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Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#51

Post by serverlessmom »

godDLL wrote: post #38
Tim25659 wrote: post #21

When I am stressed out monkey mind will get stronger and stronger I will be out of control..

I put my monkey in a cage. I went around and logged the things I happen to be doing in a spreadsheet for three weeks. Assuming those are mostly the things I'll be doing going forward I've categorized them into action-cards. Those have groupings by space (home, out, job) and time (night, noon, morning). One card is titled BURN. If you play that card you can do whatever for 25 minutes, but you can't play two in a row.…

This is a really interesting technique! I'm happy this is working so well for you. Would make an interesting app though I suppose that would put you back on your phone.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#52

Post by tandr »

all2 wrote: post #34
danhab99 wrote: post #33

All I ever hear about this Zig is how much harder everything is. What's the point of Zig? What does it do better?

Uhhh, wrong thread? I think you might be meaning to be over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29965239

a bit meta: it is actually kind of funny how their questions are actually quite fitting into the discussions going here...

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#53

Post by paulryanrogers »

brimble wrote: post #47
zackmorris wrote: post #40

I had an unusual experience this weekend while I was sick. After laying around for 2 days with brain fog, I woke up early Sunday morning and watched TV, checked social media, etc, but was sick of consuming information and had the strangest feeling that I wanted to work on something productive but my body aches wouldn't let me concentrate. I also felt like.. playing video games? I haven't had the urge to play video ga…

On rare occasions, I'm left with both wife and kids out of the house for a few days. Just about every time I lose the first (non-work) day entirely to video games. Then the next day I'm just... done with games for a good long while, and start doing productive things because I want to . It's like I have a fucking-around-uselessly tank that's never full (near-empty, in fact) usually, so most of my free time goes to wor…

Try fixing up a project house. It's amazing how quickly once beautiful properties can get run down without maintenance. And the hundreds of hours you can lose trying to undo the damage.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#55

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

I enjoyed the article, but I disagree. Back in the day, the Getting Things Done book said to organise tasks by energy level. That does make things easier; however, easy to procrastinate by saying I'll do it later when I have energy.

I have taken to the more disciplined, priortized approach pushed by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger/Jocko Willink/David Goggins... the items that are a priorty or important get done first. Hammer through the first 2-4 hours, then you can have flexibility in the rest of the day. Even if you're not feeling it, go through the motions, make it a habit to make it easier.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#56

Post by brimble »

godDLL wrote: post #38
Tim25659 wrote: post #21

When I am stressed out monkey mind will get stronger and stronger I will be out of control..

I put my monkey in a cage. I went around and logged the things I happen to be doing in a spreadsheet for three weeks. Assuming those are mostly the things I'll be doing going forward I've categorized them into action-cards. Those have groupings by space (home, out, job) and time (night, noon, morning). One card is titled BURN. If you play that card you can do whatever for 25 minutes, but you can't play two in a row.…

At first I was like "but with those rules you could play BURN every other card, and that's not good" then I realized that if I'd only wasted half of an average waking day for the last couple decades, I'd probably be god-emperor of humanity.

This does seem quite a bit like the Pomodoro method. Was that an inspiration? Did you try it and it didn't work? If so, why do you think that is?

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#57

Post by serverlessmom »

teekert wrote: post #10

Hmm, finally some tricks that I could actually see myself use! Especially the healthy intellectual “snacks”. I mean I can get stuck on HN for a long time, but to be honest I could also do a course that just requires me to listen and eat a (physical) snack or something. I'm still hoping that a some point this leads to a control over the states, but maybe I should give up that dream :) "I also made so many mistakes tha…

A helpful link for "intellectual snacks" might be this one: https://retrohacker.github.io/wikiscroll/ . It was posted in another thread here on Hacker News and I've been enjoying the more general information because it helps keep me from becoming hyper focused on one subject and scrolling away the hours of the day.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#58

Post by dasil003 »

DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #55

I enjoyed the article, but I disagree. Back in the day, the Getting Things Done book said to organise tasks by energy level. That does make things easier; however, easy to procrastinate by saying I'll do it later when I have energy. I have taken to the more disciplined, priortized approach pushed by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger/Jocko Willink/David Goggins... the items that are a priorty or important get done fi…

I tend to think all of this is extremely personal and the system is mostly window-dressing. If you are able to focus on work which is engaging and useful (by whatever measure you choose) regularly, over time you will get good results.

Different kinds of systems like habit-building, reminders or GTD can help; as can cutting yourself some slack and making room for inspiration to find you without obsessing over productivity. But ultimately you either do things you are proud of or not, and any system or reflection you put on top of amounts to rationalization. If that helps then more power to you, but don't lose sight of the actual work.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#59

Post by mlac »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #53
brimble wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On rare occasions, I'm left with both wife and kids out of the house for a few days. Just about every time I lose the first (non-work) day entirely to video games. Then the next day I'm just... done with games for a good long while, and start doing productive things because I want to . It's like I have a fucking-around-uselessly tank that's never full (near-empty, in fact) usually, so most of my free time goes to wor…

Try fixing up a project house. It's amazing how quickly once beautiful properties can get run down without maintenance. And the hundreds of hours you can lose trying to undo the damage.

And the hundreds of hours of YouTube videos learning about tools and techniques to fix the house.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#60

Post by raman162 »

I think the most important advice in this article is "Be aware of your current mental state". This goes a long way with not just being productive but being aware of how to address any emotional state. The easiest way I've been able to do this is just to journal every-time I find myself going distracted.
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