Ask HN: Which daily habit has affected your productivity the most?

- Sleeping at least 7 hours, 8 is better.

- Waking up earlier - I thought I am a night owl, but I realized that I am not. Morning is the best time frame to be creative and productive for me (and for many people actually).

- Always keeping my stuff ready. This means clean email folders, clean notes, clean desk etc.

- Watching the food what I eat (I am not on a diet, but I do not eat pizza and chinese food every day e.g), the drinks also (tea instead of coffee), and keeping attention to breaks while I am working

I also pay attention to avoid disctractions while I am coding. Every morning when I sit down in front of my monitors I read my RSS feed/twitter/personal mails first. This is good to start my brain at the morning and also keeps me away from checking these at the rest of the day. A psychologist told me once at a training that your mornings should start with something they call 'warm-up'. This is mine. Some people do not need it as they can warm up while they are travelling to their office or just after they get up and yoga for example.

Ah, and one mor thing for the sleep part. I - personally - don't like when I need to fall asleep during watching a film or a part of a TV-series. It is also not the best when I just turn off the computer and jump into the bed. I always go to bed with a book in my hand. This relaxes me and when I feel I can sleep right now, I just turn off the lights (or my ipad). A few minutes of meditation is also very helpful for a good sleep.

Hope I could help!

I'm having trouble falling asleep after going to bed (~2hrs), or waking up during the night or early next day.

Would you please detail more about the meditation part?

I started a new job, and moved from Perl to Python Django. The organization was fairly new and there were two of us in an office, so not much in the way of distractions.

My productivity went up an order of magnitude, and Django made programming more interesting / fun again. There was (and still is) a lot of work to do building and maintaining the database. I generally tried to focus on the 80% that takes 20% of the time.

A year later I get an extra boss (who knows nothing about databases). He likes meetings. He is pedantic, and focuses way to much on the 20% that takes 80% of the time.We now have 4 people in the office (previously 2). I am constantly asked to switch task, and fix Excels (I have been arguing for two years that we shouldn't be using Excel for data uploads as it is so error prone).

Anyway, I think my productivity is around a quarter of what it was two years ago, and my work is a lot less satisfying. And I am on HN right now.

So for me, productivity gains: Working in a quiet office. Getting to use language / framework of my choice. Learning new interesting stuff. Focusing on one task at a time, until it is finished.

Losses: Two managers pulling in opposite directions. One cowboy coder quick fix king. The other pedantic and focusing on spelling mistakes over new functionality. Busy office. Tedious repetitive work (fixing Excels that are used for data uploads) - really kills motivation. Too many meeting. I don't get many full or even half days uninterrupted programming.