Ask HN: Do you also alternate between super productive and slow days?

An old mentor once told me a truth in life: everything comes in cycles. That includes productivity.

It sounds like you’re trying to determine if your tiredness is an inevitable side effect of a productive day, if unproductive days are just random, or if your variation in productivity can be optimized. I don’t know the answers for you, but you might be able to better understand your productivity by keeping a detailed time log of your work.

For two weeks, keep track of every minute of your working time. Once you know where your time went, you can then try to understand why your less-productive days are less productive. Was it because you were too tired to concentrate? Did your “super productive” day involve 12 hours of focused work? You might find there’s not as big a difference as you think between different days, except that some days feel productive because you happen to finish some task, when in reality the groundwork for finishing it was laid on a day that felt unproductive.

In my experience, I also need slower days otherwise I will simply burn out. I love having days full of code, but this is not sustainable. After 8 hours of coding and focused work, I typically need a day or two of recovery. I still can perform tasks and plan but not at the normal intensity. Another approach is 4 hours a day of code daily. This can become a problem if you have a 20 year old team mate willing to grind 12 hour days and just knock out all the tickets. This can create toxic behavior and resentment from that individual towards older and experience devs.

In everything people do, there is time for rest or a task that is easier physically or mentally. A laborer cannot sustain moving shovel non-stop all day. A soccer player cannot sustain playing 8 hours a day. This is part of being human.

Yes, it's normal. Don't stress over it. Ideally you can work on a team or with a partner so that your productivity cycles balance out each other.

Probably when you're feeling unproductive you should just stop working and go do something else; it's better to recharge than to work inefficiently.

Yes, I also alternate. But my ebb and flows are around motivation, not exertion.

If I am working for someone else, and I put in a lot of effort, then I feel completely drained after N amount of days (or after project completion) – which requires me to mentally "unlink" my brain from anything related to that project.

If I am working for myself, whether that be on my company, or for personal growth, then I can hit a wall day after day and still find motivation to continue forward, projecting even one little victory as something that can give me energy to keep going.

The key for me is motivation. If I feel invested (and rewarded) in my own growth, then I am much more productive than just adding more to the bottom line of some faceless organisation.

Good luck to you! I hope you find something worth while that both gives you energy and makes you feel like you're growing.

I alternate - but discovered my perception of productive days can be skewed. I came from physical, real world jobs like construction. When my day was done, I had something tangible for my efforts (fence, concrete, brick wall, etc.)

When I started in computer work, some days I felt super productive, but others I didn't. On many of the days, I didn't feel productive. I was still brain dead from the work on these 'less productive' days.

Back in those days, I printed a lot of stuff. I discovered that I felt more productive on the days I printed more things, because printed pages are tangible items. On the days I felt less productive, I was still doing a ton of work, but the lack of tangible evidence skewed my perception.

The nice thing about the amortisation strategy is that you can e.g. exercise on the slow days, which improves your stamina and thus efficiency in the long run.

Go with the flow. When you're in-flow, block interruptions. When you're ex-flow, handle the other stuff so you're prepared for the next peak. If you're ineffective, uninspired, tired, demotivated or otherwise inoperable go do something else or sleep.

Yes. This is pretty common, actually. People who force themselves to work on the days they aren't really motivated to work ultimately end up in burnout - sometimes career-ending burnout.

Find an employer that understands this and stick with them, honestly.

It depends on what kind of work I'm doing. I'm not as "productive" if I need to take a day or two to figure out how to solve an unfamiliar problem, but if I'm doing familiar work and my morale is up I can just crank features out like a fuckin' machine.

As a workflow consultant, that's one of the clues to help someone find their groove. Good and Bad days can happen for various reasons. Finding patterns is key to managing your life well.

One exercise we use is to first track your days and rank them just on productivity, which is just the measure of what was planned and what got done - we worry about volume and type of work later on.

Rank the day on a scale of -3 to +3. Once we have enough of these we see either an internal or an external driver.

Crossing that ranking with a daily work journal (Ben Franklin style is fine), you'll start to see all kinds of things. By far the biggest influencer for better production I run into is day of week.

The day of the week we have the most control over is our most productive day. The exception to that is when people are "burning out" on their work and when they do have more control, they coast / float / rest / runaway / crash.

Once we find the better days, it's usually easier to repeat those conditions than it is to eliminate the poor days.

And just so this doesn't sound like a campaign to turn everyone into a 7-day-a-week work monster, I'm convinced over and over by watching people trim their days and weeks, increase their "people" time, and carry a notebook with them ALL the time, that less labor, more life results in more work and more love of that work.

When you have a great day or two of productivity, and then skid to a halt, ask yourself more questions about the work ahead. Get big picture and drop more questions, puzzles, problems on your subconscious. Chances are a few days from then you'll have all the answers and you'll have another blow out day! Tightening that cycle up is the goal, but take what you get and enjoy the ride.

Happy to give you a free workflow tune-up. Takes about a month, and it's usually fun.

Happens to me, but not only on days-scale also on weeks-scale: sometimes a week is very inspiring, intense, and the next one is relaxed, almost lazy. Usually happens after a big task has been completed though.

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After having a burnout I came to accept this is how my work schedule should be working.

When I don't force myself to 'work' when I don't feel like, I end up with may more productive days that (objectively) also last longer.