Ask HN: Do you also alternate between super productive and slow days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you also alternate between super productive and slow days?

98 pointsalihm28 comments

I've realized that when I have a super productive day the next day or two after that I'm not as energetic and can't do as much. Is this something that other people face? If so is it because you exhaust yourself on your energetic day and need rest? or is it just random and some days you have a great night sleep and are well rested therefore you have a lot of energy?

I have nothing against incorporating rest in my schedule to be more productive, but I'm wondering if going all out and then resting and recharging is better or worse than limiting yourself on your energetic day to not exhaust yourself (kinda amortizing your energy). I'm also not sure if the amortization strategy has the same effect. Maybe I need to try it and see.

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As a workflow consultant, that's one of the clues to help someone find their groove. Good and Bad days can happen for various reasons. Finding patterns is key to managing your life well.

One exercise we use is to first track your days and rank them just on productivity, which is just the measure of what was planned and what got done - we worry about volume and type of work later on.

Rank the day on a scale of -3 to +3. Once we have enough of these we see either an internal or an external driver.

Crossing that ranking with a daily work journal (Ben Franklin style is fine), you'll start to see all kinds of things. By far the biggest influencer for better production I run into is day of week.

The day of the week we have the most control over is our most productive day. The exception to that is when people are "burning out" on their work and when they do have more control, they coast / float / rest / runaway / crash.

Once we find the better days, it's usually easier to repeat those conditions than it is to eliminate the poor days.

And just so this doesn't sound like a campaign to turn everyone into a 7-day-a-week work monster, I'm convinced over and over by watching people trim their days and weeks, increase their "people" time, and carry a notebook with them ALL the time, that less labor, more life results in more work and more love of that work.

When you have a great day or two of productivity, and then skid to a halt, ask yourself more questions about the work ahead. Get big picture and drop more questions, puzzles, problems on your subconscious. Chances are a few days from then you'll have all the answers and you'll have another blow out day! Tightening that cycle up is the goal, but take what you get and enjoy the ride.

Happy to give you a free workflow tune-up. Takes about a month, and it's usually fun.

What the heck is a workflow consultant?

Could I sign up for a free workflow tune-up too? That sounds awesome.

What you do sounds awesome! I never heard of "workflow consultants". How can I hire you?

It's an off-shoot of startup consulting. Over the years I realized the first step in helping a founder, CEO, or anyone with a project (especially someone struggling) wasn't (usually) the plan, goals, team, etc. It was them and how they planned their day, week, tools, meetings, and so on.

When someone is really grooving, and they find their personal workflow, look out. It's not unusual to check back in with a client just laughing at how much they get done in so little time. Sometimes, of course, ruts and grooves are separated by a serious wall - and it's harder.

These days, I do a deep dive on the project, then bounce back to their workflow and deep dive on their habits, routine, tools, and so on. It makes all the other "business" work easier and the client is usually happier and more productive longer than just knocking out the scary thing that made them call me in the first place.

One of my Covid projects was writing a manual and workbook for it. It's in first draft, but I'll post it here when it's presentable.

You two and the Ali92hm are welcome to a freebie! Thanks for your interest.

I'll second this: how can I hire you? Or more generally how would you suggest going about finding a workflow consultant?

Given some of the questions I'm getting off-HN from this thread, it's worth understanding Workflow is NOT a self-help program like coaching or other programs. Workflow is about meeting you where you are and adapting everything else TO YOU. Think, Feng Shui for furniture and Feng Shwet for work. Get nicer furniture if you like, but whatever you got, that's what we'll deal with. Same for workflow - as you are.

Will you be helping yourself, yeah. Can it sort of be self-help, yeah. But that's the side show.

I'll leave my email up on my profile a few days. Write if you are interested.

To answer your other question, I don't know anyone else doing this across industries. My experience runs across factory production lines (don't touch it if you aren't moving it closer to the customer or adding value), kitchen work (mise en place everything), startups, writing, coding, newspaper work, ditch digging, librarian, painting, and so on.

Then there are the more biological aspects - sleep patterns, physical and mental uniqueness. Again, change them if you like / can, but if you don't / can't how do we optimize your work to be the most effective it can be given what who you are?

Within any industry there are best practices, but I really enjoy bringing other work places, systems, and tools to new settings.

I'm sorry but my freebie time is gone for a while! I'll get cracking on the pamphlet and workbook.

If I can find a good on-demand drip email system, I'll put a 12-week class together. An email-based workbook class.

Hey sorry I just looked back at this thread and I think you took your email off of your profile. You can email me at my username @gmail.com

Hi I'm interested in this offer, I'd like to understand better how to improve my workflow, are there any more seats available? or is the offer expired?

This sounds great. I've been working on a project for 5 months now and am so demotivated and seem to lose entire days without seeming to make any progress. I know my daily routine is in shambles (I've never been good with scheduling or routine) even though I write a LOT of plans and schedules for myself. I would love to read your book / learn more about what you do to help people improve their workflow systems.

Yes, I also alternate. But my ebb and flows are around motivation, not exertion.

If I am working for someone else, and I put in a lot of effort, then I feel completely drained after N amount of days (or after project completion) – which requires me to mentally "unlink" my brain from anything related to that project.

If I am working for myself, whether that be on my company, or for personal growth, then I can hit a wall day after day and still find motivation to continue forward, projecting even one little victory as something that can give me energy to keep going.

The key for me is motivation. If I feel invested (and rewarded) in my own growth, then I am much more productive than just adding more to the bottom line of some faceless organisation.

Good luck to you! I hope you find something worth while that both gives you energy and makes you feel like you're growing.

So this is one thing I'm trying to tease out. Do I feel motivated because I'm well rested and have energy? Or is it the motivation that causes the energy?

From this morning I can say it's the former. I do feel super excited to work on my stuff, but just cant get myself to do them or start. Getting out of the bed this morning was tough

I am not the user above, but it's both. I have off days, and the privilege not to work on off days. I can let them pass and work another day, when the conditions are right. Overall I end up working more with greater energy, just not steadily.

In my experience, I also need slower days otherwise I will simply burn out. I love having days full of code, but this is not sustainable. After 8 hours of coding and focused work, I typically need a day or two of recovery. I still can perform tasks and plan but not at the normal intensity. Another approach is 4 hours a day of code daily. This can become a problem if you have a 20 year old team mate willing to grind 12 hour days and just knock out all the tickets. This can create toxic behavior and resentment from that individual towards older and experience devs.

In everything people do, there is time for rest or a task that is easier physically or mentally. A laborer cannot sustain moving shovel non-stop all day. A soccer player cannot sustain playing 8 hours a day. This is part of being human.

I alternate - but discovered my perception of productive days can be skewed. I came from physical, real world jobs like construction. When my day was done, I had something tangible for my efforts (fence, concrete, brick wall, etc.)

When I started in computer work, some days I felt super productive, but others I didn't. On many of the days, I didn't feel productive. I was still brain dead from the work on these 'less productive' days.

Back in those days, I printed a lot of stuff. I discovered that I felt more productive on the days I printed more things, because printed pages are tangible items. On the days I felt less productive, I was still doing a ton of work, but the lack of tangible evidence skewed my perception.

Yes. This is pretty common, actually. People who force themselves to work on the days they aren't really motivated to work ultimately end up in burnout - sometimes career-ending burnout.

Find an employer that understands this and stick with them, honestly.

It sounds like you’re trying to determine if your tiredness is an inevitable side effect of a productive day, if unproductive days are just random, or if your variation in productivity can be optimized. I don’t know the answers for you, but you might be able to better understand your productivity by keeping a detailed time log of your work.

For two weeks, keep track of every minute of your working time. Once you know where your time went, you can then try to understand why your less-productive days are less productive. Was it because you were too tired to concentrate? Did your “super productive” day involve 12 hours of focused work? You might find there’s not as big a difference as you think between different days, except that some days feel productive because you happen to finish some task, when in reality the groundwork for finishing it was laid on a day that felt unproductive.

Yeah, I've been meaning to instrument my time to see how it's being spent on a more granular level. I do keep logs and notes from my daily work and tasks currently though. So I know when I started on what and when it was finished.

But to answer your question, I don't think it's just the feeling of finishing a task. Yesterday, I woke up and felt well rested. I stretched, made breakfast and had some introspection time, started grabbing tasks one at a time from my side project and finishing them. Then I picked up a book that I've been reading and read for 2 hours and I also finished some random chores.

This morning, I woke up and I cant get out of the bed (this is not just Monday effect, I've felted on other days). I don't know if this exhaustion is because of being too excited last night from all I've done and not being able to have a good night sleep, or just I've exhausted myself yesterday and don't feel like doing anything today. Or I would have felt this way anyways.

I do think though the ground work is done on the less productive days in terms of restoration. My girlfriend got a dog about 10 months ago, and I can see the same behavior in the dog. She runs around and exhausts herself on a hike one day and then just sunbathes and chills the next day. It seems like our hunter gatherer ancestors behaved the same way.

I’ve been wondering about the same thing for awhile, but I’ve been mainly focused on physical and mental health side of things.

Of course it’s easier to get up for a task that’s exciting, but I found that my motivation seems to be strongly correlated with my physical well being. One part I’ve been looking at recently is what I eat and how that affects my gut health which affects my mood and motivation.

That being said physical wellness is definitely the only factor as I still get quite big down time (had one yesterday) but not as often and long as I used to have.

Go with the flow. When you're in-flow, block interruptions. When you're ex-flow, handle the other stuff so you're prepared for the next peak. If you're ineffective, uninspired, tired, demotivated or otherwise inoperable go do something else or sleep.

After having a burnout I came to accept this is how my work schedule should be working.

When I don't force myself to 'work' when I don't feel like, I end up with may more productive days that (objectively) also last longer.

Happens to me, but not only on days-scale also on weeks-scale: sometimes a week is very inspiring, intense, and the next one is relaxed, almost lazy. Usually happens after a big task has been completed though.

The nice thing about the amortisation strategy is that you can e.g. exercise on the slow days, which improves your stamina and thus efficiency in the long run.

Yes, it's normal. Don't stress over it. Ideally you can work on a team or with a partner so that your productivity cycles balance out each other.

Probably when you're feeling unproductive you should just stop working and go do something else; it's better to recharge than to work inefficiently.

Yeah I've kinda come to the same conclusion. Seeing how I can get done in one day if I'm well rested.

An old mentor once told me a truth in life: everything comes in cycles. That includes productivity.

Right, so I think I should just take advantage of those days and rest or do low intensity work on other days. Kinda like strength training

This is exactly how I envision the process. My two passions in my personal life are writing code and lifting weights. If I squint hard enough, the shape of each is oddly similar.

It depends on what kind of work I'm doing. I'm not as "productive" if I need to take a day or two to figure out how to solve an unfamiliar problem, but if I'm doing familiar work and my morale is up I can just crank features out like a fuckin' machine.

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