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Comment by throwawayqdhd | Hacker News Reader

I track my productivity very assiduously. For some tasks, such as writing, it is next to impossible to be productive for more than 5-6 hours/day. Your brain gives up after a while.

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The problem here is assuming only hours in deep mode are “productive hours.”

If you’re an engineer not all of your productive hours are writing code.

That's why i also charge clients for my "thinking" hours.

Right before that happens, eat a good meal then meditate or take a nap.

You'd be surprised how much more you can squeeze out your day.

Except my days are not oranges where I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of juice out of them, leaving nothing but pulp, peel and seeds before I throw them in the green bin.

Life is most certainly a marathon where pace of play is far more important than local maxima.

...or you can just do more everyday and live a better life.

As a founder you would probably spend more time on calls and other administrative tasks that don’t require much brain energy. That’s how you end up doing long hours.

However constantly switching contexts between different tasks is also very taxing...

The idea is two spend first half of the day braining and second half doing busy work. Also championed by pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I've taken to waking up at 6 to get a couple of hours of solid "brain work" before I start the day

I think this is an important comment. I used to be a late night worker but family and other commitments has made that impossible. I wake at 5AM to get a few solid hours of brain work in before the family stirs. This has been the best approach to retaining the 'late night work hours' and balancing family.

Second this. Morning is the best for clear thinking. Late night work is less productive.

It depends. I am a night owl and if I wake up too soon I am really useless for almost the whole day. Instead waking up later than usual (like 11-12am) makes me hyper-productive until late night.

I guess each person has a different time of best performance, the problem is when you get a job in a office without flexible hours.

I find my creativity peaks after 1 A.M.if I’ve been able to get into a state of flow. I’m certainly not at my most productive, but for work which isn’t time critical it’s a useful tool.

Edit: grammar

I tried to delude myself for years, telling myself that I'm not a "morning person". It was just an excuse to stay up late and watch garbage on the TV or scroll endlessly through Reddit.

Since I've forced myself to go to sleep no later than 11, I've realized that hey, I actually am a morning person.

It really depends on the individual. My kids wake up between 5 and 6 and some weekends I might just tap away on my laptop while I sit in the front room with them with cartoons on (they're still too young to get up unsupervised).

However despite a few years of this routine I still find myself more productive at night than I am in the morning (or even during the day, unfortunately).

How do you track it?

A combination of Toggl, Spreadsheets, and good old paper and pen. I keep a calendar that I mark every day as either green or red depending on whether I've met my threshold for a productive day (>6 hours of actual productive time - tracked using Toggl)

Great! I'd love to hear your thoughts on https://crushentropy.com/ (something I made for myself for this purpose)

If you'd like to chat more, please email me. My email is in my profile.

Man I love this. Very neat! Kind of like markdown for calendaring.

If you wrap this up in a more 'fashionable' ux, you'd have a big hit

I'd love to just upload a text file with my entire plans for the week.

Thanks! :-) Please email me if you can. I'd love to discuss more.

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