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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Trying to do what I really like, sleeping more, exercise. Procrastination is often a symptom not a disease: you are doing something you don't care enough, you are tired, or don't exercise enough. Also a fix can be stay away a few days form the PC having fun with friends or girlfriend and so forth.

Also remember, to be productive 8x5 in our industry is a myth: not possible at all. If you are able to code even 30% of the time in a focused way it's already great.

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Great advice. One of the secrets is to do something you believe in, which is why having a startup is so good. The other is to have a close deadline, that work's for me anyway.

A peppering of exercise and plenty of sleep also help. I don't believe in all this 'sleep hack' stuff - just get 6 to 8 hours on a regular basis, but that's a whole separate discussion.

Don't convince yourself it's not possible. I've done it and it was the norm at my last startup. For me, I can't do more than 60-70 hours a week, but certainly 30% is a low level of productivity.

I think it depends on how you define productivity. I have had jobs where people (even the programmers) felt that if you weren't typing code you weren't working. In my latest job I luckily don't have managers harassing me at all and find I spend a lot of time just thinking about how the system we are building should work and not much time coding, but I push solutions out just as fast, with less fixing down the road.

If a groups definition of working is just writing code it seems likely they will hit a wall where they are no longer improving. They might know their languages APIs better but they lose out on much of the larger communities gained knowledge.

Exactly, most of the time should be spent thinking about how to make the system simpler, writing less code.

I'd define it as milestones per day. It's important to set small bite sized goals imho. Any programmer who has a boss thinking that !writing code -> !working needs to find a different job asap.

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