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Ask HN: Have you developed any habits to be more productive?

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Ask HN: Have you developed any habits to be more productive?

#1

Post by sujayk_33 »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Have you developed any habits to be more productive?

#4

Post by purple-leafy »

Yes, but I don’t do these just for productivity

- 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

Re: Ask HN: Have you developed any habits to be more productive?

#9

Post by bruce511 »

"Productivity" can be a frustrating term. Because there are things we have to do and things we want to do.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Have you developed any habits to be more productive?

#10

Post by nicbou »

Mine was to aggressively reduce overhead and reduce distractions.

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.

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