Sometimes we need days where we aren’t “productive” to rest, recover, or process so that we can do our best on the days where we are able to be productive.
I’ll also say that for me having a good, supportive team makes a huge difference. If you have other people who can help you stay motivated and accountable who are also empathetic it’s a huge boon for staying focused and productive.
Going at 110% capacity is what helps you to improve. Rest is what lets you go at 110% capacity, rather than being tired and slogging on at 80% capacity. More often than not, we have inadequate rest.
(Advice I should follow far more often myself.)
- Doubled the length of time to somewhere between 45-80 minutes, loosely based on the perceived complexity of the task
- Didn't time my breaks. This sounds counter-intuitive but they never lasted more than 5-10 minutes for me anyway, but having an open-ended "breathing-session" helped psychologically
- No notifications during this period, at all. Phone and laptop on DnD, no messaging apps running - I really mean all notifications.
- Having the "guarantee" that I'll see missed notifications during my break, with some sane max delay (1-2 hours) instead of an indefinite amount of time helped my brain unplug considerably
- Working with no notifications is incredible
- You have to believe you won't be interrupted to do deep work.
I've started to cut the wine with dinner and feel much more productive throughout the next day.
I get best results starting with the hardest problems first thing in the day, and as complications or dead ends manifest, calculate if it is best put off until something gives (or the mind thinks up something randomly in the commute or shower), and move on to intermediate issues, repeating until the end of the day are small trivial tasks and maintenance.
This is the daily grind though, project deadlines or resource intensive efforts are going to skew individual results.
1. Find a reasonable tracking and logging system. I've trended strongly to paper/pen systems, heavy on index cards (POIC / Zettlekasten inspired), Bullet Journal, and 43 folders / tickler-file based.
2. Be gentle with yourself. Project focus is much like meditation. Allow your mind to still and focus on the task at hand. If it wanders, guide it gently back. Know when you've had enough.
3. Know when you've had enough. There's only so much focus you have, attempting to prove more is all but certainly counterproductive.
4. The role of play and diversion, even in adulthood, suggests something primal about these. It may be freedom for the mind to wander without consequence.
5. Reassess goals. Change or discard the ones which no longer suit a purpose.
6. One trick for maintaining the apearance of productivity is to have a list of goals far longer than your ability to meet them. Creative procrastination (slacking on task A by tending to task B) may give outsiders the illusion you are infinitely productive. You will see things differently.
(The outsiders' view is the correct one.)
7. If you possibly can, seek a supportive environment. This means a space, tools, resources, and most of all, people, which and who support and facilitate your goals. I say "seek" because odds are strong you won't find this, or at least not in any single or rapid manner, but consider "a better productivity environment" a goal in itself. Working early or late, regular hours or irregular, clean or messy, seems to matter less than having agency over your working conditions.
Saps to productivity -- environmental, resources, or, most of all, people -- are the biggest impediments to progress.
8. You are your own worst enemy.
Be gentle with yourself.
9. Start now, or soon. It's never the right time, it's never the right place, you never have the right books or information. Start with what you have, do the best you can.
10. I honour virtually all of this advice in the breach. What we do wrong is in thinking there's a single method. There are many paths.
Have some method. Note what you want to accomplish, how you attempt to do so, what succeeds, and what does not. Don't forget to ask yourself if what you think needs doing actually does or not.
Apart from that, it's mostly all in your head - i.e. at least in my case, motivation/demotivation largely depends on whether my internal self believes that the effort is actually worth it. So, for eample if the project is actually pointless (will likely not deliver value to anyone on completion), I will be demotivated. Also, if my effort is unrecognized, this will be demotivating as well. Having to deal with completely preventable bullshit every day (general corporate incompetence spilling over my particular area of work) is also demotivating.
If I don't have any task like that, I just make myself work on something for ten minutes. 90% of the time, I continue to be productive after that. The 10% that I don't, I either give up and take a break until I feel productive (if that's feasible) or just force myself to work on anything that absolutely must be done now.
I maintain lists of things to think about and to do. My style of bulllet journeling.
I usually stick to the rule of threes. Three things I need to do this am, or today,or this week, this sprint...
If I don't need to read something now, it goes in my list and the tab is closed.
The biggest problem for me is that I am a morning person and there is not enough morning. I am most productive from around 5 or 6am til somewhere between 10am or noon. During that time, I need to get kids off to school, work out, and eat. I could shift working out, but if I skip it in the morning, I'm very likely to skip it over lunch or in the evening.
To do that, I pick small, easy wins, then roll from there until I'm back into a good day to day work routine of productivity. I've found making sure I do something early in the morning as part of being productive, makes a big difference in breaking slack patterns. Not letting the morning get away without doing something meaningful toward whatever I'm working on. I'm strongly a night person and I still find that to be critical. In my observation of low-productivity periods of time throughout my life, my mornings were always mediocre for productivity. As I've gotten older (closing in on 40 now), the value of being productive early in the day has gone up considerably (it's an energy conservation and utilization thing).
It's less any one element of the concept than the fact that it's immensely negligence-tolerant. Sort of like quitting smoking: you can do it a thousand times, but it's so easy to pick up again.
That and the notion of an index, which is IMO key to the whole concept, moreso than the bullet notations and other organisation.
Longer discussions here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22134879
Also here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22086217
After resumability and index: spreads. Basically, an idea hits you, take a two or four-page section, title it, add it to the index, and collect thoughts on That Thing there.
One early spread I did (and still maintain) is "How to organize BuJo" (or words to that effect). Pages wanted, management ideas, etc. List things you might want to manage, figure out how to do that, and then ... Just Do It.
I make a practice of starting from the front and back of the journal, with more-fixed references (frequently-called numbers / email, reference information, hours of operation, Significant Other details (dates, measures, etc.) in the back, whilst various projects tend to hit where they occur to me in the course of a year.
(And yes, I've been starting a new journal each year, a bit of housecleaning / stop-lossing.)
The manual overhead (numbering pages, adding month overviews, etc.) is slightly tedious, but also a practice-of-presence and/or awareness that helps focus the mind and encourage review.
The Bullet Journal site itself is pretty good (https://bulletjournal.com). There are numerous very artsy BuJo videos on YouTube. I tend to discourage those -- BuJo is a functional tool, but also a personal tool, and the notion of competitive BuJo strikes me a bit like competitive yoga: spectacularly missing the point. If your muse says "glitter-gun and washi-paper All The Things", then great. But if not, a well-used but non-artistic BuJo beats the pants off one that would feature well on Instagram or Pinterest.
I guess the current environment for many people (at least for me) contains too many distractions that so easily washes away all the good ideas I've been pondering on.
Being organised by keeping a daily todo/journal has helped a lot, unless I forget to use it, which happens from time to time.
I plan something fun to work on for ten minutes at 7am every day. Usually I already know what I'm doing to do.
Then I get ready and go to work.
Waking up late for me I realized was due to not looking forward to the day. This helped.
I also time everything. It games your mind. I'll set a timer for ten minutes to write a unit test or something, and try to get it done in that time.
Another is to occasionally take a break from your own interests, and help someone (or something) else. Making a difference where you are not directly and personally involved can itself be its own kind of rewarding.
I have a really solid desk setup - tray, mac, ultrawide, nice speakers. Ergonomics are important too.