Ask HN: What Practices Has Helped You Reach Productivity Zen/Flow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Practices Has Helped You Reach Productivity Zen/Flow?

14 pointskashfi12 comments

One could argue that in today's industries our success is tied to how well equipped you are to handle stress from oneself, from the job, as well as from others (family, significant others, coworkers, etc).

With that being said, I would much appreciate you taking a moment to share the activities/practices that you have come across and adopted that helped you feel more secure, that has helped you consistently reach a state of flow/success and would recommend to others?

Many thanks!

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One of the best tools is disconnecting from the internet. This pins my mental compute on the issue at hand and prevents mental threads from even being created. Need something about a specific library? I have its docs on my machine. Don't have docs? I have its code. No search engine, no Stack Overflow, no Wikipedia. Think harder.

Disable WiFi.

The code might not be optimal, but it's unlikely it would have been by looking things up online in the first place for a prototype/poc. Get prototype done, refine later on second pass.

Mail client, browser, and Slack are killed since they have no reason to live.

Slack is killed because it still has a blue dot from a message on a workspace somewhere. I refuse to fight it for my attention by tweaking notification parameters that don't seem to work. I had tried overwriting `slack-taskbar-highlight.` and `slack-taskbar-unread.` with `slack-taskbar-rest.*`, but it recreates them, and for that reason, killing Slack even offline gives me respite.

Toying with it: unplugging the charger and implementing a feature on battery. Long battery life? Not if you have NVIDIA graphics card activated.

Thanks for sharing!

My best productivity habit has been using https://crushentropy.com/ every day. I wrote it for myself but a lot of people use it now.

It's like markdown for high resolution planning.

I used to feel harried trying to cram a lot into the day. Now I spend a few minutes planning the day and when I'm in a certain time block, I can totally relax, not worry about all the other things I need to get done in the day, and really focus.

If the day changes due to interruptions etc, I type that in and the rest of the day reflows around that.

My brain isn’t used to 24-hour time, mind adding support for AM/PM times?

Thanks, will do.

I've tried to plan and work like this but I end up getting interrupted and it goes all wrong.

That's the cool thing about this. As the schedule evolves, when you make a change, the rest of the day reflows around that change.

    1100,1200,meeting x
    x,+60,lunch

If you change 1200 to 1220, the "lunch" block auto adjusts.

Thanks for sharing!

Assuming this is for developers:

Close slack and email client for a given amount of time. Say keep it closed for 1 hour, then pop up to check it.

If you need to be urgently contacted sometimes, give such people your phone number, or another way to contact that is more intrusive. e.g. WhatsApp.

When using Slack or email, completely deal with one message (even if just creating a ticket to deal with it later) before reading the next.

Thanks for sharing!

When I wake up:

- I play a bit of guitar

- Lift my weights (all exercises, one set)

- Shower

- Drink coffee

That makes me wide awake and ready for the day.

Bonus: if you sleep well this becomes extra amazing.

Note: sleeping well is not a bonus, but unfortunately, sometimes it is.

Thanks for sharing!

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