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What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

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Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#31

Post by lhorie »

eigenschwarz wrote: post #12

IME the single greatest yes simplest productivity tip that can be applied in almost any situation or context: "If it's not a definite yes, then it's a no." Everything else I've found is noise.

I noticed myself doing this more and more, but not in the context of personal productivity, but rather in the context of "how can I help you help yourself". The gist is usually "can we solve this in some way that doesn't involve me coding a full blown technical solution". A lot of times, a workable solution is as simple as "just write 2 paragraphs about it in the docs" (and then mindlessly copying+pasting the link to it in chat until people get the message to just go RTFM). Or spending an hour doing a brain dump of the problem/solution space and letting them go off and do the work themselves.

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#32

Post by qnsi »

legrande wrote: post #22

That's the thing about productivity - it's a very meta word since the human brain works non-stop since birth (some even say that before being born, the brain is still working). Dossing about, loafing, or idling are not the work of the devil, they are necessary to getting things done since we need to pause and reflect, and conjure up ideas typically in silence. My favorite phrase regarding this matter is as follows: "…

obviously when people speak about productivity they dont mean wasting time. And I agree with the need for rest, but again some people struggle with the balance in the opposite direction

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#33

Post by zeku »

bamboozled wrote: post #16
cseleborg wrote: post #14

I'm at a stage in my life where I have a true love/hate relationship with productivity. I have a business, a job, two young children and there's this thing going on in the world that makes everything kind of strange and our of our control. Every time I read an article like this one, and this one isn't particularly good, if I may add, I feel like saying, yes, right, you go ahead and try that calendar blocking thing wi…

That, and being kind to myself when I have unproductive days, which is almost every day. I suffer from Insomnia, I have for many years, I'm up at 1am after a day which I let me discipline slide. I didn't feel as productive as I should've been today, So you know what I did? I worked till 8:30pm. I punished myself. I broke my new golden rule of getting off the computer by 6pm, which was working so well for me. Then wha…

100%. If you look at productivity weekly instead of daily it always pays to have deload time daily, eat correctly, sleep 8 hrs, and get a workout in on a regular basis!

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#35

Post by wenc »

mojuba wrote: post #4

I feel like individual productivity is a pretty much solved problem and comes down to picking your tools. Whether it's one out of a million 3rd party Todo/Note taking apps, or just whatever is available in your OS, is a matter of taste. If you want to be productive you will find your way and most importantly, just don't get too obsessed about not being at maximum productivity. Group productivity and collaboration, ho…

I think there isn't a one-size-fits all because group dynamics differ across groups. A group collaboration strategy has requires experimentation and evolution.

Trello boards (Kanban boards in general) work great for certain types of people like designers, but they've never worked great for engineers I've worked with.

Jira is often just way too complicated.

Slack is great for asynchronous team meetings but if you're not checking in reguarly, you might find yourself scrolling way up to figure out what people are discussing.

A Github pull request + code review workflow is great for collaborating in code, but for documentation writing, some writers don't get it (and struggle with version control -- to them, track changes makes more sense). Google Docs makes more sense.

Almost all group collaboration solutions are at best local minima for the group you have right now and for the types of stuff you need to accomplish. Add or remove people from the group, and the dynamic changes.

That said, I have found my own local minima in Google Docs, and Markdown design docs + Mermaid diagrams in Azure Devops wikis (Github wikis are similar). But I also live in a word-centric culture. These things might not work so well in visual cultures.

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#36

Post by doubled112 »

resonious wrote: post #7
roland35 wrote: post #2

I keep finding that the more complicated the setup I use for productivity, the less I go back to it whenever there is a hiccup. Simple methods survive long term. Currently my wife and I use a shared google doc, and while it is far from perfect, it ends up working well for us since it works on our phones and computers, is easy to bookmark, and the interface never changes.

I feel the same way about my dev environment. I'm a Linux user with a propensity for customization, but my preferred bashrcs and vimrcs have converged on something small enough to write up from memory. It's a lot of fun to have a hugely customized ultra-productive setup, but as soon as you find yourself on somebody else's system, a server, a container, or whatever, it's not so fun anymore. The less setup you need in…

I think I've fallen into this trap before, and ended up with a small set of features that degrade well if I don't have them.

Something like fish shell will never work for me. Not every machine is mine. So I tried Zsh. It turns out that better tab completion, syntax highlighting and suggestions does speed me up, but I don't feel lost when the machine has a default bash install.

The hours I've spent customizing just to decide it's too much and undoing half of it is baffling. At least I had fun doing it, or that's what I tell myself.

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#37

Post by chuckcode »

cseleborg wrote: post #14

I'm at a stage in my life where I have a true love/hate relationship with productivity. I have a business, a job, two young children and there's this thing going on in the world that makes everything kind of strange and our of our control. Every time I read an article like this one, and this one isn't particularly good, if I may add, I feel like saying, yes, right, you go ahead and try that calendar blocking thing wi…

+1 to the reality that most productivity tips come off as hopelessly naive to the reality of life with kids, sick parents/spouses, customer demands, etc.

Few things that have helped me:

- Have something like google calendar that reminds you so don't forget something important. Avoid turning small tasks into huge ones by missing a critical deadline

- Change the game when it is stacked against you. Most productivity advice is written about what can you do alone in the current situation (game) to improve, when changing situations could make things much better. I see too many people get stuck in bad relationship, bad job, etc. trying to make it work. Find places where the tide is rising and raising all the boats rather than working against you.

- Be kind and realistic to yourself. Look around, life is challenging and nobody wins everthing. Coach yourself the same way you would coach your kids with kindness and empathy and setting them up for success rather than something impossible.

(edit formatting)

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#38

Post by mattmanser »

cseleborg wrote: post #14

I'm at a stage in my life where I have a true love/hate relationship with productivity. I have a business, a job, two young children and there's this thing going on in the world that makes everything kind of strange and our of our control. Every time I read an article like this one, and this one isn't particularly good, if I may add, I feel like saying, yes, right, you go ahead and try that calendar blocking thing wi…

What I always find funny about people with young children is that they seem to think their situation is somehow normal.

It's not, you'll do it for 8 odd years of your life and complain about how awful it is to everyone else. Constantly. Then tell us kids are the best thing that ever happened to you, no, really, honest.

And then it's done and a few years later you've got teenagers living with you who despise every fibre of your being.

The mystery is quite easily solved too. It used to take a village to raise a child, but we're now all doing it alone, isolated from our neighbours, and that's why you've got no time.

Hope that helps you to not bother reading any productivity articles until your kids are 8 or so.

TL;DR Stop reading them, they're not aimed at you.

Edit: Also, I'm only saying this to you, because I can't say it to my friends/sister :) Feels good to get that rant off my chest!

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#39

Post by Dudeman112 »

peakaboo wrote: post #29
cseleborg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. I think everyone here will recognize themselves, at least occasionally, in what you just wrote.

No. This is just basic life skills. Taking care of yourself is your highest priority. This means keeping your company life and your personal life completely airgapped, using a specific work phone and a specific work computer so nothing bleeds over. At 5 pm or earlier you stop working. Then you focus on relaxing as much as possible to recharge. If you have kids, it's harder but it's even more important you learn to re…

I agree.

I find it incredibly odd how people can be absolutely bad at basic life skills and act as if it were some universal thing about mankind.

If they got some condition in their body or in their mind that makes then a permanent wreck, alright that's a thing. Or sometimes life just happens and your mother is dead - alright, you can be a wreck for some time.

This shouldn't be the norm.

Re: What I Learned About Productivity by Writing About Productivity

#40

Post by dotcommand »

gnulinux wrote: post #19
dotcommand wrote: post #17

Writing about productivity seems like a nice racket. What's with the excessive productivity propaganda the past few years. Is that what humans are? What humans exist to be/do? Be products that produce as much as possible? So much time/resources/etc wasted to be more productivity. What's the end goal here?

The end goal is value. And value changes from community to community. I don't get this skepticism against productivity. It really doesn't have to be work stuff. After work I play piano, chess etc and any improvement done to these are "productive" too because I'm increasing my value to my community by making music, playing chess etc. It's infinitesimally tiny, but there is an objective difference between that and e.g.…

> The end goal is value. And value changes from community to community.

From one overstated and meaningless self-help word to another. Is that what a human exists to do? Provide "value" to the community?

> After work I play piano, chess etc and any improvement done to these are "productive" too because I'm increasing my value to my community by making music, playing chess etc.

How does that provide value to the "community"? Did you ask anyone if you playing the piano or chess provided value to them?

Funny, I play the piano, chess, etc for my own personal enjoyment. Didn't realize I had to play it for the community 's benefit. What else do I owe the community? So as I can better attune my productivity?

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