Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?

The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly familiar with all the tools, enough that you have your API calls completely committed to memory.

If you look at most programmers who have a reputation for being insanely productive, they all follow this pattern. Fabrice Bellard works pretty much exclusively in C, mostly on signal-processing or low-level emulation. Rob Pike works all in Go using the plan9 stack. John Carmack is all games and 3D graphics, using OpenGL. Jeff Dean has two major interests - distributed systems and large-scale machine learning - and works basically exclusively in C++.

I read an interview with Guido van Rossum, Jeff Dean, and Craig Silverstein within Google where they were asked basically the same question, and the answer all of them gave was "The ability to hold the entire program in your head."

Because of this, I beg anyone who wants to be as highly productive as I was to please take care of your body and your mind. It's better to be productive for forty years than highly productive for two years and then dead.

I don't want to hear about another dead hacker.

I noticed that when I make lists of things to do, and I see progress on the items ticked off, I know I am productive. No anxiety after that. (I usually write down the number of hours taken to complete each task and sometimes flip through the list to reassure myself with indulgent self-adulation).

Without the list, even though I am killing items, I still feel unproductive. It's that bizarre.

Make a list! :-)

1. when I have a ton of things to do, I schedule or bucket them and then work on one at a time. My giant todo list is in a different doc and I only have a mini one with up to 3 tasks that I look at regularly. When I remove those tasks, I add the next three. Then you only have 3 things to do instead of 300. Small hack but works great to not feel overwhelmed.

2. Practice your focus and willpower so that you can stay on one item at a time and not feel like you need to check FB/email/etc every 5 minutes. For some people this is really hard, but it is a skill you can improve.

3. Figure out the fastest, easiest and most efficient way to do things and then do it that way. This covers everything from the commute to coding and project management.

4. If your office is driving you crazy, schedule "meetings" on your calendar to block out dedicated work times. Put your headphones on. If people still don't get the hint, tell them you are busy working on x right now and can talk to them in an hour.

5. Most importantly, work when you are working and live when you are not. I don't check my email on weekends. People have my phone number and if something is important they will text me. Leave your work at home. Even if you are the CEO most things can wait until you get back in the office.

   1. Work on something that you MUST get done.
   2. Plan your day the night before.
   3. Wake up early and start working immediately.
   4. Other people's "obstacles" are your opportunities to invent.
   5. One day at a time, regrouping each night.
   6. VERY short to do list at any given time.
   7. 2 computers, work in 1 room, internet in another.
   8. NO distractions while working (email, phone, others).
   9. Short intense sprints with short breaks between.
  10. Moderate & healthy eating.
  11. Full night sleep.
  12. Analysis time away from computer.
  13. Clear (revisable) vision of end product.
  14. Dinner with mate (or family) every night.
  15. Have no other major projects (or interests) for now.
  16. No day job.
  17. Accept input from others, but go with your own gut.
  18. No TV.
  19. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
  20. Get off Hacker News (stop posing, start acting).

They share a lot of common ground - both work on software solving a common problem, that really just needed one person to dedicate themselves to fully understanding the problem and to do a very high quality job.

Neither has had particular commercial success through doing that, but both have excellent reputations that they are now able to leverage.

If you those are your role models, you need super-expert knowledge and dedication. And, some means of supporting yourself to do that - Wickham's work fits alongside his PhD and professorship, and Otwell has been taking one day a week from his work.

Tough. Good luck :)

Along the same lines, the best advice I ever received was from an old music teacher: do less, better.

Also: if you think "delegating" and "managing" are luxuries and somehow antithetical to creation, I'm guessing you haven't done much of either.

Obvious stuff: minimize distractions and interruptions. Allow the problem before to assemble itself and present itself to you. Then you become a scribe, working as fast as you can.

In this state, I can sometimes write pages of code that run the first time (although not a recommended best practice, lol).

As mentioned in another reply, this highly productive state is easiest to reach when you are working with familiar tools and aren't attempting anything too out of your comfort zone.

This flow state is hard to come down from, so you will need to make sure that you give yourself time to come back to earth. Don't do this too close to an RL deadline, like bedtime. Your family may not get much out of you for an hour or so.

* Create some sort of system for capturing and organizing your tasks (like GTD)

* Immediately do something if it takes less than 2 minutes to do

* Prioritize all your tasks. I prefer using the Eisenhower Matrix. Prioritizing also includes delegating and eliminating tasks.

* Start waking up earlier (like 5:30). It's quiet, there's few distractions, and it's empowering to get a ton done and then realize it's not even noon yet.

* Decide what your Most Important Task (MIT) is and do that first thing in the morning (important!)

* Make your tasks specific and actionable. Not "Study for exam," but "Review chapter 2 notes on X section." You can also break tasks down until it sounds stupid, but much easier to do.

* Batch similar or small tasks together and set a time to do them

* Schedule your day on a calendar. If it doesn't go on, it doesn't get done. You don't have to get super specific with tasks. Just block out chunks of time to do work. Also schedule your breaks and your not-working times (important!)

* I like listening to background sounds. Either classical music or using Coffitivity/Noisli. Also helps train my brain so that whenever I hear it, I know it's time to work.

So what's my dirty little secret? Three simple things: I keep a to-do list, the items on the list are incredibly clear and take, at max, 2 hours, and finally, I switch gears if I have to wait on other people (i.e. I don't surf the net while I wait for an email to approve workflow, I simply switch to another item on my to do list)

I am INCREDIBLY focused on execution, and if I have a task that I know can cause my mind to wander, I limit the amount of time I spend on it (for example, I have research potential repository structures, 1 hour, on my to do list right now).

I used to write things like 'redo startup website' on my to-do lists years ago. Now it's '1. rewrite main copy on landing page to highlight x feature 2. rewrite faq to include a, b, c questions. 3. change contact form to say 'sign up', reset analytics'. Make your tasks granular, tactical, and limit the time frame. I also start my day with a maximum of 6 things on the to-do list, and I rank them based on priority. As I start to cross things off the list, I add more to the next day (or for later that day if I am finishing things faster than I had anticipated). Finally, before I go to bed at night, I make sure I have 6 items on my to do list for the next day, so I can hit the ground running.

Plan ahead. Break it down. Prioritize. Write things down. Regardless of what you do for a living, or where you are in life, you can definitely use this method to improve your productivity. Good luck!

1. If I am working on a large project I try to keep it split into very small pieces. I only work on a small piece at a time and switch between pieces often. This keeps my mind going. It also helps if you start to get stuck and lose focus by looking things up or just outright losing interest in what you are working on. By breaking it into small pieces you tend to complete more items and it tricks your mind into staying focused (at least for me). As someone else pointed out, a big time suck for developers is having to look things up. If I know that I want to get 20 things done in a day, I will work to get as many as possible done before I get stuck having to look something up. Sometimes I find that doing other things will freshen my mind and I no longer need to look it up.

2. If I find myself getting stuck or losing focus, I get up immediately and do something else non-work related. I may go for a 15-20 minute walk, grab a cup of coffee, or read HN.

3. I try to go to sleep at, or around, the same time every night and try to wake up at, or around, the same time every day. Being in a routine helps.

4. Watch what you eat/drink. I used to drink a couple beers every night, smoke, and drank a lot of soda. I stopped drinking 2 years ago (I still have a beer every now and then at events or with dinner on occasion), I quit smoking (been a year now), and gave up soda entirely (haven't had one in 3 years). Combined with exercising more and watching what I eat I have found this alone the biggest improvement to my staying focused and being productive. I also used to eat late at night, which didn't help my sleep cycle and also is bad for your health in general. I forced myself to get on a more routine diet, or at least eating cycle.

A great little poem got posted here which I find highly relevant. [1]

[1]: http://finishonethingtoday.com/

wherein you look at their body of work and think how is this possible

when it takes ages for me to finish a rather mediocre painting/blog.

The more time you spend with your stack the better you will get

as you develop something akin to muscle memory and a deep buffer

as evident with say a pianist or guitarist.

Nothing wrong with role models, but you're not going to help your work-life balance by comparing yourself to only their best and most visible output.