Ask HN: How do I 3x my performance?

What has worked for me are the following things.

1. I have quitted drinking coffee about 5 years ago. I love the taste and smell of coffee but it's a joke what it does to people's wellbeing.

2. I am semi vegan, 3/4 of my diet is a vegan diet. I only eat meat on the weekends and only in small portions. During the week when I need to be sharp I avoid it completely.

3. I stopped eating bread and if I feel like eating it I would get a gluten free one.

4. Before going to sleep I get a pint of water.

That's it, 4 simple rules. If you try it for 5-10 days you will never look back. At times I miss a chunk of medium rare piece of steak on Thursday after work or a nice smelly fresh cup of coffee in the morning accompanied by a chocolate muffin but what I learned is that the endorphins spike that follow up the food intake would be momentary and can not compete with the level of energy my brain produce without it.

You think of the activities too much. The 'high-performers' I know, do it unconsciously. They had developed the habits to be 'high-performers'. They don't waste mental energy/willpower on the activities they do daily.

They start writing/blogging every day for 3 months, then suddenly is a habit of writing 2 hours per day. They do not think 'I need to write today' they just write.

Then they develop another habit; they start coding an idea for the next 4 months. After a year of daily coding, it outputs 2 or 3 great side projects. At the end of 5 years, the projects are on the double digits.

Then they develop a fitness habit, they start by swimming an hour a day, then adding a running hour, then cycling weekly. At the end of the year, they complete a half-ironman.

Don't aspire to be a high performer. It's a lie. People posture and virtue signal and Instagram how they want to be perceived, and the nerd crowd is no exception.

Want to know the secret to social and economic power housing? Contacts! You only get real power when other people contribute to it, whether you're an artist or a financeer or a scientist or whatever. You succeed when your network wants you to succeed. How many things you can do at once is irrelevant, and only puts you on par with the horse in Animal Farm.

But there's nothing that says you must play that game. Success in life is not how many shinies you get. It's about your deep connections. Nobody on their death bed wishes they'd gotten that Ferrari.

Get the money you need to do the things you want with the people you care about. How you get it is up to you, but it doesn't have to be the measure of your life.

Stop.

Enjoy where you are now, because you'll never be able to come back to it.

See the wonder that's right in front of you. Enjoy your youth while you still have it.

Don't try to become a productive superman in one day, you'll fail. Don't even decide to work towards lofty goals. Instead slow down and iterate. Move the ball forward a little each day.

What does that look like in practice?

1. Building routines. People don't rely on making the individual decision to exercise every day. Instead they set a schedule and stick to it until it becomes a habit. Where you'd have to specifically decide to skip the gym rather than decide to go. Imagine if people didn't have any set schedule or expectation for work hours? How much mental stress would be involved in just choosing when to deal with work.

There is only so much willpower you've got, and it should be focused entirely on building habits. Only add one at a time, and find methods that help turn a decision into a routine. For some people that's religiously keeping a calendar. For others it's more ritualistic (I always go for a walk with my morning coffee).

2. Matching pursuits with available resources. Remember in HS when you had to write a paper about a subject in Biology and you had to write an essay in English class. What did you do? Wrote one paper that could meet the requirements of both. Or at least one that could be cross submitted with minor edits.

Often the people holding down 2-3 jobs are copying work between areas. Doing one unit of effort for two units of credit. I.E. If you are a full time programmer, keeping up a blog about technology developments has a lot of crossover. Being a sysadmin and publishing benchmark results.

3. Min/Maxing total progress rather than fear of failures. We get a lot further by showing up everyday ready to make mistakes vs holding off waiting for more analysis/knowledge. Be the dumb noob, seek out harsh criticism and embarrassment early in the process.

It's a lot easier to write off mistakes due to inexperience, than it is to explain a long term lack of progress. This area gets me all the time, because it feels right to carefully weigh all options. However any honest appraisal of the opportunity cost would show that I'd have been better off making any decision (even the worst one) and then correcting based on feedback.

I love what Stephen King says on this topic: "I try to get six pages a day." [1]

He works 3 to 4 hours per day, every day. He most likely works the same time block every day. As he says in the video, life happens. Don't stress life happening. Attend to things that come up and return to your "six pages a day".

The number of pages isn't important. King even qualifies his answer by saying, "...if things go well." The key component here is:

- every day;

- preferably same time block each day;

- concentrated effort;

- attainable goal with a bit of a stretch each day.

I adopted this model several years ago and my productivity went through the roof. (From my own perspective, measuring against myself; not others.) I can say I'm overjoyed at how much work I can get done using this approach. Five hours each day, starting at 4am, is the sweet spot for me. Note, though, that I wake up at 2am to be ready by 4am and I go to bed, uh, about now.

Here's the rub: it will always appear that you can do more. However, as others have said here, it's an illusion.

Finally, I would make the following observation: if one feels secure and has a stable environment, productivity and motivation don't seem to be elusive. If you're chasing after dollars and you're about to go bust if-it-doesn't-get-done-by-this-Friday, you've already lost. It's been my experience that you cannot start from a foundation of anxiety. It can't be "I have to do this or I'm screwed". I realize this creates a paradox for many folks. My solution was just to accept a much lower standard of living to reduce that meat-computer thread constantly running in my brain saying, "...but where the MONEY going to come from!?" The thread still runs occasionally and I just kill it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7XMkjDGw0

EDITED: formatting

Work up to it, and strip out stuff you don't need to do. For most people jumping into a lifestyle change is likely to fail.

My approach is more triage based: when I find something new I want to do but don't really have time for, I look at the other stuff I'm doing and work out what is less important than the new thing. That explicitly includes "me time", and an honest assessment of what I actually do vs what I think I should. So, a certain amount of randomly reading crud on the internet and posting rubbish (like this)... just because I enjoy doing it. I used to be active on various stackoverflow sites but I found gaming the metrics too addictive so I stopped (viz, too much time writing answers to get rep, moderating posts to get badges... it wasn't what I wanted to be doing, and I found it hard to just do it a little).

When I have been busy all the time it's been like that, but more so. Get up, eat the same thing for breakfast every day, wear the same clothes, etc... routine tasks take little mental effort and can be streamlined. That works for me, it may not work for you. Do a day's work, minimal lunchtime and maximum productivity so I can leave early and still get bonus marks for getting things done. Be conscious of the metrics my workplace uses and balance playing to those metrics against the time it takes (ie, if lunch with the boss is worth the same as an extra 5 hours work a week... have lunch with the boss).

Look for ways to save time and combine tasks. For me that means bicycle transport. I get time outside, exercise, and save time/money over driving. Since I rent, I try to rent somewhere in the area bounded by my other activities and such that I get enough exercise just doing those things. Likewise, vegetarian food can more easily be cooked once a week and stored/transported every day. I make soup or pasta or stew, cool it, put it in meal-sized plastic jars (they held stewed fruit once, which I like eating), then they go in the fridge. Again, efficient to cook, saves money, and no effort spent during the week making sure I eat well. I buy easy-to-eat fruit and vegetables as snacks, and drink water or herbal tea. Bike riding means I need more salt than most people, and more energy. Fortunately I also like eating corn chips :) Those synergies are important, look for them!

I recently started doing Ultraworking "Work Marathons". This is a 3x improvement in itself. It made me realize how much there is left to gain in performance improvement.

I combined it with Focus@Will with noise cancelling headphones and "run-breaks".

I wrote a little bit about it here https://www.elijahlynn.net/blog/2019-01-08-ultra-working-plu...

I haven't fully implemented it yet (every single day) as new habits take time but the trend is going up and I have a lot of optimism around this!

I neglect my health, personal relationships, and rational probability. Also because of however my brain is wired, "making things" is my happy place. Not recommending this, just saying that some "high-performers" might be people with unique problems that you might not want.

Enjoy what you're doing while you're doing it. Enjoy it like it'll never make you a billion. Also, as much as you can, try to stay grounded with your health, personal relationships and rational probability.

Maybe spend 30x the amount of money?

Based, in part, on the concept that the fastest way to become a Millionaire in Business Type X, is to start out as a Billionaire in Business Type X?

Other than that, I think you'd be better off trying to figure out how to be happier with what you've got, rather than looking at all the things you don't have and berating yourself for failing to achieve them.

One thing that has helped me is trying to understand exactly the task I am supposed to work on. Because I read once on HN, that there is nothing worse than implementing wrong solution in the right way! What generally happens is, without understanding the task properly in depth, we try to form a solution and start execution. Then, while execution we continously run into problems, slowing us down and causing frustration.

Another thing that has helped me is searching/asking for help. You see majority of the problems that happen with us, someone or the other has encountered them and tried to solve them. It can be very useful to look at what they have done and see if you can apply it.

I just started Vyvanse today, maybe give it a try? It's not a "magic pill" but rather a supplement to help.

For a bit over four years I worked a demanding full time job while also getting my Master's degree and maintaining a relationship with my spouse.

I don't really have any insightful tricks, I just found the time.

When friends would go out, I would choose to stay in and either get some rest or do work. My weekends were fully allocated to my graduate work. My spouse was understanding and supportive but ultimately I spent less time with her, my family and friends.

I felt most overwhelmed when I planned out what I needed to get done next - that feeling usually went away when I started working.

One semester, in an effort to finish my degree faster, I tried taking an additional class. A little over two weeks in I found myself physically and mentally overwhelmed and unable to keep up with the work. Upon reflection, I realized that in an effort to keep up with the work, I was putting in 95+ hours of work per week. For me, that was unsustainable, so I dropped a class.

Most importantly, in retrospect, I regret it. Looking back it's pretty obvious to me that the compromises I made were misaligned with what actually matters to me. The tricky part for me was that it was really hard to see when I was in the middle of it.

I also think that my excessive workload actually took a lot of the joy out of the work I was doing. And for me, I think I'd rather go 50mph and enjoy the ride adjusting the direction as I go than 150 mph holding on for dear life in who the hell knows which direction.

>Generally, I'm not doing everything I want to do in my life, and I'm wondering how other people manage to do all the things.

As if other people do "everything they want to do in their lives"?

Don't fall for success porn, productivity porn, hustle porn, etc.

Who exactly does "all the things"?

Over 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1].

An untold number struggle with situational depression, opioids, messy family lives, alcoholism, obesity, and such.

Tons work on low income, minimum wage jobs.

If you don't belong to any of these groups, you are achieving way more than the 90% of the people.

>I just want to know if I'm lacking something fundamental: something physical (chemical imbalance? gut microbiome?), some lack of character development (do I lack "grit"? am I undisciplined?), or something else entirely.

You lack a job telling others BS about your productivity, and selling them conferences, tutorials, sponsored products, seminars and retreats. But then again those are few and far between, and they depend more on having a charismatic persona and good stage presence to sell BS (Tim Ferris and co) than actual productivity.

You also luck the conveniences, assistants, etc, rich people have to make them appear as they do "so many things" (when they don't have to worry about 80% of what a non-rich person has, from cleaning the house, to picking up the kids).

>In the case of the conversation in [0], the user has some external motivation; having faced death by cancer, he now wants to live his best life possible.

And who said the "best life possible" is to overwork yourself with "two or more full-time tasks during [your] everyday"? That's just a sucker myth sold to people to keep them in the rat race.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-eco...

It's about priorities. I wouldn't necessarily make all the same choices I made in the past or recommend it. I've sacrificed some health, aged more than I would've otherwise, missed out on social events, lost relationships and damaged others in the name of professional proficiency. I just put that first and didn't let anything else get in the way.

A far better way to achieve the same thing is to lead others (making 5 people 25% more productive is much much easier than doubling your efficiency), though that's less of a personal productivity hack.

I am a extreme multiplexer, that means I switch between sound engineering, camera work, music composition, electronics, programming, writing, design etc.

First thing to realize is, that you won’t be able to do all things 100% at once. Usually that is okay, many activities benefit from some cool off period anyways (everything were perception matters — colors, sound, shape, etc).

Some activities require more uninterrupted time than others, for these it can make sense to dedicate fixed days or mornings to.

Some activities depend on inspiration, it usually doesn’t make much sense to forxe them into a schedule.

Treat off time also as an activity.

Not a high-performer by any measure. But it seems like you are trying to extract meaning from achievements and success in life.

Hopefully this will give some perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

Some of the other comments touch on the routine building that leads to "high-performance". A buddy of mine says that the ingredients to greatness in anything are consistency, determination and a little bit of anger.

-consistency: devoting time routinely to the thing you want to achieve, i.e. eveyday

-determination: being able to stay focused on your goal when your original motivation is not longer relevant and being able to find new motivation

-a little bit of anger: the key here is "a little bit". You can't be angry all the time, that's not healthy. But when push comes to shove and you need a little extra it helps to become competitive and use that to push through.

Start keeping a notebook how long tasks take, like morning routine 06-06:10. This simple trick makes you understand how much time you waste. At least it did for me. I doubt you can get 3x performance with a full time school, work & family though. Delegating family stuff doesn't work for most of us.

Sleep better, regular exercise, learn the skill of focusing on a single task with no distractions for at least 45 mins. Eat your frog every morning - i.e. do your most difficult task first.

Most of your questions can be answered with the usually productity space answers. If you want resources try Chris Bailey’s Productivity Project and the book The One Thing.

First and foremost, you have to be healthy, mentally, emotionally, and physically (yes, physically). If you are not up to par, get these out of the way, first. Go to the gym, sleep well, eat well, don't consume mind-altering substances (for me, even caffeine has been shown to hurt my performance), don't be in an unhealthy relationship that is a constant distraction. I like to think of mental performance as a racing engine. You can have a dirty fuel filter, and not notice it because the air filter is plugged, and the spark plugs are misfiring. Only once everything else is fixed, do you begin to feel the horsepower from all cylinders firing.

Another thing that has helped me immensely, is listening to Jordan Peterson. If you can get beyond his political bent, you realize that he has a lot to teach to motivate. The main take away that has helped me become motivated, is the realization that you must be working towards something that is both difficult, and will significantly change your life. Listening to his lectures has helped me go back to working on a project that I had stalled for a year, and I have been working 40+ hours on it each week for months now (In addition to my 40 hour regular job).

I think the best thing you could do is to find a therapist to discuss these feelings with and help you work out a plan for you. A lot of high "performers" regularly work on their mental health. Nobody talks about it but you see it with high performance athletes, CEOs etc...

Another idea is to focus on your unique skills and do those well. You may find that your skills have no use in one company but are invaluable in another. So it's a matter of context that defines high performing.

Just to note that health scares only briefly change behavior [1]. Some ways to help make a change permanent is to develop a support network and physically change your environment so that something negative is no longer accessible.

The last part of having a support network is huge. You may see someone who is a high performer at work and school and as a Dad but they have a spouse who shoulders at least half or more of the burden. In work they may have a team to rely on and in school a study group. We really should look at high performant teams instead of individuals. We like to assign success as a function of the individual but really it takes a village.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35584798/ns/health-behavior/t/scar...

I work F/T, I study ~3hrs a day, I work on sideprojects, I exercise on a bike for an hour, I do bodyweight exercises, and I have a partner and social obligations like everybody else. I also get as much sleep as I want and have a ton of free time, mainly my weekends and after work evening hours are completely free as in there isn't one thing I have to do whereas most people I know need to spend hours doing laundry and other chores they put off. Before I did this I worked F/T, wasted all my free time and felt like I had no time to even get essential things done like going to get a haircut. My strategy then was to put off everything to the weekend and then end up not doing it anyway, repeat. After I organized myself I was even working at a university lab on weekends in addition to everything else because of all the free time, putting in 6hrs before 1pm still left lots of partying or beach time.

I agree that productivity memes are getting ridiculous, like actors or CEOs who shill their schedules of getting little sleep and power lifting 5 minutes after waking up at 3am but there is benefits to doing just basic time management. I give myself 4 hours in the morning free time before the daily commute. Before I started doing this I had to blow off social obligations because homework and assigned reading were due, but now I'm already done the assigned reading, already done working through the hw (and last semester's hw), and already went through the lecture slides before I go to the lecture that day. The reading I do while on a stationary bike for one hour. The bodyweight exercises I do during 10 minute breaks while going through exercises and hw. A half hour in that morning period is just for organizing laundry/cleaning and basic chores that before I put off until the weekend, then would end up wasting half of Saturday getting my shit in order. Breaking it up to a half hour for 5 days a week, and now my weekend is completely free, which was a god send when I started doing an OS course and the assigned projects were a ridiculous amount of work like implementing a kernel spec. While I'm doing all this everybody else I know is asleep, there's no phone calls to answer, no emails to answer ect. I'm always out at night doing something with my gf and have tons of energy whereas before I just wanted to fill my face with takeout, passively entertain myself with some Netflix marathon and then pass out. I didn't have a gf, I was overweight, I was tired all the time and thought that it would be impossible to finish a chapter out of a dense math text unless I waited until the weekend, but of course I was so disorganized I didn't have time on the weekend either.

The only reason I made this choice to start scheduling was due to getting older. When I was very young I always felt like there was plenty of time to put off things until later, but like you I'm very aware of time and how little of it we all have. Now if I'm wasting time I'm always thinking to myself I could be learning randomized computation right now and discovering something amazing about quantum information theory, instead I've wasted that opportunity so I can consume yet another zombie themed soap opera. That nagging feeling of winding up on your death bed and realize you've wasted something like 12hrs a week for 2 decades passively watching junk or putting off having a family to just self indulge a meaningless existence is pretty much my primary motivation not making money or becoming a Zuckerberg.

Find your most productive hours and squeeze them for all they’ve got. The rest of the time do passive activities. Spend time with family, go to the beach, eat, sleep, chill.

Mine are early morning or late night, that’s just how I’m wired.

What do you think full time means?

The people who seem to be high performers are the ones who quit almost everything else.

So your answer is a simple, "quit".

Quit all the things, quit family, quit friends, quit tv, quit YouTube, quit Reddit, quit HN, quit your side gigs, quit your job.

Find the one thing you want to focus on and go for it.

Obviously don't quit all family and friends. Don't quit sleep. But do quit family and friends that bring you down.

There is a difference.

Good advice here, I'll add some tactical tips that have helped me:

1. Offload mental overhead. For example, try organizing systems like GTD. What works for you will be highly personal, but the goal is to clear your head of everything you can so you can devote your full brainpower to whatever task is at hand. In the post you linked MRD85 mentioned keeping lists.

2. When things get busy, separate thinking about what needs to be done from actually executing it. It lets me plan and organize when I have high mental energy and execute even when I have low mental energy. It's a lot easier to knock out a 15m mindless task after a long day at work than to decide what needs to be done and then do it.

3. Consider impact in everything you do. It's a lot easier to 10x your output by working on tasks with 10x impact than by working 10x as hard. This is intuitive, the challenge is remembering to do this when things get chaotic and urgent. Related, read about the importance vs urgency quadrants in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I consider someone doing okay if he/she is not having one of the following issues.

(a) He/She lost someone close or someone you love has a life-threatening disease. He/She most likely is having a tough time comprehending life/death or the futility of aspiring to be like someone else. Life changes in a moment and everything that was important thus far becomes insignificant.

(b) He/She has a tooth ache. You'll agree that when someone has a tooth ache, nothing else matters

I'm sure there are other examples that portray my point. But I think the root cause of this feeling of appearing "incomplete" or "not enough" to yourself is that we as humans tend to unnecessarily compare ourselves with others. I'm not saying you shouldn't have goals to achieve, but just that those goals shouldn't have origins in somebody else's seemingly successful life.

Any small success you achieve on a day-to-day basis should be celebrated. And believe me, a string of such small kinds of successes will make you contented.