Walking is underrated. I've intentionally walked at least 3 miles every day (not without fail!), at top speed, in addition to whatever else is part of daily life. I don't intentionally do any other exercise (though apparently I'm strong enough to get asked to move things).
My resting heart rate (in my 30s) is 48 bpm. Forty-eight! (As measured on multiple occasions by genuine hospital equipment that I happened to be using in the course of testing/working on it.) For someone who used to be a fat guy, that seems incredible. And yet there it is.
But read what I wrote: “This is not the case for me.”
I won’t speak to programming only 30 minutes a day, or only three and a half hours a week. I don’t do it, and don’t know anyone that does. It’s a strawman argument that doesn’t really apply to any real-world scenario. I simply used it as a fulcrum to make a comment, based on my own, real-world experience. I also used it to mention something that has a bit more relevance to the article, itself.
When you say "programming" do you mean "acquisition of skill" programming or "I need to use existing skills" programming?
Because I can certainly agree that whenever you know what you are doing and have a task that needs to be done hammering it out all at once is much better than splitting it up and doing parts of it each day. Now imagine you have to study for a python test coming up in 2 weeks as an absolute begginer beginner and you have the option of looking at stuff in 30min chunks per day or 3.5 hours per day all at once. Which option would you pick?
If that was true it would be the only example of that in skill acquisition ever found. Distributed practice beats massed practice for the same time expenditure.
If you program for 30 minutes you spend first 15 minutes filling your short-term memory with all the relevant details to do 15 minutes of work and throw it away.
I think it is understood that there's a lower total bound for it to be useful, like it's pointless comparing ten seconds of daily fitness with 70 seconds of one time weekly fitness
