Tagged “productivity”

Hyperbole, but it is a pretty great editor.

"How can I reduce my time here?" is a good followup question after finding out where one spends time

...and you experience resistance against doing the work, it's worth identifying and articulating that resistance, and then integrating it into the work. once the resistance is inside the work, it doesn't need to act against the work

Solid first comment, too

On an emotional level, I think it's better to start from a place of (unconditional!) self-love, and go from there, rather than beating yourself up because you're not meeting some blogger's expectations of how you should act.

Convinced me to start using xfce timer, and it has already been useful!

Seeing more of these GitHub-as-a-blog.

HN thread

Mapping Fn is useful. Mostly saved it for this best ever outro:

I'm also secretly hoping to start crafting wood flutes and composing music so that I don't have a need for remembering any hotkeys anymore.

keeping notes simple, rather than getting caught up finding (or making..) a perfect and complicated and powerful notetaking system

Don't multitask, batch small tasks, etc.

.1% improvement per day is apparently 43% per year

avoid reading the short little articles and threads on improving things. Instead, do the thing.

Good thread, too.

don't need to hyper optimize every moment all of the time

asker is 23!

Do the work. That's all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you're ever going to get.

When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself.

good collection of tips on focus, time management, people management, communication, learning, maintenance, estimates, planning

If your hourly rate gets too high, how to justify doing anything that isn't billable?

Some good work/life balance suggestions and options in the comments

1. Keep the lights on, and make keeping them on cheaper. Everything your team already owns (that actually matters to customers) needs to approach 0 maintenance costs.

2. Cut the entire roadmap of new features down to one thing at a time

Writing to allow yourself to forget shit. Much of what is on this page.

This reply spoke to me. I did it a few years ago and it has helped a lot.

I've silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it's been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.

I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.

THe daily work capacity estimate for different tasks is a great idea. Should do that.

Advice gathered by someone smarter than me. My top three of their picks:

• minor barriers aren't minor
• remember what used to work, then do it again
• when choosing a life path, think about what contexts it puts you in

First two from Chris Sparks, third from Devon Zuegel

Perfectionism is more often about being afraid to be bad at things

cool idea. I'd like a fork of this with todos as well, so you can have daily dos and dont's.

there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run (due to the additional fatigue, loss of motivation, or increasingly urgent need to attend to non-work tasks that this can cause). Generally speaking, it is better to try to arrange a few hours of high-quality working time, when one is motivated, energetic, prepared, and free from distraction, than to try to cram into one’s schedule a large number of hours of low-quality working time when one or more of the above four factors are not present.

The 100+ starting point really put things into perspective for me..

So many good points. Tasks vs notes; not everything needs a checklist, some things are just notes. Thinking "I'll do that later" is a lot easier than "I will select a date/time in a calendar popup to schedule a reminder for this task". Todo apps are ineffective if having them is more work than the task you are trying to do!

A quote on HN about procrastination has also made be add Red Dwraf to booklist.

Excellent take. The imagined overly critical audience is a jerk.

Covers a lot! Approximate cost breakdowns, on people's desire for customisation, on transport costs of materials (you can't ship prefab concrete slabs across the country).

Includes a handy one-liner on why things aren't improving:

The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.

Suggests coming up with a range of estimates (best/worst case), include assumptions, refine later

Though I don't think I ever worked as hard as the commentor, this bit felt pretty relatable:

One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.

Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.

Stumbled across this after reading some posts on his excellent main site, which I've seen on HN a bunch of times.

I’m starting to grow tired of the term Project
Today online everything seems to be a project. It’s become an umbrella term for anything, from artworks to app development, from business endeavours to, well, writing fiction.

Some good tips on ensuring things other than work happen.

A lot of programmers get to that second 90%, get tired and bored and frustrated, and change jobs, or lose focus, or find excuses to procrastinate. There are a million ways not to finish a project, but there’s only one way to finish: Put your head down and grind it out until it’s done. Do that, and I promise you the programming world will be yours.

I love this, and have experienced it first hand too many times. But a single text file has worked well for me, and saved.

This made me feel better both for the suggestions, and because I had nowhere near as many. TLDR just delete most stuff as it doesn't actually matter

tldr: Do things.

Confidence comes from past performance
Recent past performance is more important than the stuff you did 5–10 years ago
You can’t ride the wave of old confidence for too long

This looks very useful. Full-text search and some other convenient integrations

Good strategy to minimize hindsight bias and try to improve quality of decisions. Interesting point from some interview: good decisions that have bad outcomes (due to chance) are better than bad decisions with good outcomes, as the latter reinforces bad decisions.

how to make better use of commute or dead time

Sometimes I think "I am a huge nerd". Then I read things like this and feel either normal or inadequate.