athletes train

This was originally published on the Flow Club Blog.

How might we apply athletic training principles to train our productivity, do our best work, and reduce burnout?

A rainy morning track workout at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. Photo taken by author

We are knowledge athletes

I first started thinking about similarities between athletes and knowledge workers¹ during my run coaching certification class. For starters, both require focus on building consistent habits, dedication to long-term growth and goals, and knowing the importance of sleep and nutrition. But I started thinking —wow, what would it look like if we devised and followed training plans for our work?

My coach writes often about stimulus in training: training is basically a structured way to intentionally stress our bodies to trigger musculo-skeletal adaptations that make us stronger and faster. But if we introduce too much stimuli *without adequate rest and recovery, we’re not only more likely to get injured, but we’re not giving our bodies the chance to adapt. This got me to thinking— if I’m this deliberate about stress and recovery for a *hobby passion², why am I not more deliberate about how I approach my work? Would adding more structure and thinking about stimuli, rest, and recovery help me train to perform better on my work?

For running, I can open up my training plan and know exactly what I’ll be running this week. I know that I rest on Mondays, do workouts on Wednesdays, and long runs on Saturdays and I could probably remember the last 10 or so workouts I’ve done on Wednesdays.

But if I open up my work calendar, at least until more recently³, I just see meetings and hopeful empty blank patches of time tied up with my hopes and dreams. The progress and cadence I’ve made with my work, at least at the week-to-week level, is a little less planned out and deliberate. That’s not to say that there isn’t a daily/weekly cadence to our work planned around weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals. But they’re usually focused around the company’s goals or scheduling times that work best for coworkers or customers. They more or less completely ignore your individual energy and fatigue levels, and certainly don’t adjust for unexpected burnout. As an introvert, I know that long days of meetings will usually leave me drained, but I’ll still naively plan to try to get lots of coding done at the end of the day, and then beat myself up for not being productive. I certainly wouldn’t go run 20 miles and then be disappointed I wasn’t able to run a fast 5K right after. I know that if I’m feeling great and in the flow³ coding something, I might get more done in one morning than the previous several days.

Before I started following a training plan, I just ran hard or easy depending on how my body felt. It felt like pulling a slot machine every time out. That’s not that say that I feel great every Wednesday that I have a scheduled workout, but in being deliberate and running easy on Tuesday, I give my body the best chance to feel ready for a workout on Wednesday. But for work, until recently, I would crank away nonstop until I got too tired and crashed, then wake up the next day and try to do it all over again. Could I actually get more done by spending time doing less intense work and then try to crank out higher intensity, focused work?

How might we apply training principles used by elite athletes like periodization and progressive loading to become the best knowledge athletes we can be?

What burnout might look like. Photo by Matheus Farias on Unsplash

Burnout and injury

First let’s talk about the dreaded words. Injury. Burnout. Just as athletes dread getting sidelined by an injury, we all dread working to the point of burnout. Spoiler alert: no matter what you do, nobody is injury-proof or burnout-proof. There are certainly steps you can take to minimize risk and hopefully frequency. But if you train or work hard for years, you’ll more likely than not eventually experience injury and burnout at some point. What’s fascinating is how we react to these things so differently.

When an athlete gets injured, how do they deal with it? They rest, recover, seek medical treatment if necessary, do strengthening and rehab and slowly build back up training volume. When a runner is first coming back from an injury, they’re not just going to jump right back into a marathon or mile time trail as their first run back. They usually have a several weeks or months-long rehabiliation and slow ramp-up process. We expect athletes to lose some fitness and maybe even be a little rusty when they first come back. But after taking the appropriate steps, depending on the severity and length of the injury and subsequent layoff, they’re often able to come back even stronger than before.

What do we do when we feel burned out? Take time off? Unplug for a few days? Maybe go out with our friends for a night (pre-pandemic), maybe drink our troubles away because we can’t stop thinking about work otherwise, or maybe we book a flight to some place that we’ve seen scrolling through Instagram while trying to force ourselves to work. But then we come right back and try to resume working just as intensely *as we were before, or even *harder because we have to catch up on all that work and make up for that time off. If a runner coming back from injury tried to immediately go right back to running a marathon the next day, tried to set a personal best, or tried to catch up *on all the miles they didn’t run while out injured, we would expect them to probably not stay uninjured for very long. And yet we all do this with work. Just come back from a week on the beach in Hawaii that felt relaxing? Monday morning, let’s try to *catch up on 847 emails, take back-to-back-to-back meetings, and catch up on all the work you missed while gone. And let’s work nights and weekends to make up for all that time we missed while away. Gotta catch up! Are we surprised that we just end up burned out again?

To be sure, our bodies have more measurable limits when it comes to repetitive use or performing at a high level than our brains. When we run or lift heavy weights, we know that the science says that we’re causing microtears in our muscle fibers. We understand that there’s a limit to how far we can push them, and we have to let them literally recover in order to grow stronger. Runners understand that after a huge effort, they need to let their bodies rest and recover adequately. Sure, sitting at a desk for 40, 60, or 80+ hours a week arguably impacts our brains less than our legs pounding the pavement. While there aren’t really studies, our brains should be able to handle more training than our bodies can before breaking down.

But why haven’t we done more studies on how to let our minds and bodies recover after pushing and stretching the limits of what they can do focus and energy-wise? What if allowing our minds to rest and recover might actually allow us to perform our best work and actually allow them to grow stronger? For example, rather than just drilling rout memorization, spaced repetition and the spacing effect has actually proven to be more effective for remembering things long term. Why don’t we have more tools in our work toolbox for warming up and getting into a focused flow state as well as for cooling down and allowing ourselves to rest and recover? Elite athletes don’t just run the farthest and hardest they can each day before taking a break when their bodies can’t handle anymore — they follow training plans.

What if we had a plan for how we approached work, with scheduled harder and easier days? Athletes use a concept called periodization in training and conditioning programs to achieve peak performance during competitions and to minimize injury, fatigue and burnout.

How might periodization help knowledge athletes perform better?

The basic building blocks of periodized programs: Microcycles, mesocycles, macrocycles. Diagram made by author.

The core of periodized programs is generally a structured microcycle, usually a week, that consists of higher intensity and more difficult days balanced by lower intensity days and rest days. This usually means that you’ll have days where you’re running at what feels like a much easier pace and intensity than you otherwise would have with an unstructured program. Sounds counterintuitive right? Run slower to run faster? What about working less to get more done? Or at least work fewer hours or fewer, but more intense hours to get more done?

One of my favorite bloggers, Tim Urban of WaitButWhy, tweeted earlier this year that he wanted his time to be more black and white than just gray. Intentionally varying intensely is an important part of training— what if instead of working 8 or 10 “gray” hours a day where we’re constantly task-switching between emails (which themselves can vary in intensity), administrative work, and focused work, we intentionally planned out the day? It feels like intentionally scheduling in 2 hours of “easy work” feels less productive overall. But as a runner, I don’t think of my warmups or easy runs as wasteful— they’re just as important to my performance as the hard workouts that proceed them. If we have a most important task for the day, what if we warmed up into it, and then tackled it during our most productive hour or two of the day? And what if when we have really intense day or string of days of user interviews, design iterations, or building out the first iteration of the product, we knew that and scheduled an “easier” day the next day to allow ourselves to recover and give ourselves the best chance to succeed for the important product sprint and customer meeting the day after?

In running, there’s a concept of relative perceived exertion (RPE). Rather than focusing or obsessing over speed just in terms of miles per hour, we recognize that your easy or hard effort one day may not look the same from day to day, week to month, and year to year. The first implication here is that as you get fitter, you’ll naturally get faster for the same more effort. But the more nuanced observation is that your body and legs might be not as fresh from one day to the next, or maybe you didn’t sleep as well, hydrate as well, or eat as well. It’s easy to expect our bodies to be a little tired and slow down the day after a hard workout, but why do we expect to be able to just jump right back into productivity immediately after a long day of intense meetings and hard work?

When we translate this to knowledge work, what is a difficult stimulus for one person might actually be a recovery day for another, and vice versa. One such delineation might be that back-to-back-to-back meetings actually energizes you and even be considered “recovery” or “easy”, whereas for me, I’ve come to understand that it’d likely completely DRAIN ME. Going forward, I’ll know to be cognizant of that, and try to avoid stacking two days of non-stop back-to-back-to-back meetings and calls since I wouldn’t run two hard workouts on consecutive days.

Long-term growth and potential

Periodized programs aim to achieve peak performance on goal race day—the culmination of a single macrocycle, and usually as part of that goal, athletes will begin tapering and reducing training volume and intensity. Working up to that goal, programs use mesocycles—usually three weeks to a month, with specific focuses around building up endurance, improving running economy and top end speed with higher intensity, or focused improvement for the competition.

While there aren’t races per se in most of our jobs, with more continuous iteration, shorter product release cycles, and shorter feedback loops, shouldn’t we think of milestone product releases as more race days than finished products? Shouldn’t we want to perform our best not just on the day we release our big product or feature to customers, but also in the short period thereafter? That’s certainly the most valuable time — we’ll get their strongest feedback during that time, have important bugs to fix, and have the attention of important stakeholders. Rather than thinking of bug-fixing as just a small task after the big “product launch”, what if we think of those iterations after the milestone release as “the race”? How might we think about building in tapering to achieve peak performance for a big sprint or big release?

For work, it’s usually accepted to celebrate and relax after a big deal gets closed, a big event goes off without a hitch, or a product finally gets released. But what about tapering so that we can put our best foot forward for those moments? So that we can stretch the limits of our engineering, people, design, and problem-solving abilities, perform better at our jobs when it matters most, and grow in stronger and fitter knowledge athletes? What if instead of just doing long hours trying to get as many reps in as possible, we focused on pushing our focus or concentration slightly farther each time, so that when the important release comes, we feel ready to tackle the challenges that come with it?

The goal of applying training to your work life is NOT to be able to do 20-hour all-day/all-night work sessions—just like for most people, the goal of running isn’t to be able to run 20 miles every day. It’s to figure out what meaningful, happy and productive work looks like for YOU and what long term goals you are training towards. For me, this means making progress talking to users, testing, and writing software, but at a cadence that allows me to be effective and creatively solve problems. We need to finally let go of the idea of 8-hour days or 40-hour work weeks or 80-hour work weeks or the crazy people out there who claim to work 120 hours a week. Will there be days that I WANT to and have the energy to run 20 miles or 100 miles or work long hours because I’m working on something and just in a flow state? YES ABSOLUTELY. But certainly not everyday, day after day. And ideally, I’d be adequately trained for it. And will I make sure to give myself body and brain the chance to rest and recovery later? If I’m thinking long-term, YES ABSOLUTELY.

How might we apply this to teams? Startups are a marathon, not a sprint, and you generally wouldn’t try to run a marathon without properly training for one, so why do we try to sprint to product-market fit and scale? To be continued…

Notes

[1] I’m not a HUGE fan of this term, but I also didn’t want to go through this whole post referring to engineers/designers/salespeople/founders, etc. We’ll just refer to all knowledge/creative workers as “knowledge workers.”

[2] Don’t get me wrong— I LOVE running and it adds a ton of meaning to my life. I believe that running makes me a better friend, founder, family member, and human. It feels wrong to call it “just a hobby,” so we’ll go with hobby passion.

[3] Now when I open my calendar, I see lots of scheduled Flow Club sessions, which is a project we started working on about a month ago to introduce some of the structure that I felt was sorely missing.

[4] The term flow gets tossed around a lot and has many different definitions. I prefer this definition from “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who first coined the term: “‘Flow’ is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” For a good intro, watch his short TED talk on flow!

2020 Reading List

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 16:30:00 +0000

I read 32 books this year, which is the most I’ve read in a year as an adult—there was one summer in middle school where I think I read every Hardy Boys book available at the Oakland Public Library and made a good dent on the sci-fi section as well. In recent years, I struggled and sputtered when I picked up a book that was very educational or insightful, but just felt like a slog to read. Some friends gave excellent advice in this thread and now I don’t feel bad about abandoning books or pausing/putting down a book if another, more interesting book catches and holds my attention. Reading whichever book seems most interesting to me at the current moment in time has made reading much more enjoyable.

I read the majority of my books this year as audiobooks while running or walking. I LOVE audiobooks narrated by the author, especially Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly and Angela Duckworth’s Grit. There’s something about hearing the author’s voice inflectios and emotions that makes the book THAT much more powerful for me. If you have any great recommendations for other audiobooks narrated by the author, I’m all ears!

The books that most affected my thinking were Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity, and the trifecta of Angela Duckworth’s Grit, Robert Greene’s Mastery, and David Epstein’s Range.

Among many other teachings in Oluo’s book, I learned Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” for talking about the different levels of discrimination and privilege that any individual faces based on the different facets of their identity: race, gender, sex, religion, disability, etc. I’m still parsing through some of the language in Complexity, so I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured it out— ha! It was definitely quite a dense read and I put it down and picked it up after reading several other books, but hearing about the intersection of economics, biology, mathematics and computer science was fascinating. I listened to Grit, Mastery, and Range one right after the other and saw similar patterns of connecting the dots at the intersections of seemingly disparate skills. I specifically love Duckworth’s formulation that:

Talent x Effort = Skill

and

Skill x Effort = Achievement.

After doing some math, we can see that that:

Achievement = Talent x Effort^2.

I also have tried to make a point to keep track of where I found out about a book or who recommended it to me. Apologies if I misattributed or misremembered any recs! For 2021, I’d love to read 33 books, and in particular more great audiobooks (especially narrated by the author) and both fiction and nonfiction by BIPOC authors, so please do send me recs! 🙏

Note that I’ve included some Amazon Affiliate links for books, but when possible, I highly recommended making use of your local library, especially for digital loans via OverDrive/Libby (they even let you checkout audiobooks) and your local bookstores. Green Apple Books in San Francisco will let you order online for pickup or shipping.

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates (Yoshi Goto’s app Book Tribes)
Living with a SEAL: 31 Days with the Touhgest Man on the Planet by Jesse Itzler (Yoshi Goto)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (Browsed the library in Libby)
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly (This tweet from Tracy Chou)
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Yoshi Goto)
Letting Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory by Denna Kastor (Avesh Singh, Andrew Ng)
Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (Loved the Isaacson Jobs book)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (A lot of people— can’t remember who specifically)
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami (Sidney Le)
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (A since-deleted? tweet from Susan Fowler)
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger (Ricky Yean, Jason Chen)
Movies (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano (David Roche)
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop (Bill Gurley on Twenty Minute VC)
Know My Name by Chanel Miller (Willy Chu, Tracy Chou)
How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton M. Christensen (RIP. Innovator’s Dilemma was one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read, so decided to pick this up)
Running Home by Katie Arnold (Allison Barr Allen)
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Had been wanting to read, got a copy after seeing a post from Molly Seidel on Instagram lol)
Running for My Life: One Lost Boy’s Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games by Lopez Lomong (Jake Ols)
So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo (Was on almost every anti-racist recommended reading list)
Untamed by Glennon Doyle (Sara Broyles)
I Love Yous Are For White People by Lac Su (Sidney Le)
The Happy Runner: Love the Process, Get Faster, Run Longer by Megan and David Roche (re-read)
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown (Amanda Ables)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (Amanda Ables)
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth (Willy Chu, Yoshi Goto)
Mastery by Robert Greene (Ricky Yean)
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (This tweet from Bill Gurley)
Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works For You by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (Nishant Jacob)
Dream Big: Know What You Want, Why You Want It, and What You’re Going to Do About It by Bob Goff (Amanda Ables)
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day By Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Yoshi Goto)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Browsed the library in Libby)
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier (Can’t remember, might have seen it from Sarah Frier herself on Twitter?)

David Tran's Blog

Vibecode Together: StumbleUpon for Vibe-Coded Projects

VibeReps: Tend to Your Quads While You Tend to Your Claudes

Burnout and Basketball Dynasties

User Preferences

Summary

Burnout is losing joy in the grind while expecting results you can’t fully control in a certain timeframe

Preface, October 2024

Preface, September 2024

Preface, June 2023

Preface, May 2023

April 23, 2023

The end of the dynasty

On Burnout and Perspective

References and Inspiration

An Archipelago of Ideas

GPU in the Arena

The feed multiverse

A reflection on resilience

Maker’s Schedule 2021

Maker’s Schedule 2021

Meetings are exceptions

Time-blocking is intentionally raising and catching exceptions

An evolving environment of exceptions

How to work like elite athletes train

How to work like elite athletes train

How might we apply athletic training principles to train our productivity, do our best work, and reduce burnout?

We are knowledge athletes

Burnout and injury

How might periodization help knowledge athletes perform better?

Long-term growth and potential

Notes

2020 Reading List