Ask HN: What's your way to keep being productive day by day?

Disclaimer: I in no way make any claims of success.

1. Find a reasonable tracking and logging system. I've trended strongly to paper/pen systems, heavy on index cards (POIC / Zettlekasten inspired), Bullet Journal, and 43 folders / tickler-file based.

2. Be gentle with yourself. Project focus is much like meditation. Allow your mind to still and focus on the task at hand. If it wanders, guide it gently back. Know when you've had enough.

3. Know when you've had enough. There's only so much focus you have, attempting to prove more is all but certainly counterproductive.

4. The role of play and diversion, even in adulthood, suggests something primal about these. It may be freedom for the mind to wander without consequence.

5. Reassess goals. Change or discard the ones which no longer suit a purpose.

6. One trick for maintaining the apearance of productivity is to have a list of goals far longer than your ability to meet them. Creative procrastination (slacking on task A by tending to task B) may give outsiders the illusion you are infinitely productive. You will see things differently.

(The outsiders' view is the correct one.)

7. If you possibly can, seek a supportive environment. This means a space, tools, resources, and most of all, people, which and who support and facilitate your goals. I say "seek" because odds are strong you won't find this, or at least not in any single or rapid manner, but consider "a better productivity environment" a goal in itself. Working early or late, regular hours or irregular, clean or messy, seems to matter less than having agency over your working conditions.

Saps to productivity -- environmental, resources, or, most of all, people -- are the biggest impediments to progress.

8. You are your own worst enemy.

Be gentle with yourself.

9. Start now, or soon. It's never the right time, it's never the right place, you never have the right books or information. Start with what you have, do the best you can.

10. I honour virtually all of this advice in the breach. What we do wrong is in thinking there's a single method. There are many paths.

Have some method. Note what you want to accomplish, how you attempt to do so, what succeeds, and what does not. Don't forget to ask yourself if what you think needs doing actually does or not.

Subscribing. I find I tend to very easily forget the projects, ideas and endeavors that keep me inspired. I occasionally find about them again in my notes, bookmarks or chat history, and then productivity might go up again.

I guess the current environment for many people (at least for me) contains too many distractions that so easily washes away all the good ideas I've been pondering on.

Being organised by keeping a daily todo/journal has helped a lot, unless I forget to use it, which happens from time to time.

I work in an open office plan and one thing that can really help me to focus is to go to a conference room to work for a few hours. (At my workplace we have some ”conference rooms” that are not bookable.)

Getting enough good quality sleep. No amount of stimulants, productivity systems or external motivation can overcome a tired mind and body. You will be trying to ice skate uphill.

The mind craves novelty. Part of why problem solving is satisfying is that it gives us new perspectives or new results. When we're bottlenecked by knowledge or resources it's easy to become burned out and to 'cheat' with a wandering mind seeking information feeds or hobby interests.

I get best results starting with the hardest problems first thing in the day, and as complications or dead ends manifest, calculate if it is best put off until something gives (or the mind thinks up something randomly in the commute or shower), and move on to intermediate issues, repeating until the end of the day are small trivial tasks and maintenance.

This is the daily grind though, project deadlines or resource intensive efforts are going to skew individual results.

I take time to do something not related to work to free my mind. I tried sports, but for it turned out for me it’s cooking. I spend roughly 3-4 hours a day cooking, may it be actually cooking, chopping, cleaning, scouting of ingredients, sharpening knives. It’s meditative and I get to eat better (and less) food. And it’s a challenge, you fail, and you get better. It’s a bit like programming actually.

This week I've had some success using something like the Pomodoro technique. Though I've tried it a few times before I never quite got it to stick. Some thoughts / changes I made:

- Doubled the length of time to somewhere between 45-80 minutes, loosely based on the perceived complexity of the task

- Didn't time my breaks. This sounds counter-intuitive but they never lasted more than 5-10 minutes for me anyway, but having an open-ended "breathing-session" helped psychologically

- No notifications during this period, at all. Phone and laptop on DnD, no messaging apps running - I really mean all notifications.

- Having the "guarantee" that I'll see missed notifications during my break, with some sane max delay (1-2 hours) instead of an indefinite amount of time helped my brain unplug considerably

- Working with no notifications is incredible

- You have to believe you won't be interrupted to do deep work.

I used to beat myself up a lot when I would have an unproductive day for whatever reason (because I was tired, depressed, anxious, distracted, etc). This would then carry over to more days where I needed to be productive, thus hurting my focus and productivity further. Then I realized that, at least in my job, things won’t fall apart if I just have an off day. Now when I have one of those days I’m easier on myself and remind myself that tomorrow will be a new day where there will still be plenty of challenges to tackle and I don’t need to be working at 110% capacity every single day of my life. I now find it a lot easier to just write those days off so that I can come back the next day and focus.

Sometimes we need days where we aren’t “productive” to rest, recover, or process so that we can do our best on the days where we are able to be productive.

I’ll also say that for me having a good, supportive team makes a huge difference. If you have other people who can help you stay motivated and accountable who are also empathetic it’s a huge boon for staying focused and productive.

Bullet journal or any similar organizing system

Manageable chunks, intermediate milestones and small rewards after each goal all help go forward without too much stress.

For me, what works best is to kickstart the day by checking something out of my todo list. Every morning, I choose a small task which shouldn't take more than 2 hours to complete, trying to have something to show for. The rest of the day using flows naturally afterward.

Productivity increased greatly for me after ditching my smartphone for a dumb phone and using a bullet journal when I'm away from the computer. That plus a disciplined regimen of daily planning, execution, and migrating tasks to the next day if not finished; learned from "Time Management for System Administrators" by Tom Limoncelli.

This is specifically for coding productivity, but I find it helpful to write out summaries of what I'm seeing in the code base when I'm working on a tough problem. It helps to keep my mind focused as I'm reading through thousands of lines of code. I may do the same thing if I need to dive into documentation for some API or programming language.

I listen to my emotions. Often times when I’m frustrated or lacking motivation there’s a need or desire I’m not paying attention to. Productivity is not a win-lose, it’s a win-win for both conflicting sides of my self.

Other than the obvious, like sleep and eat better, I would say getting rid of long, recurring, useless meetings was a big change. Status meetings in particular I find to be quite useless. Having my day broken up by a few meetings is a lot less productive than one fully open day.

Above all else, work on something that you're truly passionate about. It may take you a while to get there (either by finding the right employer or starting your own company), but it is the single biggest motivator I have found.

This goes hand in hand with waking up early for me.

I plan something fun to work on for ten minutes at 7am every day. Usually I already know what I'm doing to do.

Then I get ready and go to work.

Waking up late for me I realized was due to not looking forward to the day. This helped.

I also time everything. It games your mind. I'll set a timer for ten minutes to write a unit test or something, and try to get it done in that time.

I really need to pay attention to my sleep. My ability to do anything goes down severely when I don't sleep enough (which for me is less than 8 hours a day). So much so that it's enough of a reason to not have kids (I suspect I'd lose my job and/or go crazy), at least not until I'm financially independent.

Apart from that, it's mostly all in your head - i.e. at least in my case, motivation/demotivation largely depends on whether my internal self believes that the effort is actually worth it. So, for eample if the project is actually pointless (will likely not deliver value to anyone on completion), I will be demotivated. Also, if my effort is unrecognized, this will be demotivating as well. Having to deal with completely preventable bullshit every day (general corporate incompetence spilling over my particular area of work) is also demotivating.

I've never found a way to make sure every day is guaranteed to be productive, I have stretches of being non-productive. It's ok, within reason. The most important thing, to me, is to reboot sooner rather than later. If you let it become later, you can lose a lot of time and not notice initially (the days will seem to slide by rapidly in hindsight). I treat it mentally like a small vacation, then tell myself to get back to proper work mode.

To do that, I pick small, easy wins, then roll from there until I'm back into a good day to day work routine of productivity. I've found making sure I do something early in the morning as part of being productive, makes a big difference in breaking slack patterns. Not letting the morning get away without doing something meaningful toward whatever I'm working on. I'm strongly a night person and I still find that to be critical. In my observation of low-productivity periods of time throughout my life, my mornings were always mediocre for productivity. As I've gotten older (closing in on 40 now), the value of being productive early in the day has gone up considerably (it's an energy conservation and utilization thing).

I keep a regular schedule. Wake up, get kids to school, work out, eat, get to work.

I maintain lists of things to think about and to do. My style of bulllet journeling.

I usually stick to the rule of threes. Three things I need to do this am, or today,or this week, this sprint...

If I don't need to read something now, it goes in my list and the tab is closed.

The biggest problem for me is that I am a morning person and there is not enough morning. I am most productive from around 5 or 6am til somewhere between 10am or noon. During that time, I need to get kids off to school, work out, and eat. I could shift working out, but if I skip it in the morning, I'm very likely to skip it over lunch or in the evening.

I have a dedicated office

I have a really solid desk setup - tray, mac, ultrawide, nice speakers. Ergonomics are important too.