My work routine: plan, do, learn loops
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
However, in my experience this approach has one big problem: certain events (changing continents, moving, sickness, finished milestones) completely unravel my productivity for weeks or months. Once I lose the streak it's very hard to get back on track.
I either have to rebuild a new routine step by step or just procrastinate long enough until I've found a new project I can build my work day around. These periods can last several months.
Has anyone come up with strategies to cope with such breaks?
For example, in my system, "travel to X continent" is itself a project, existing alongside multiple other projects. I find this pretty helpful not just for staying in motion, but also for avoiding that sense of guilt that I haven't been productive on days when I'm dealing with these kinds of environmental change. It's a reframing: "It's not that I've been unproductive while moving. It's that I have been productive on my moving project."
a) The fact that I work in conscious 90-minute chunks allows me to take steps to prevent myself from getting distracted. For example, at the planning phase of a 90-minute session, I'll usually activate a 90-minute website block using an app called Freedom [1] and turn on DND mode across all my devices. Then when the session is over, I can lower all these defenses guilt-free.
b) Say I have a friend or relative staying over, which is pretty distracting. I communicate with them upfront: "Hey, I have this routine where, first thing every morning, I do a couple hours of focused work and don't do any socializing. I even wear headphones to block distracting noise. It's not you, it's me. So would you mind just doing your thing for like an hour or two when you wake up tomorrow morning? Then we can chill and go for brunch." etc.
As far as being sick? I guess it depends on what kind of sickness we're talking about lol. I've gotten COVID, been a little hungover, and other aberrations, and usually had no problem carrying myself through just a single work session. (Notably, my first 90-minute session of the day is a routine I've deeply internalized through repetition, so it requires very little mental effort.)
Somewhat circularly, it's the system itself that gives me the energy to keep using the system. I know, because I've engineered it to work that way. (At first this wasn't intentional, but when I noticed the positive effects in an earlier version I systematically began to tease out those effects.)
How much of it do you think is that its your system that you designed, and how much of it is just the usefulness of the system?
Like does it generalize well to others?
Numerous readers have already responded saying it's worked for them so far, but the devil's in the details I suppose. I really only shared the tip of the iceberg of how it works, and a lot of the magic [1] happens down at the level of the active work sessions.
[1] Things like website blocking, task timers, interstitial journaling, pattern interrupts, etc. (Of course, there's a certain logic to it all that I'll spell out in a future article.)
I’ve noticed this my entire life and tried to fight it and have been mostly unsuccessful. Now I see it as an opportunity to build a new, more resilient structure in my life.
Some habits and routines seem to stick around even after big events. Some don’t. Thinking about why this is the case has been a bit illuminating for me . Also, I find those big events also help get rid of bad habits as well.
I wrote about it a long time ago on my old blog when I first started using it, and dug up the link. Sorry for broken images, etc:
https://hackthesystem.com/blog/the-bet-switch-mechanism-the-...
Lots and lots of material out there about this type of process in industrial process design circles, a lot of which is suitable for soft production processes like software development.
Plan: Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
Do: Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
Check: Review the test, analyze the results, and identify what you’ve learned.
Act: Take action based on what you learned in the study step. If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.
Presumably the original PDCA has some good if applied correctly - I haven’t studied it, but have heard good things.
I'm not surprised that managers in non-manufacturing/technical areas picked up on it, since it's easy to understand at a glance. However, it's difficult to implement well.
PDCA means basically that you test a change before completely committing to it. That concept is the same as our canary releases, for example, but more clearly, it's the same idea as running one or two iterations of your algorithm on paper before you go and write the program.
It's not some niche thing that is rarely useful, it's just that people try to push it into exactly the work that can't use it.
Anyone that deals with people, no matter what all the training/literature/latest pop-industrial-psychology fad espews.
>PDCA:
Plan (see: "analyze data," i.e. read tea leaves (metrics)): impossible to do with people. Some try to get a "quick glance" via quantitative data, but that doesn't provide you anything practical, except ammo for political moves. People aren't processes. And any attempt to analyze them as a system is the peak of arrogance.
Do: i.e. either go with your gut, allowing your intuition to navigate you, or go with policy/procedure/a process to cover your ass, and check off the "I'm adding value" box, so you can spend your mental energy on other schemes.
Check: see: "Do." Either you know how a certain action/policy affected someone or you have to read "data" to figure it out. Average case, you redefine your metrics and massage the data to get the result you wanted, so...
Act: you can use your results as ammo for political moves. Pat yourself on the back, have your assistant make a spreadsheet, and then hold a 30 minute jerk-off session/meeting with your superiors and fellow sycophants.
Now that I'm really looking at it, this is already implemented by those who deal with people.
But the "innovation" (if that's not too strong of a word) in the nested plan-do-learn loop is that it's explicitly engineered for someone's personal life routine, rather than, say, the development of an external product or service.
Workflowy is great though — years back, I used it for everything. These days I supplement my Notion workflow with Dynalist, which is basically a Workflowy clone with additional features.
Another thing I've found is that externalizing my plans takes a little stress off my working memory, which is also somewhat diminished in people with ADHD.
Can't really choose what app to use, though. My go to choice for now is a vim and plain text file. But I'd love to have iCloud sync + smart features (like grepping over todos) out of the box. I use Obsidian for the second brain, and it looks like a great choice for interstitial journalling, but their app is an Electron :( Apple Notes seems like a great choice for iOS/Mac, but close source and I can't even find an easy way to automatically insert time. Notion is a great thing too for this, but, again, too web based.
I’ve also been using Drafts quite a lot for more temporary notes - an excellent Mac/iOS (native) app.
But most recently I’ve been trying paper notes again. I’ve been trying dated journal entries where I’m kind of documenting my state of mind, thought processes, and todos all in one place. Not too far off the concept of interstitial journaling, just missing the timestamps! So I’m going to adapt my paper journaling to incorporate this more granular time stamped approach and see how it goes.
No doubt I’ll shortly be back to doing this electronically… I rarely seem to stick with one way of doing things for too long.