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Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

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Re: Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

#41

Post by colomon »

JohnsonB wrote: post #22

>The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.” Wow, that sounds like an incredibly unjustified relationship, with only the superficial support of its counter-intuitive nature. In my experience, the opposite happens, the more you do in a day, the more you recognize and remember that you accomplished that day, and conseque…

For me there are definitely days when I do a lot and find myself wondering why I was unproductive at the end of the day. Generally it happens when I do things that aren't directly programming. I will find myself feeling blue at the end of the day because I haven't accomplished any useful programming. Then I stop and think, and realized I spent hours e-mailing customers and potential customers, and all afternoon working on my taxes. Not a bad day's work, but because I'm biased to think of programming as my real work, it feels like I haven't accomplished anything.

Of course, there are also days when it feels like I haven't accomplished anything because I haven't actually accomplished anything.

Re: Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

#42

Post by scotty79 »

DasIch wrote: post #15

You can be even more productive by not making any (Anti-)ToDo lists, thereby reducing management overhead and the time spent figuring out how to use, using and reviewing todo list techniques.

Lack of productivity is rarely due to lack of time. Almost always due to lack of motivation. If you can trade excess time for some motivation by playing with lists then why not?

Re: Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

#43

Post by npsimons »

pnathan wrote: post #18
minimax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried several times to get into org-mode and for whatever reason it just hasn't stuck. I'm going to give it another crack for daily logs.

Honestly, you don't need org mode to do this. You just need a way to have a hierarchical folding tree (an outline) that takes text for both the headers and contents. I implemented a half-baked similar system in C# years and years ago - that worked really nice. I just use org-mode because I'm an emacs user and hey, it works well for me.

The nice thing about org-mode is it's as involved as you would like it to be. Sure, the beginning is a bit steep, but if you're already using Emacs, it will be a breeze, and you can keep it light (as pnathan is doing). I've been slowly inching my way into using it over a long period of time; I have to admit, it's quite involved for me, but it never felt forced, it was always "cool, that works nice; but I wonder if I can X?" and with org-mode, you can almost always do X. Or not, if you don't want to. Unlike a lot of other "productivity tools" it's very flexible.
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