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In 2007, I finished my bba, received an angel investment, and started a company. Three months later (and with my investor's enthusiastic support), I started a non-profit street magazine. About two years later, I ended up in hospital with stroke symptoms and blood pressure on the 'how are you alive?' end of the scale. Because of this, I beg anyone who wants to be as highly productive as I was to please take care of yo…
1. Work on something that you MUST get done. 2. Plan your day the night before. 3. Wake up early and start working immediately. 4. Other people's "obstacles" are your opportunities to invent. 5. One day at a time, regrouping each night. 6. VERY short to do list at any given time. 7. 2 computers, work in 1 room, internet in another. 8. NO distractions while working (email, phone, others). 9. Short intense sprints with…
I've noticed that when I fix my sleeping, I am less wasteful, less tired, less distracted and ultimately less anxious about my lack of productivity.
The truth really is that we will never finish our respective "baking". The freagin' cake will always need some final touch or a redo! It never ends.
Stopping for the day and believing that you deserve your rest for the next 8-9 hours is what I define as productivity.
Along the same lines, the best advice I ever received was from an old music teacher: do less, better.
Also: if you think "delegating" and "managing" are luxuries and somehow antithetical to creation, I'm guessing you haven't done much of either.
Obvious stuff: minimize distractions and interruptions. Allow the problem before to assemble itself and present itself to you. Then you become a scribe, working as fast as you can.
In this state, I can sometimes write pages of code that run the first time (although not a recommended best practice, lol).
As mentioned in another reply, this highly productive state is easiest to reach when you are working with familiar tools and aren't attempting anything too out of your comfort zone.
This flow state is hard to come down from, so you will need to make sure that you give yourself time to come back to earth. Don't do this too close to an RL deadline, like bedtime. Your family may not get much out of you for an hour or so.
* Create some sort of system for capturing and organizing your tasks (like GTD)
* Immediately do something if it takes less than 2 minutes to do
* Prioritize all your tasks. I prefer using the Eisenhower Matrix. Prioritizing also includes delegating and eliminating tasks.
* Start waking up earlier (like 5:30). It's quiet, there's few distractions, and it's empowering to get a ton done and then realize it's not even noon yet.
* Decide what your Most Important Task (MIT) is and do that first thing in the morning (important!)
* Make your tasks specific and actionable. Not "Study for exam," but "Review chapter 2 notes on X section." You can also break tasks down until it sounds stupid, but much easier to do.
* Batch similar or small tasks together and set a time to do them
* Schedule your day on a calendar. If it doesn't go on, it doesn't get done. You don't have to get super specific with tasks. Just block out chunks of time to do work. Also schedule your breaks and your not-working times (important!)
* I like listening to background sounds. Either classical music or using Coffitivity/Noisli. Also helps train my brain so that whenever I hear it, I know it's time to work.
I don't have good work-life balance but I work insanely productive. 70 hours a week on average. 23 years old.
Working 70 hours a week doesn't mean you are productive, just that you are working 70 hours per week. Being productive means getting things done. Maybe you are crushing it and doing 120 hours work of work in 70 hours. Or maybe you are doing 70 hours of work in 70 hours.
I don't have good work-life balance but I work insanely productive. 70 hours a week on average. 23 years old.
I kid.
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
I've recently switched from C# to Ruby. In C# I'd consider myself as close to an expert as an ordinary man can get. I never had to look anything up, but more importantly... it was rare that I was confused why something didn't work. In fact most of the time when I saw something not work I knew exactly what I forgot.
In ruby, where i'm less familiar. I'm surprised every now and then. It's not the "go to the internet and search" part that looses time. It's the "let's try this, and see if it works". I might spend an hour on writing 3 lines of code. In C#, I might forget the 3 lines, but I know roughly what they are... and if i had to look it up I can confirm if it's the right 3 lines in minutes.
Chances are you are already productive. So, an anecdote: I noticed that when I make lists of things to do, and I see progress on the items ticked off, I know I am productive. No anxiety after that. (I usually write down the number of hours taken to complete each task and sometimes flip through the list to reassure myself with indulgent self-adulation). Without the list, even though I am killing items, I still feel un…
Making a list helps you to focus only the things that really matter, and prevents you to quickly jump to reactive-mode.
Also if you archive those lists daily, you end up with a nice work log that you can quickly scan in the future, looking for past references.