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How I got to 200 productive hours a month

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Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#111

Post by ivm »

Asdfbla wrote: post #98
empath75 wrote: post #73

>Such news don't actually inform us but spread sensationalism, negative emotions, and outright lies to capture attention. What do you gain from following the latest political crisis or some scandal? You can't do anything meaningful about these events. They only depress you and occupy space in your mind. It's better to direct your focus toward things that we can actually impact and improve. This is a depressing point…

That statement doesn't preclude some political activity if you consider it to be something that you can actually "impact and improve", in the author's words. Of course I can only speculate about the author's original intent, but I think I agree insofar that most daily news out there is irrelevant for most individuals. Even if you have a political cause you are interested in, you have limited time and energy, so it mi…

Yes, I still read the local news once a week and the biggest events pass my filters anyway.

Intentionally following the popular news also steals your attention from the small tragedies that are never picked up by the big media.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#113

Post by Lord_Zero »

mistersquid wrote: post #91
syllogism wrote: post #53

When I read the article I was thinking there was actually something quite simple missing from it. I found that just measuring the number of productive hours per day was enough to be very helpful in breaking some bad habits, because it made me mindful of how I was spending my time. I was going to suggest the Qbserve tracker for this --- then I saw that that's actually your app! I guess you didn't want to plug it more,…

I've been using Timing, an amazing software with a very small memory and resource footprint. [0] If it matters, Timing's UX is very macOS-y both in my experience and in the opinion of Mac aficionado John Gruber. [1] I have no relation to product except that I'm a satisfied customer. [0] https://timingapp.com [1] (disclosure: advert) https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/07/02/timing

Anything like this good for Windows?

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#114

Post by TeMPOraL »

hacker_9 wrote: post #49
gazarullz wrote: post #48

For those people that manage to get up pretty early, 4-5 in the morning, how do they cope with the weekend and what kind of weekend schedule do they have ? What time do they usually go to sleep and what is their noon daily pattern (weekday and weekends). Most importantly how do they spend their time after 7pm during workdays and weekends ?

"early to rise, early to bed, socially dead"

Social life is overrated anyway.

I used to be "late to rise, late to bed, fuck parties, let me live in peace when everyone else sleeps and doesn't distract me with nonsense", but recently my SO beat some sense into me, and I'm slowly joining the "early to rise" crowd now.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#115

Post by rdudekul »

"Some people report success with Pomodoro, but I find it too short to make a deep dive into work."

Pomodoro technique has been working for me very well. I started with 25 minute Pomodoros, gradually increased the duration to now 50 minutes per Pomodoro. I am able to do deep work (per my needs) consistently for about 4 Pomodoros per day.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#116

Post by octalmage »

nurettin wrote: post #62
mbrock wrote: post #26

TL;DR: Basically getting up early and doing 4 hours of deep work has changed my life from really stressful and bad to really productive and nice. One thing really fundamentally helped me, as someone who works from home on a large project in an asynchronous 100% remote organization. I work on a fairly involved project that demands a lot of hard work. At the same time there are other things I want to get done: some adm…

I miss the times developers would optimize their lives without all the online rants and the sensitive encouraging, nodding and enabling of said behavior. That said, don't you have banks which automatically pay your bills (electricity/gas/water)? Which country are you from?

Everything should have automatic payments, and if they don't then they don't deserve to get paid. That said I use Prisim to take care of the rest that don't.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#117

Post by ivm »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #9
wingerlang wrote: post #3

EDIT: Not that sneaky, just me completely blanking on the sentence after the actual link! Original comment below. ---- Sneaky. I clicked around on the links he had on his tools and found one that looked interesting (Qbserve) and it turns out it's one of his products which I felt would have been nice to have as a note. The only indication of this is the bottom footer header which also says Qbserve.

Did the copy change? It says "our automatic time tracker" and it is also on the same domain. It's an excellent tool. I have only tried the free trial though. $40 feels a bit high. $25 or below would have been an instant buy. I think he will also get better conversions if the free trial is 30 days instead of 10

Thank you. We set this price because it's not a subscription and you don't need to pay for upgrades.

It's not a lucrative pricing model compared to $70-150/yr competitors and going lower in a niche market would be too uncomfortable.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#118

Post by ulkesh »

> Caution: The mentioned amount of hours is not advisable for people working on someone else's business for illusory stock options, with no payment for overtime. There's also no point in going beyond this number because working over 50 hours a week actually decreases productivity. Life should come first in the "work-life balance."

Great disclaimer in the article. The only problem is that many employers will be quite happy with people working 50+ hours per week. It's up to the employee to not let an employer take that much advantage of them (this includes having enough savings to be able to put in notice at the job at any point, assuming no contract or law would prevent it). The current landscape of the technology field, while lucrative for an employee, especially in the United States, is tremendously skewed toward the business where many employers see high turn-around as the rule, and no longer the exception, leading the employer to expect employees to work such high numbers of hours.

If a person likes working 200 hours per month, I wish them all the best and hope they are hourly-paid. Being salary-paid and having a family means I will continue to limit myself to 40 hours per week working for someone else. At a point where I work for myself, then, of course, that number may change.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#119

Post by ivm »

yigitdemirag wrote: post #44
eknkc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought it partly because I like the offline tracker idea, other stuff seems to have some cloud backend. Also wanted to support development, it was on the front page a couple months ago. Decent product, if you are looking for something like this.

I was using RescueTime for long time but then discover Timing[1] (which also works offline). Never tried Qbserve but I highly recommend Timing. [1] https://timingapp.com/?lang=en

Timing is also good but our initial goal was to make a RescueTime alternative, so Qbserve is similar to it in many ways.

Re: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

#120

Post by ivm »

beagleman wrote: post #83
boundlessdreamz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the copy change? It says "our automatic time tracker" and it is also on the same domain. It's an excellent tool. I have only tried the free trial though. $40 feels a bit high. $25 or below would have been an instant buy. I think he will also get better conversions if the free trial is 30 days instead of 10

I've been using Qbserve for maybe 6 months. It has saved me, I don't know, 4-6 hours a month ret-conning and tuning timesheets. It's also meant I've gotten paid for those trivial jobs that I always forget to enter into even the simplest manual tracker. The productivity boost (which I have absolutely noticed) is a nice bonus. I don't know what you charge for your time, but Qbserve paid for it for me several times over…

Thank you, I'm happy to hear that it works as intended!
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