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Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

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Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#21
Given a set of tasks T, that have to be done, and the tasks are interdependent.

Sort T by difficulty to complete. Complete one task after the other starting with the hardest.

This approach goes against the often spread advice that you should start with the easiest tasks, which are probably fast to complete, in order to get quickly a feeling of accomplishment which keeps you motivated. I think this approach is wrong and here is why:

IMO our brains always weigh risk multiplied with investment against reward, and as long as the reward outweighs (risk * investment), we are motivated: Risk meaning here, that you invest time and effort but eventually you miss the deadline and are not paid the full reward. The more time we let pass, without completing anything, then the risk of not getting the rewards becomes bigger and eventually it is not worth our effort anymore, and our brain finds more rewarding things to do (procrastinates). So why should we start with the hard tasks first?

Because, given that we start with the easy ones first, we reduce the available time to complete the hard tasks, and by the time that we start with the hard ones, the risk of failing becomes too big in order to be still motivated. In contrary, when we start with the hard ones, of course it takes longer to finish them, and the time left for the easy ones is less, but our brain can easily estimate the risk of easy tasks, and it will find that it's quite possible to get the final rewards, because we already finished the hard ones.

The realisation changed my life. I completed my CS master studies within 15 months.

Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#22
"Opportunity looks a lot like hard work"

Whilst I don't love this quote, it represents a problem that I see often: people are asking for tools and techniques to achieve better productivity when often, it's about discipline. I wrote more about how discipline and why it's important here[0], with a particular story about how my father's time in the British Army taught me a few things.

However, there are certainly a few strategies that we can all use to combat our irrational behaviour and get things done rather that procrastinate (on hacker news all day!):

Make Time

Stop saying you don't have time. It's up to you to make time. If it's important enough, you can do it. Read more at 'Make Time for Your Side Project' [2].

Timeboxing

This is a simple technique (similar to using a pomodoro timer) that defines a start point and a fixed time for completing a task. Often starting is the key to finishing.

Mise-en-Place

Prepare for success by getting the environment right and ready. Make it easy for you to jump in to a piece of work without any 'set up' time. Give yourself the chance to succeed by removing any potential distractions.

Celebrate Small Victories

Allow yourself a pat on the back. Completing small tasks can give you enough of an adrenaline rush to start the next task. Then you're on a roll!

Stop Aiming Too High

This is something I suffer from all the time. I see so much great work out there that I'm constantly embarrassed to launch. This 'fear of the launch'[3] can be dealt with. It's about overcoming your anxieties to produce something 'epic' by purposefully launching something below your comfort threshold. True success is often journey paved with small, iterative launches.

For more, you might want to read the previous discussion on Good and Bad Procrastination (2005)[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864959

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7864525

[2] http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/make-time-side-project/

[3] http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/fear-of-the-launch/

Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#23
post #17

Here's what works for achieving extreme levels of hyper-creativity and hyper-productivity for me. Will it work for you? Yes. Will you do it? No, you will find endless excuses to call the below "impossible". Still, for anyone who dares, here it is: 1. Get as much sleep as you can. Consistently. Yes, it's counter-intuitive. Yes, you'll have fewer waking hours. But those few hours will be many times more productive and…

This sounds very attractive. Can you share the context - what kind of work do you do, how do you get paid?

Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#24
post #17

Here's what works for achieving extreme levels of hyper-creativity and hyper-productivity for me. Will it work for you? Yes. Will you do it? No, you will find endless excuses to call the below "impossible". Still, for anyone who dares, here it is: 1. Get as much sleep as you can. Consistently. Yes, it's counter-intuitive. Yes, you'll have fewer waking hours. But those few hours will be many times more productive and…

Did you get that list from some TED, Accelerator Speech or a book? Because it ain't realistic for 90% of the 'population'... which means it's unrealistic and pretty much useless.

Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#27
post #6
post #5

Avoid multitasking as hell. Very few people can really afford it without going mad in the long run. At first it's very demotivating because you feel like stalling but then you'll naturally learn what (and how) you can micro-improve in your daily life to make the whole pipeline of TODOs more productive. I might not look very productive in the eyes of multitaskers, but at least I'm happy and totally not burned out.

I'd say its best to try and find out what level of multitasking you can handle without becoming too stressed and/or unproductive - it does vary a lot from person to person. Once you understand your own capacity for multitasking then fight to stay in that zone (and before anyone calls something like that a "comfort zone" its more like an "efficiency zone").

Well if we are talking about true multitasking (working on more than one thing at the same time) then humans can't do that - we only have one CPU with one core, our brain. Some people can do scheduling and time-sharing well, that is they work on one thing for some time, then on second one for some time, then on third one, then they return to the first one etc. but that's not multitasking really.

Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#28
My biggest productivity boost as a developer has been switching to a Vim, tmux and more recently Docker based development environment. Whereas it used to take me quite a while to get my environment started and get in the flow, it now takes just a few seconds with a simple "tmuxinator start projectname". It's especially helpful when you often switch between projects that have different languages and stacks.

Re: Ask HN: Share your best personal productivity tips and tricks

#30
post #24
post #17

Here's what works for achieving extreme levels of hyper-creativity and hyper-productivity for me. Will it work for you? Yes. Will you do it? No, you will find endless excuses to call the below "impossible". Still, for anyone who dares, here it is: 1. Get as much sleep as you can. Consistently. Yes, it's counter-intuitive. Yes, you'll have fewer waking hours. But those few hours will be many times more productive and…

Did you get that list from some TED, Accelerator Speech or a book? Because it ain't realistic for 90% of the 'population'... which means it's unrealistic and pretty much useless.

Wait what? Which steps are impossible for 90% of the population?
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