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Ask HN: What was your most productive (day|week|month|year) ever?

94 points by daryllxd ↗ HN
It could also be someone else's. What happened that day, and what techniques have you developed to try to recreate that day?

I'm asking because I've been more productive these past weeks since I completely blocked out social media on my machine and I put my phone in another room during work hours, and I should have done that years ago. :(

78 comments

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patatino
I started planing my days around a 4 hour period where I am fully concentrated with no mail, meetings etc. I set myself goals for this period and do not care about the rest of the work day. Just get this 4 hours in and you're good. I work more than 4 hours a day, but most of the work is getting done in those 4 hours.

Consistency is key in life! With everything, working out, eating healthy, raising children.

Bizarro
I've been doing the same thing. Morning is my productive time of the day. I work from home, so before I take a shower I make a pot of coffee and then after shower I get on it.

If I can accomplish a couple (maybe only one) things in that four hour period in the morning I feel good.

I also like to go to the gym around 3 in the afternoon. The gym time gives me a little time to reflect and plan. And then after that I have a good 2 hours of "endorphin" rush to work some more before I start getting tired and relax, do some more planning, research (not implementation stuff) for tomorrow.

Eating healthy seems key too. I've never been a breakfast person, but I force myself to eat some protein and maybe some fruit so I'm not crashing (and then eating the wrong) thing mid-morning.

I've also got a 5 year which can drain the energy levels, so I need to plan so I can spend time with him at night.

chrisvalleybay
My recipe for constentration is to eliminate sources of distraction. Simple? Not so much. Anything can be a distraction today. This is what I do:

- Delete Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger from phone

- Disable notifications for all messaging apps (including badge count)

- Keep Do Not Disturb (iOS) on a schedule during work hours

- Disable all notifications on MacOS

- Use software that distract less. For me this means removing every single button I don't need. Hide all the things!

- Eliminate clutter on desks. I don't keep anything on my desk that is not related to the current task

Here is my favourite thing at the moment: set /ONE/ to do. To do lists are productivity killers for me, because I'm constantly looking and thinking ahead, instead of focusing the problem I am solving now.

In Visual Studio Code, for instance, I use the plugin `title`. This is very simple, it lets me set the title of the window. In the title of the window I write what I'm doing. For instance: "Clean up user model".

Edit: one more thing. Give your setup some love. If you're working on your computer all day, keep making your environment more friendly and relaxing. This can be software; customizing the colors to your liking, customizing keyboard-shortcuts; or it can be hardware such as a better chair or a stand for your monitors. I recently bought Ergotron HX Desk Dual Monitor Arm for my monitors, and it increases my happiness and thus my productivity.

EZ-E
I grew up disliking coffee - and as such I never got to drink it

One day I decided to order a coffee while eating at McDonalds because I didn't feel like drinking soda and I wanted something different. I drank it, didn't sleep for 24 hours but got a massive amount of things done with a new found focus

Since then, I like coffee

alexdrans
I'm giving up coffee for lent, you just made me miss it a lot more :(
Bizarro
I'd like to give up coffee because I tend to crash from it, but it sure is hard to resist that nice rush you get in the morning from it.
vivan
Spring of 2012. I ate a ketogenic diet and went to the gym (cardio) for half an hour daily. Lost weight, felt great and was able to breeze through studies.

Haven't been able to recreate it, as it was only possible due to being at university with a fairly light timetable and a very close gym.

zappo2938
It better be today or I'm not going to survive. It's 6:47am, I better get some coffee for what is about to happen.
jgtrosh
Reminds me of myself, last Friday. Just arrived in Vienna to learn I had a presentation coming up. Had to plan my day, the presentation, type it out, draw graphs, sleep, with not too many hours available. Plowed through successfully but decided to start with a nap. Good luck!
zappo2938
We all have those creative moments when it is easy to produce. It is another thing to produce when everything is complicated, we still have to imagine the solution because we don't know it and it can't be searched on Google, and disheartening. There is something to be said for people who are discipline to keep moving during these times.
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wastedhours
Contrary I think to most of the rest of the audience here, my most productive came when I was directly (in the same room) working with people on a specific project.

I find being surrounded by people working on different elements to bring something together much more motivating and productive than banishing all outside disturbances. This might be because marketing is less in need of "the zone" than programming, but frankly, having that direct accountability of working with other people on pulling a campaign together really gets me focused and firing at 100%.

When I'm doing that, I don't seem to get distracted by notifications, bloated software, my phone, Facebook, HN etc...

My most productive period where I was managing a campaign launch, but working with my peers. It skews a bit if you're either managing from atop or below, because when you're at the same level there's camaraderie that makes it just click (great colleagues being a requisite, of course).

[This isn't an extrovert/introvert point either, I'm the latter, and whilst this way of working is draining from that perspective, it seems to be highly productive for me.]

decasteve
If you asked me this a decade ago I would have said 2003, when I was working 80 hour weeks. But looking back now, in terms of what I accomplished and produced, it was a lot less than I do now in terms of rate-of-production.

I’m writing this on an iPad Pro, which is my computing device for recreational things. I don’t have social media. The niche sites/forums I belong to I can only access from this iPad or my phone. My workstations are for work only and Hacker News and other sites that I frequent are blocked. I disable notifications—no messages, no popups, no email—just work!

In terms of time spent during a week, I spend more time as a single father than I do as a software consultant. My time working is focused and productive but short. On days that I don’t feel productive I tackle the low hanging fruit. On days that I am productive, I go for it.

Sounds like you’re taking the right steps.

Nashooo
Do you work remotely ?
decasteve
Yes.
Nashooo
Any tips? I know there is a large amount of tips on the internet. But I find it very helpful to talk to people who have done it themselves.
rm_-rf_slash
When I was in college I did a startup. It petered our but my schedule was excellent: Friday’s were for girlfriend and social life; Saturday’s were nonstop startup work, and Sundays were for me. I was also taking an obscene amount of credit hours, but I made sure to only deal with that during the week.

The key wasn’t focusing on productivity, it’s balance. When you feel like you’re spending the right amount of time on the people you care about, the work you need to do, the work you want to do, and most importantly, yourself, the productivity will happen. Otherwise, your body is trying to tell you that something is off balance.

bartedinburgh
I use https://kanbanflow.com to manage my week.

Instead of classic Todo - Doing - Done, my board is divided into Todo - Monday - Tuesday - ... - Sunday - Done. The board contains both work-related and private tasks. If a new task comes up randomly during the day, I just add it to the board and immediately resume whatever I was doing. Since I've scheduled the new task for later, it's not occupying my mind anymore.

The app has a built-in pomodoro timer. I don't necessarily use it in a strict sense (100% deep work) but I don't do any non-work-related tasks when the timer is on, so it helps me fight procrastination and schedule my breaks.

I've blocked most sites that I identified as time-wasters. My phone is in my drawer on "silent" and I usually don't pick up the phone at all during my working hours.

I've noticed that one of the most important things for me is gaining momentum. If I work 2-3 pomodoros first thing in the morning, it's usually going to be a productive day overall, but if I start with procrastinating, the whole day often ends up not very productive. So I pay much attention to how I start the day.

On a not strictly work-related note, going to bed and waking up at the same time significantly improved my overall life satisfaction. During my last holidays, I took measurements how much sleep I naturally need (~7.5h) when there's no pressure to wake up early. Then I started taking care to always be in bed at a set time (11 p.m.) and get the right amount of sleep.

nfin
if you use kanbanflow the way you described, what is the difference with a calendar?
jchernan
Chemotherapy was accompanied with steroids (to help with sickness) which made me stay awake almost all day. Instead of taking more meds to help with sleep, I had many productive nights working on an iOS hobby project.
froindt
Probably not a system most people would voluntarily submit to, but I'm glad you made the best of things. Hope you're doing well now.
froindt
During college I had a semester with 5 engineering classes and was the president of an engineering club. I didn't realize when signing up for classes, but all 5 courses had engineering projects worth 25-60% and still had final exams. I had no choice but to suck it up.

I started something I called "12 hours of productivity". It didn't matter what time I got started in the morning, but from then until 12 hours later I was being productive.

* I wouldn't get on reddit, Facebook, or similar sites.

* I could be doing class work, be in class, do club stuff, or study. I would eventually run out of club stuff. Even if I procrastinated with that, eventually I'd have to move on to school work.

* a few short breaks were included

My productivity soared, though I couldn't have done it for long term (years). It got me through the semester from hell though.

psyc
The funny thing is that I knew the answer immediately upon reading the title. I got the flu (the actual flu) about 10 years ago, and was out of work for over a week. It was my very first staycation, and I didn't have any contact with anyone. During that time, even though as sick as I've ever been, I completed and released my first iOS game (a very zippy direct-to-OpenGL implementation) and added a substantial number of features to my desktop game engine.

It was amazing. I felt so alive. However, at this point, I could (somewhat tongue in cheek) credit this week with ultimately ruining my life and career. I became obsessed with recapturing that feeling, and with finding a way to support myself with my own work (as opposed to the company's work). I quit my job one year later and happily worked on my own stuff for the next 2 years. This began a pattern of living on the ramen budget, being a single hermit, only going to work when I'm broke, and quitting after a year or less. Disastrous. Why, as I write this, I haven't gone to work in over 2 years, and I'm broke again and looking for a job. I have unprofitable side-projects and repos out the wazoo though.

What makes me most productive is when I truly love what I'm working on.

bpicolo
> What makes me most productive is when I truly love what I'm working on.

I suspect that's true for almost everybody, hah. I can really grind it for a month when I've stumbled upon an intriguing new side project

badpun
Hah, I ruined myself in exactly the same way, except that I was writing a poker bot. I loved it so much that I did not hold a job for longer than a year since.
mooneater
did it work out?
badpun
I've spend about 2 years of full time work on the bot. In the end it was not worth it in monetary terms (was making maybe $1000 per month while requiring very heavy support), but it rekindled my interest in maths and programming. Also, the experience gained allowed me to catch some highly paid long-term contracts (most of them boring as hell). Now I spend maybe 60% of my time doing those and 40% regaining my sanity, toying with side-projects etc. I'm dreaming of switching to doing interesting work as a full-time job (as opposed to a hobby), but the competition in such fields (computer vision etc.) seems to be dramatically higher than in what I do for money today. I'll probably do the switch in the next couple of years anyway, as I'm slowly approaching mini-FU money.
fsloth
Thanks for this! It's a cliche to say "do what you love, don't care what anyone else says" but seldom do we get these honest retrospectives to underpin how hard it can get if you actually follow this advice. Good luck on your job search!
psyc
Oh and I hope I didn't accidentally romanticize it. I do have a sense of humor about it, and I do truly love my projects, but I believe 9 out of 10 more objective onlookers would agree I have actually ruined my life and career.

The first time I did this, my project was never released, but it directly got me my next job. It was a very good job, and I wouldn't have landed it otherwise. The second time I did this, I found a job pretty quickly. This is the third time, and the first time that recruiters are all drilling me about the gaps and why I quit each job. Drilling me. I'm getting the distinct impression that I'm starting to push my luck, and plus I'm old now.

sodafountan
What are some of the projects you built while you were doing this? Could you provide some links? I'd love to check them out
Vinnl
Same here. Half a year ago I quit my job to start working on something I consider important (open access to academic articles), and it's been my most productive half-year ever. That said, I have set a deadline for myself for having to be able to fund my regular living expenses in six more months though, either by having obtained a grant to cover the remaining start-up costs, by working part-time given that I still believe I can make it self-funding if I spend more time on it, or give it up altogether and hopefully use the experience to find a more stable job doing something I consider important.
psyc
I encourage you to stick to these realistic plans. I have succumbed to bargaining with myself lately. I said, "If this project does not get X users or make Y dollars in Z time, I will get a job." Then, I said, "I will make a smaller-scoped thing that may have more mass-appeal, and if that fails, I will get a job." Then it was, "I will go all out trying to market these things, and if that fails, I will get a job." I made the decision to stop the foolishness and really start looking for a job full-time only yesterday.
Vinnl
Thanks for the advice. I'm very aware of the inclination to start bargaining, although I'm not sure yet it that's enough to prevent it properly. To be fair, there's been some bargaining already, which I feel can't really be avoided given how some initial assumptions may be wrong. For example, I've observed that I've had retention problems after my first launching, so I'm currently switching things around a bit to see if I can lower that barrier to entry. Initially, I'd planned to have x users at this point, but I don't think it's that odd to try a few more small experiments to see whether there's still potential in it. I just hope that not being afraid to throw them out will be enough to stop in time.

However, I also know that especially the part where "I might start working part-time if I feel there's still potential in it" has a lot of wiggle-room for bargaining in terms of whether there's really potential. But then at least it'll just be a side project again, which will hopefully keep me grounded :)

vinchuco
what percentages of skill would you say were transferable to and from your independent and professional work?
psyc
It’s extremely highly transferable, which has already saved my butt twice. I mainly work on games and game engines, as a hobbyist and professional.

But, like, why oh why could I not have had a passion for bingo cards and money ... sniff.

muzani
It sounds like you need some of the pressure that comes with limited time. A part of the high also seems to happen when hacking. It's hard to get the same high if you're building for the next 3 months, as opposed to hacking something in a week or a day.
zwischenzug
I once walked among London's canals and parks for 8 hours in a day and wrote a script I'd been meaning to write for years that visualised in ascii the degradation of server threads from log files.

Every time I got stuck, I stopped and walked again. I think I only did about 2 hours of 'work' that day, but it would have taken me weeks to do under normal circumstances and distractions. I slept like a log that night.

zwischenzug
Oh, and I resolved to take a day off work a week to walk London and write. So I work a four-day week and do just that :)

Also, the script proved immensely useful at debugging appserver crashes.

rogeruiz
My most productive time is when I am thoughtful of what I want to accomplish and write it down before I start. It’s really helped me using a script wrapped around Tmux sessions to achieve this. Two simple questions:

What are you working on? What did you work on?

coinerone
The last day before bachelor thesis deadline. I peaked that day!
vouhardy
ha! I still remember my MA thesis deadline, it was a research so there was a lot to hand in. I remember going 60 hours straight with some not necessarily natural push.
muzani
I went straight 3 days no sleep and wrote about 20-30 pages (against my supervisor's advice).
monkeynotes
2012 when I started a business with a friend. We moved out of the city and into a small town in the mountains an hour away and lived off of our savings. I wrote more code that year than ever before and I wrote almost all of it from scratch, making my own crappy but perfectly suited framework. Because I wrote it all, I understood it all and productivity was phenomenal. We self organized without sprints, or stand ups, or any other processes, and we made some great stuff. Many a day was spent writing code and then mountain biking in the afternoon, some of it was bliss, some of it was horrible but overall a valuable experience.
nathan_f77
There was a week last year where I did a huge amount of work on a mobile game. I was in a state of "flow" the whole time, and it felt like the time was just flying past. RescueTime tracked over 100 hours. Many other weeks were around 60-80 hours, but I was having a lot of fun and learning tons of new things. It's not too healthy though, and I took a long break after launching the game.

I can sometimes get into that state when working as a contractor, but it's very rare.

pvsukale3
The week before exam and the days in between. I was trying to work on a side project but could not get a lot of work done. But a week before my semester exams I was very productive and full of new ideas. I completed most of the work on side project before the last paper. I was highly productive and creative before exams. This has happened twice.
xbryanx
Tomorrow is going to be my most productive day ever!
randallsquared
In 2003 I worked on the same project and nothing else for about 70 hours a week for 3 months. In absolute terms, I'm a lot more productive now, but given the tools I was using at the time, it was by far the most productive period of my life so far.

Here's what I did:

* I went to a vacation rental * I had someone with me to handle non-code things who would leave me alone to work even though we were in the same 1BR apt * I had a tiny office with one entire wall being a window looking out over city, which was a wonderful combination of low local distraction combined with a broad distance full of things to occupy my surface attention while thinking * I ate only after work, by planning, so that I didn't think about meals or snacks for most of the working day

I did not turn off social media. Well, in those days it was a combo of slashdot and about 10 messaging systems; the problem with actually not checking messages is that I worry about what I'm missing, but if they're on (or I think they are...) and I'm not getting anything, then I don't think about them for hours on end.

tinco
I had slacked off for a semester in university and got 0 study credits, where nominal study performance should have yielded 30 credits (EC). This worried me because some of those points were part of my freshmen year and the university had just instated a rule that students entering their third year without having completed their first year would be expelled (the p-in-2 rule) designed to get rid of slackers prevalent in the otherwise lenient European style university.

My best friend was also faced with a harsh deadline at the time, having to finish his bachelor degree before a certain date so we made a covenant to study at the library together this entire day, every day, for that quarter.

I made a crazy ambitious plan to complete exams for 9 courses, worth 45 EC in total. There was some low hanging fruit that I just had to read the course material for, but also some (for me) hard courses. I think 2 calculus courses, Algorithms Data structures and Complexity and a Discrete Mathematics I. Especially that last one was giving me a hard time, having failed the exam three times already even though most of my friends felt it was a fairly easy maths course.

I look back at those few months fondly. Although I was socially isolated, not going to parties not seeing any friends besides just that one, I grew closer to him and I felt good because we just were so productive.

Of those 9 courses I failed two, yielding 35 EC in just one quarter. I know there's geniuses out there that do that sort of thing on the regular, but for me just passing a single maths test was an achievement, let alone passing 6 more in the same week.

rapfaria
Right after they released the HN api. I made an app called feedhint, that took me three days non-stop. Not only that, I had a bunch of exams aligned that very week, but that didn't matter. All I wanted was to create that app, personalized HN RSS feeds based on keywords. Had some good feedback also! Felt really great.