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

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

#31

Post by mklepaczewski »

I have developed a habit of checking my calendar while brushing my teeth in the morning. This ensures that I keep track of events for the day and the week. I have ADD and constantly forget about birthdays, meetings, and plans.

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.

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

#32

Post by muzani »

antwerp1 wrote: post #28
muzani wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found budgeting really unproductive and ended up costing more money ("I need to use up my gaming budget! I need a big enough monthly budget to cover the next sale!"). 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…

Can you elaborate on the second point? Sounds like an interesting dynamic but I don’t understand..

Oh, I assumed most people were familiar with systems theory. It's one of the more useful math stuff to pick up. I strongly recommend reading Thinking in Systems if you haven't.

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.

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

#33

Post by mklepaczewski »

pestatije wrote: post #15
sujayk_33 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Than the time you were not

you can spend one minute less flirting with the receptionist, or go take a coffee when theres no risk of being caught in chit chat or gossipping, or just dont wash your hands after going to the bathroom, youll spare 30s of your valuable productivity...you productivity maniacs have to realize theres a give and take, theres only so much you can optimize, if you go over a certain point other thing start to break down...…

This is rather unhelpful comment. People struggle with productivity, some suffer from chronic procrastination. There is nothing wrong with trying to improve one's productivity.

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

#35

Post by gaws »

austin-cheney wrote: post #21

AS a former software developer here is what worked for me: * 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. *…

> Measure things. You really have no idea how slow you are unless you have data to compare against.

Can you share some examples?

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

#36

Post by austin-cheney »

gaws wrote: post #35
austin-cheney wrote: post #21

AS a former software developer here is what worked for me: * 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. *…

> Measure things. You really have no idea how slow you are unless you have data to compare against. Can you share some examples?

Test automation helps with this. When I wrote a test automation application I had each step output the time difference since the application started and I could look at the difference between steps to see something was taking too long. Now, keep in mind your test automation application cannot limited in performance to the thing it is testing. Nonetheless I was still able to get to about 300 tests in 8 seconds.

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...

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

#37

Post by purple-leafy »

muzani wrote: post #25
purple-leafy wrote: post #4

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

I found budgeting really unproductive and ended up costing more money ("I need to use up my gaming budget! I need a big enough monthly budget to cover the next sale!"). 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…

It works well for me. We’re very frugal, so we know how much we usually spend and set a fixed limit per expense +- a small amount. That’s it. We review every time an expense or income changes, so usually monthly.

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

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

#38

Post by sujayk_33 »

nicbou wrote: post #10

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 u…

Great post and it hits the spot.
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