Ask HN: Have you developed any habits to be more productive?
How does a productive day looks like for you? Do you start with certain set of tasks for a day and call it a day once you've completed them?
Also how do you tackle them because you aren't effective at all times of the day, so how do you classify/rank your to-dos and overall manage time
Share things/habits that you have developed by doing and improving and that worked for you and you'd like others to try.
Be more specific and tell how it worked out for you and why you think it worked.
Thanks in advance.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 89.6 ms ] thread- Delete ALL social media. I just have hackernews. No Facebook, no reddit, Insta, Snapchat, TikTok etc
- Get rid of TV
- Get a dumb phone (don’t have it now but did at one point)
- Make a budget, track incoming income and all expenses. This allows you to ask the question, what is the goal/desire of my productivity?
So with all that, I’m pretty productive
Taking from systems design, monitor stocks, not flows. Make several bank accounts (digital banks are good for this), watch how much money is in those accounts, and whether they're going up and down. It's more suited for the human brain. If the numbers are moving in an unexpected way, then you can check each one.
Flows are movement. Money in, money out. Heating. Leakage of heat. Turning on the water tap. Draining water. Mining oil. Selling oil.
Stocks are how much is there. Money in the bank. Debt unpaid. Temperature of the room. Water in the bathtub.
For some reason, we like to measure flow even though it doesn't help much and it's actually the hardest to measure. You can't measure economic health by taxes paid, and it's hard to estimate whether a room will be warm based on how hot the heater is.
Stocks are easiest to measure. And they're effective too. Most flows are based on stock. If you took a historical count of stocks or flows and tried to model the future, flows are not good because they don't take into account structural changes. You may have a steady expense and income and suddenly it changes - maybe you're on the brink of divorce, maybe you're moving to a new city. People are likely to worry about how much the new rent is but don't account much for how much new income they make from the move. Or vice versa - they underestimate new expenses and overestimate new income.
Flows are good at predicting near term, bad at long term, and terrible at figuring out a solution.
More likely, it's based on other stocks - you spend more when at certain health levels, or based on the amount of money in a bank account, or perhaps your perception of the economic climate. If I have a windfall, I pay debts until my balance is a certain number. Or I buy meals for friends and family. Or give to charity, etc.
If things are tight, I don't spend, even though most of the time not spending means I have more to spend. It's based on some other stock, like how many people are on Slack, indicating how likely I am to lose my job or get a promotion.
So the easiest way to monitor is by having a bunch of different money stock (bank accounts) and monitor whether they're going up or down.
We have multiple accounts (food+fuel, bills, apartment, fun money) and we put the exact same amounts into each account each week.
Anything left at the end of the week gets moved to overflow accounts (food+fuel overflow, bills overflow, apartment overflow, etc) and anything in overflow accounts at the end of each month gets moved into savings as bonus savings.
We have 4 savings accounts. Short term, mid term, long term, retirement. We always put the same amount into these each week.
And then as our expenses decrease, or incomes increase, we just put a higher percentage into savings.
It works pretty well, we are the only couple I know who could purchase a home at our age in this environment in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I earn about 115% more than average worker, but my partner earns about 80% of the average worker.
Our situation and savings and spending discipline has allowed us both to drop 1 full day a week of employment.
We have only been out of university for 4 years
Each and every night, write a TODO list.
This will help you focus yourself in the morning
When I supported my own code I'd "feel" like a productive day was when I programmed (what I wanted to do) versus support (which I has to do.) When I (finally) realized that support was part of my job, I could see that as productivity.
30 years on I'll still wake up with an idea of what I'm working on today, the get hijacked by a bug report or whatever. Come the end of the day I still haven't started my plan for the day, but nevertheless I was productive.
I kinda see zoom meetings in the same way. Mostly I'm on mute, multi-tasking some other mundane thing, but just being in the meeting is 'being productive' - at least to the people scheduling the meetings.
So now, if a manager asks me "what did I accomplish" I start by boasting about my meeting productivity. "I was in 14 meetings this week, for 10 hours of my time. I did ad-hoc support for 4 issues raised by other managers. I spent 3 hours this week on this project. In those 3 hours I did xxxx."
One colleague of mine had 11 meetings scheduled for a day. Clearly he got a lot of work done because meetings are work...
But i digress. To be more "productive" whatever that means to you, figure out what distracts you and cut back on that.
The former means avoiding needy tech, and automating most regular tasks away. It's a lot easier to get things done if you don't pay a huge maintenance tax on your available energy.
It might only take a few minutes to renew a domain or update an SSL certificate, but it's something I need to do before I can get any work done. These little tasks can add up and drain you of your energy.
I kind of wrote about it here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/busy
The latter means shutting down all unnecessary noise, and only letting necessary noise through at the right times. Nothing should grab my attention until it needs to grab my attention. That involves a lot of ad block filters and email rules, and disabling lots of default behaviours from apps.
I wrote about it here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence
I just try to keep an eye on the little things that cause friction, and every once in a while, I fix them.
Top tip: I asked my physio to recommend a coach and they found me a great one.
1. Just having an appointment forces me to get up and go 3 days a week.
2. Having a trainer means you have a spotter so you can lift in safety
3. Having a trainer plan your sessions means it’s incredibly efficient both in ROI and overall time spent vs improvement.
If like me you are a remote tech worker sat at a desk most of the day, physical training will literally add years to your life.
Also it will make sure your younger years are high quality years where you can do whatever you want, have more energy, reduce/ avoid illnesses and diseases etc.
Lifting will help increase bone density and keep them healthy as you get older which is a huge part of getting “frail” as you age.
Simple, effective.
I will say I keep coming back to it, so that actually says a lot for it.
What worked for me
Finding a routine was the hardest part. I tried multiple things and eventually landed on something that I'm continuing to improve. Key takeaways are hiring professionals for chores (accounting, taxes, cleaning, cooking), not stressing too much, and not multitasking on multiple projects (meaning weekdays are only for work-related projects).What didn't work
What I don't like about advice that you can look up on the internet, is that even if there is plenty of good information, it doesn't mean that it's relevant to your specific situation. It would be helpful at some point, but you need to figure out what is the next step right now.* Measure things. You really have no idea how slow you are unless you have data to compare against.
* Test automation. If you have good test automation in place you are free to take wild chances on improvements because the risks to regression are very low. If you have no idea what you are breaking when working on a new feature you are wrong on many levels.
* Total Cost of Ownership. Combine the prior two bullet points and realize that slow software steals moments of your life in little pieces. You should be completely OCD about software performance. When software takes less time to execute it takes less time to test, which means you can test more frequently. If you can run all your E2E tests in under two minutes your approach to architecture and risk evaluation wildly changes in ways you cannot imagine.
* Be Critical. In my time writing software I have seen many people do stupid costly things frequently out of social conformance, perceptions of easiness, and cowardice. Don't be a coward. Ask tough questions both to yourself and others. Frequently ask yourself why the fuck am I doing this? If you cannot receive an absolutely amazing (primitive, but with evidence) answer to that question alarms should be screaming in your head. If you work in an office full of stupid I would raise some concerns or look for work elsewhere.
That last bullet point is why I no longer program for money. There are too many cowards writing JavaScript. If you cannot even vocalize devastating concerns without becoming a pariah its time to do something else in life.
Can you share some examples?
I would also recommend a perf tool that measures performance of a given operation as number of operations per second.
Also measure transmission speed. In HTTP that is easily measured as HTTP round trip, but I am bigger fan of WebSocket which requires some amount of tooling to really master.
Here is something I wrote about performance measuring just before I stopped doing JS work: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/performance...
1. Take a shower & brush teeth twice a day. Have all clothes in a clear area that I can take with my eyes closed. All the hygiene stuff should be automatic.
2. Two lists - to do & schedule. I like weekly scheduling. I list everything I plan to do in the week and then drop them by day. Because I tend to put things off until 4 PM and then have a burst of energy to finish them. Some do better scheduling every hour of the day. To do is just a stack you dump into and pull from. Don't fill it out too long.
3. Finish stuff. 95% done stuff lingers on the mind and drains energy, when you should just push it to 100%.
4. Clean up everything for 15 min at the end of the day. Also clears the mind. No more than 15 min. Dump email, slack, etc into your To Do or Schedule. If I don't have time to clean up, it's an alarm bell saying I lost control.
5. Batch non-maker time and be present. We found out we were losing 2 days per week to interruptions and stuff, and these meetings and interruptions weren't useful because nobody paid attention. So we batched Monday and Wednesday as meeting days. Find the right tempo for your workflow - you might need 3 days, you might need a few hours. If you work hybrid, then office days are your non-maker times.
What I'd like to do: Build workouts into (1) as well.
Having systems for things helps immensely. Use a calendar, write things in the calendar as much as possible. Use some kind of to do list to keep track of what tasks are on your plate.
These systems will work well 90% of the time. Be mentally prepared for the 10% of the time when they don't. Accept that you might use the system "wrong" like writing a todo in the calendar because it will remind you of something important at the right time.
Reduce distractions with blocking software, but don't try to use blocking software as a replacement for self-control. Chrome plugins that let you access YouTube but hide the "related videos" feed are great. You can click on a YouTube video, watch the content and then stay on the task. Trying to lock yourself out of all possibly distracting sites usually just results in going to even more extreme lengths to circumvent the block. It's very "binge/purge cycle".
When planning, try to predict road blocks, both internal and external. We often write plans with the perfect happy path in mind. If your plan is to jog to the gym in the morning, what will you do when it's pouring with rain? If you plan to study programming all afternoon but your neighbor decides it's time for a 5 hour drumming session, where will you go? You want to try some new hobby, what will you do when you feel anxious driving up the first session? Getting good at predicting and planning around problems is a fantastic skill. You'll start noticing your emotional state more and noticing how it affects your productivity too. Nervous? Anxious? Angry? They can all throw you off your game (this is the biggest part of ADHD in my opinion, you're dealing with a storm of emotions that you aren't very good at handling when trying to complete necessary tasks. Many procrastination behaviors stem from this)
As for tools: if in doubt, use a pen and paper. A small notebook and pen is an incredibly versatile and flexible device that is also cheap and low distraction. If you don't have a good reason to choose something else, start with pen and paper.
The first thing I do when I start work is connect with my body-doubling partner, and I stay connected with them for the whole day. This helps manage my hedonistic procrastination and allows me to be productive for 7 hours a day. Without body doubling, my productivity drops to 2-3 hours a day. Disclaimer: I co-founded a body-doubling platform (https://workmode.net/), so I might be a bit biased ;-)
Next, I go through my mailbox and Asana to create a to-do list of tasks I plan to work on. I don't use Asana for my daily to-do list as it's too distracting; there's just too much going on there. We have a simple to-do list app on WorkMode, which works well for me. Pen & paper would work well too.
I try to tackle simple and short tasks first to get into the flow and reduce focus pollution. It's good to have as few tasks in the back of my head as possible.
I always set a three-minute timer whenever I take a bio break. If things don't happen within three minutes, they won't happen in fifteen either. This saves me a good 20-30 minutes every day.
Whenever I have an idea, I write it down in Asana. I learned this trick while reading about the GTD method, and it works pretty well for me. Once the idea is stored somewhere, it no longer occupies my attention.
At the end of the day, I make notes of what I am/was doing, why I was doing it, and what I should do next. It's surprisingly effective, and it shortens the time I need to spend the next day resuming work.
I don't use fancy productivity apps. While working with procrastinators on WorkMode, we learned that fancy, complex apps rarely work. If Pomodoro doesn't work for someone, it just won't work, no matter the app they use. If a to-do list doesn't make someone more productive, Monday won't change that. The same goes for calendars, note-taking apps, and all other "productivity" apps.