Productivity in 2017: analyzing 225 million hours of work time

Twice I have. Copy editing, quality control and pacing out a year's worth of new thoughts over a year become the challenge. The well runs dry after a bit, and once you get out of the habit, that becomes the new habit.

I haven't tried again since I made an effort to broaden my interests. I've been tempted but haven't acted on it yet.

The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr / Tony Schwartz is basically all about that:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68985.The_Power_of_Full_...

Deep Work by Cal Newport

I agree with the comment at the top of this thread. In my own experience I can say that this helped me more than anything to get on the right track https://www.thefoundationsofwellbeing.com/

I know, the website looks a little cheesy but everything they talk about in the videos is legit. Meditate. Eat food that is actually nutritious, exercise, learn to be grateful and resilient. If you don't find Rick Hanson's way of talking about those topics to be helpful, just google the overall ideas of self-care and well being. Pretty much everyone says the same sort of things Rick Hanson says, but different people put slightly different spins on particular parts of the message. Find the message that speaks to you about this: how to take care of yourself.

Not just "how to happy" or "how to be productive".

We do a lot of activities we think give us energy but either don't, don't anymore, or only do in some idealized situation that isn't really happening. Or maybe something else that happens along with an activity is what we really enjoy (I thought I enjoyed driving, when actually I just like listening to music uninterrupted).

In the case of games or a show they can stop being fun and be more like work pretty easily. They're like junk food. They fill you up for a little while but they're not fulfilling.

Don't do the hard problems in the evening when you are tired, you won't get much done. Take all the hard problems when you have the energy, and save the 'stupid' work for when you have low energy.

Just want to piggy back off this and throw this out as a PSA: if you find you're constantly feeling tired even after making changes like improving sleep hygiene, exercising, etc, try getting a sleep study done.

I ended up being diagnosed with sleep apnea and once I started using a CPAP device and got used to sleeping with the mask on (took about 1-2 months), it was the difference between me being completely awake and having the energy to work on challenging things immediately after waking up vs feeling like a zombie for the first 3-4 hours every day.

I've never really had problems with "motivation" or discipline so I can't really speak on that, but getting this diagnosed and resolved has completely changed my attitude and capability for taking on new problems and not feeling "burnt out" all the time.

Speaking from personal experience, exercising will definitely recharge you. I used to think procrastination was the only reason I couldn't get things done as quickly as I wanted to, until I realized that I had low energy levels (installing RescueTime didn't really help that much too). I started to going to the gym at lunchtime at work and there was a marked difference in my energy levels during the day. As a bonus, exercise also helps you sleep well and I can't stress enough how important that is.

Exercise and in particular, weightlifting. I've always run a few times a week, but things really changed for me when I started lifting. This won't be "recharging" necessarily at first (though it will be eventually), but it will definitely increase the capacity of your reserves before you need a recharge.

Cooking recharges me. I have to set some time (1-3h) aside for it to work, which is the hard part for me.

There is something deeply relaxing in kneading dough and waiting for it to rise.

Running or cycling or swimming does it for me, oddly enough.

If you're enough floors up: descending in an elevator then immediately ascending by the stairs works wonders for the sedentary body, and the mind. I also do this sometimes when hacking through lunch to trick my mind's context, then reverse the journey to start the afternoon.

I'm the same. Exercise just makes me more tired.

I can relate to that. When I exercise in the morning I cannot get anything done during the day.

On the other hand I find it relaxing to workout after work. My mind becomes more or less empty afterwards. When I then do things that require more complex thinking the effect wears off pretty quickly though.

My initial days of running had a dramatic positive effect on my productivity. However once my body got used to running I see no difference. I must admit I have stuck to the same pace and distance more or less. 5k in about 35 mins.

There are lots of different types of exercise. Cardio, weight lifting, stretching/yoga, tai chi/chi kung.. I wonder if different people respond differently to different types of exercise? Did you try them all?

Having a burn out

I had a theory that the Hedonic Treadmill could be worked in reverse. We become acclimated to our status quo and any stress we feel is real at a biochemical level, even though we lack perspective on people who “really suffer”.

So I found the gentlest exercise program (if your joints are good, try yoga. If not try Tai chi. If not try qigong). It’s still a lot of work and sometimes you want to quit.

After six months I got into a volunteer group that involved manual labor outdoors. I got a little nature and to hang out with generous people.

Now I’ve added a hobby where I make things.

All of these have adversity in them. My thesis is that being able to deal with one type of adversity gives you callouses against the rest be they mental or physical. So far it seems to be true.

I also did very simple things like make myself take a real lunch. Even read. And when I sat down to do pass times like play a video game or watch a movie, my internal narrative was “I’m doing this to decompress or recharge”. Which also meant it was easier to time box and I would pick something I knew I would enjoy instead of feeling obligated to choose one over another.

It was a conscious act to stuff that example into the middle of that list. In part because while true, nobody who is suffering right now has the capacity to do it.

It’s less “don’t stress about it” and more “one day it might not stress you out”. If you do figure out how to shift something from column A to column B, try to hold onto the memory of the process. If you can pull it off more than a couple times then I think you’re in for a much more pleasant life.

This is not necessarily true. I think purpose can give us energy, but it isn't fair to attribute lack of energy to a lack of purpose.

I myself have a lot of purpose in life, but absolutely need some downtime due to being tired. I can do about 35h - 45h of productive time a week, and that's it. Not due to lack of purpose, but due to mental health.

I think both are true to a degree. Introverts are often introverts because people or intense sensory situations wear them out. Over the last dozen years or so several people in my social circle found out they were introverts pretending to be extroverts. High social intelligence but no stamina for big gatherings.

I found a volunteer group that had a lot of ambition in an area I feel strongly about but hanging out with them too often wore me out. Amped up people amp me up. After some of their goals became reality the energy level dropped and the contact high wasn’t enough. So I show up at events and about a third of the meetings because the purpose is still there but it’s not enough.

Not necessarily. People have different skill sets and delegating something to someone who can do it better than you and with less effort is a win for both sides.

Don’t count out depression, especially in this group. Nobody will talk about it, which makes it more insidious.

There is nothing at all that I recall in the time management literature about being a friend to yourself. Finding ways to find the energy (and thus the time) for your priorities means stepping back and taking care of yourself first. When I started this I dreamed of getting three times as much stuff done as I do now. Someday I hope to do maybe twice as much, but I’m pretty happy with the idea of getting a little bit more done than now instead of many times as much. I’m giving myself permission to try to do things right instead of trying to do everything. I’m also, as you say, accepting that some things I think I should do simply bore me.

There’s a little bit about knowing your limitations and doing what you can, which is a start, but it’s grabbing the stick by the wrong end IME.

I use Qbserve, can vouch for it being a very nice tracking system. Can't vouch about its privacy guarantees, but only because I haven't double-checked them. (I use Qbserve only on my work computer on which I don't plan on doing anything I wouldn't my employer to know). It does have some kind of database in which URLs/programs have a crowdsourced taxonomy. For example, I think news.ycombinator.com is by default flagged as "Distracting" activity. For sites/programs that haven't been classified as "Productive" or "Distracting", things are put into a "Neutral/Uncategorized" bucket. And you can go into the details panel and manually classify the content for yourself.

When doing the classification, there is a checkbox for "Send to developers to improve Qbserve": https://imgur.com/a/Rei0e

I have no reason to assume that that checkbox is obeyed, or that info isn't leaked in other ways -- but just saying I haven't tried to verify it FWIW.

There was a front-page Show HN from Qbserve 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778077

Yes and no – I doubt that we will have enough resources to build a real sync because it's really hard to implement but only a small number of people will use it. It could be possible by making a "team edition" and recovering costs by selling the app to companies but I really don't like the idea of managers spying on their teams by using Qbserve.

But I was contemplating an idea of merging scheduled exports from multiple Macs with a simple web app.

Oh, the reseller's (FastSpring) server is down. But it's $40 one-time fee.

It's a weird constant feeling that no matter what I do on my computer or my phone that someone else knows what it is, is watching, recording, analyzing my activity. No stopping it now, but it takes away from the magic.

I used to have a paid subscription with some IPTV service which is kinda popular in this region of the world. Of course I knew that with internet-based video streams, they could track what and when I watch, but I naively assumed they wouldn't really do much like that... I'm a paying customer already after all...?

At some point, I think it was after the last big football event, they sent a marketing email. In it they listed which games I had watched, with minute-accurate viewing time information. They probably thought it'd be a neat surprise which customers would enjoy reading. I was repelled to see they keep this information in such detail. The marketing e-mail had quite the opposite effect on me.

A while after this, I cancelled my subscription with them. I was happy with their service otherwise - but I paid them to watch things, not to be watched myself.

This is why I don't use 99% of online products. The thought of a chunk of my life becoming someone else's data just makes me feel icky. Last time I tried to go back to stock Android I lasted about a month before the convenience of Google Play Services and everything relying on it was outweighed by the creepy feeling that my phone was watching me.

This looks great, thanks!

Thanks a lot for this

The least productive people I knew simply did not worked much. They did spend time in work, sometimes a lot of time, but ultimately most of that time was slacking around and then pretending that 10 minutes task actually was difficult and took whole day.

So like, avoid not working on the job.

A good report would be what websites/apps are common among the least productive and what websites/apps are common among the most productive.

BTW, I love RescueTime! It has helped me wean myself off of my news addiction, especially during business hours. I wish the trending view would show longer time spans though! Can't they build cubes for different time spans to make the reports go fast over longer timescales?

How could you differentiate between people who use their computers least as being the most productive (they get everything done in the shortest time and then do something else), or the least productive (they do the least work)? Or the people who use their computers most as the most productive (they get the most done), or least productive (they spend more time on work activities but still fail to complete things).

Only measuring how much time you spend on something isn't enough to measure your productivity.

You already knew this though?

Presumably people at work don't view NSFW sites, because that would not be safe.

Not sure how much it correlates with IT. I'm sure it does on higher levels. But on lower/mid levels, lot of meetings are just regular work stuff. Inter/intra team communication, talks with clients, etc.

You're right. Maybe Wednesday-only work weeks is the optimal solution.

Any other useful correlations? Also a note on the page linked: it's not clear to me whether I need another app collecting the data or if I will need to directly enter it in your app.

What do you do during your break?