Ask HN: How do you organize your routine? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you organize your routine?

86 pointsSectumbra37 comments

As a freelancer I often found my self with too much work or too little work, I have no problem with the first case but with the latter one.

When I'm in those days of little to none work I've found my self lost in the days and time with the constant thought "What should I be doing now?".

I think that an structured routine should help me organize through the day but whenever I search online for an "optimal" formula, I end up with generic SEO crap like organize your meals and take vitamins. I'd like to know how other engineers that don't have a strict work schedule manage to organize the spare time without the feeling that you are wasting your precious and short life time.

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I'm a fellow freelancer. I don't, save for a very rough set of guidelines. May or may not be helpful, but I stressed out a lot about this when I got my start and found the "hippie" approach works quite well:

- Wake up as early as your body allows. I'd rather be on a 10-6 schedule fully rested than a 9-5 schedule just to fit societal expectations.

- Work as long as your body allows (as soon as you start to get foggy, stop or take a break).

- Eliminate tedious distractions (disable notifications, turn your phone off, etc) but if you need some "noise," have a long-form podcast or interview in the background.

- Don't get too caught up in systems (unless they help). Just have a running awareness of what needs to be done and "bins" (in the GTD sense) where you write down what comes next. Paper, an app, doesn't matter.

- Do the work until it's done. Deadlines are a manager's tool that shift people's focus away from the work on to meeting the deadline/manager's expectations. I've found the less awareness I have of this, the higher quality of work I can produce and less stress.

- Accept that you are you. Everyone is different, there is no fixed way to get things done. Experiment and find what works and then do that, adjusting as necessary.

I do think there's value in setting deadlines; even if there aren't any consequences for missing them, just having a deadline helps me stay focused and serves as a check on my natural inclination to procrastinate on problems that don't have easy answers.

Yes, for me it's all about the morning routine. If you can start your day off early and accomplish a bunch of tasks it boosts your mood and also makes it easier to keep the train going for the rest of the day.

Routine is all about forming healthy habits, the best way to do that is to make them obvious and easy. I'd highly recommend reading 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear to help with this.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits

I think Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg is probably the better book, especially for the Hacker News crowd. There's an extraordinary precision and simplicity to Fogg's book, not only in the writing and presentation of the material, but also in his underlying model of human behavior. Also, there are some really helpful techniques in Tiny Habits that are missing from Atomic Habits.

I found the book "get things done" helpful. i don't follow the system closely but it's a good mental model. It's especially helpful to have a list of medium and long term goals with associated next steps for when there's time.

I work as a consultant and have a similar ebb and flow to work. I try really hard to appreciate and enjoy slow downs instead of feeling guilty about them. check all the routine boxes for the day, make sure I've done what I need to and then do something enjoyable because other days I won't be able to.

Would you mind providing a quick summary of the primary points of the book?

https://hamberg.no/gtd - don't read the book, there's nothing else in it that's good.

off the top of my head i'd say its a few things:

1, don't use mental capacity for remembering things, do that in a trusted document that stores things you need to remember

2, always be (mentally) knolling, staying organized and recording things you need to refer to later should be a reflex. Supplement this with weekly reviews of everything going on in your life.

3, categorize actions into long, medium and short term tasks. A short term task is something you can do immediately if you have the right context and opportunity.

4. if you're blocked on something, figure out the next immediate task, i.e. "email user group to ask if anyone else has seen this problem before" NOT "figure out problem with spatial join"

Emacs org-mode was a huge help in getting started on this. there's a vscode port of it thats semi-usable. I haven't been a fan of other organization software.

Searching for “Getting Things Done” will give you numerous results with summaries and the workflow diagram.

But it’s a really short book. Could be read in an afternoon or two.

50% of the battle is knowing what you want to accomplish and in what priority order. Writing it down helps immensely and forces clarity. I like to write a simple TODO checklist on a piece of paper in the morning while I eat breakfast. Having a single TODO app bucket that collects everything in your personal backlog is fine, but it’s only useful if you can actually groom the backlog and select tasks to work on for a given day.

The key is to select a reasonable amount of work each day. If your daily TODO list is always 15 items long and each of them takes at least 2 hours to do properly, deep down you’re going to know it’s all impossible and ignore the list entirely.

Instead, pick 1 or 2 main big tasks for the day, maybe 2-4 smaller auxiliary tasks that can be accomplished quickly (grocery shopping, gym), and maybe a couple of quick TODOs that can be batched together in an hour (vacuum floors, iron laundry, etc). Keep it reasonable, and actually check them off your list as you do them so you can review what’s left.

You also need to understand where your time is disappearing to. Do you have untracked tasks that aren’t on your TODO list but are actually taking hours every day? Get them on the list and work them into your priorities. Be honest about them.

Or are you getting caught up in social media, web browsing, or going down a rabbit hole of a side curiosity? Again, you need to be honest about unwanted time sinks and take steps to address them: Screen time limits for offending apps, content blockers, etc.

I'm a contractor/consultant and know exactly what you're talking about.

Things that help me.

1) Finish all client work first

2) Reach out to my network, not for work but just to catch up with people, sometimes work comes out of this effort but it's also good just to hear from people (even when you're busy it's good to make time to stay in touch)

3) Think about how to bring in some more business, this can require thoughts, strategy, etc

4) When times are busy clients sometimes ask me for things that could be more generic for lots of different clients, I immediately write them down so that in down times I can look through the list, can any of these ideas be made into a small side hustle?

5) Hit the beach/slopes/gym, whatever I put off during the busy times. You probably put some things off when you were really busy that you have time for now

I've found some of common suggestions from Ayurveda to be helpful to structure my energy and motivation:

- Eating light at night and more heavily at lunch when digestion is stronger.

- Going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to help increase feelings of lightness when waking (moving toward sunrise to sync with our diurnal rhythms). Eating light later helps with this a lot I've found.

- Doing things that make my body feel good upon waking — drinking tea, meditating, smelling nice-smelling essential oils, taking a slow walk around my neighborhood.

- Practice paying lot of attention to my body's needs — for hunger, hydration, sleep, relaxation away from screens, emotional needs like connection / love / play, etc.

Practicing these habits has really helped set a solid foundation of health.

Habits and rhythms are really important to our overall health and we have to be extremely mindful of what we allow to become a habit in our lives — including mental habits like thinking a lot or worrying about missing out.

Over the December break I started a new routine.

I went from:

- get up, make coffee, read the news / social / etc. TO

- get up, make coffee, read a book for 1 - 2 hours.

The switch from short-form micro-morsels of information to long form has done wonders for my readiness for the day. Can't recommend it enough.

...Badly enough. Anyway to sustain high loads when happen my mix is:

- most of my digital life in Emacs/org-mode(org-attach,org-roam,ol-notmuch,...) so (almost)anything is ready at my fingertips, I can have a clear view of anything case by case or build one on the fly with org-ql/zetteldesk etc all in an unique ecosystem, not many different places to look for anything;

- noting most things, especially too offload relevant details and being able to see long/mean terms slow stuff normally not easy to spot and often a source of time waste if not spot in time;

- extensively using email aliases to easy scoring messages, when I'm in a rush I can simply cherry peak mails by alias filtering instead of unread so when I can't do anything I just get exposed to what I can do in a good priority order, well, good as good I can draft it up front, here count notmuch, Emacs, MailDrop and a local-based mail setup;

- reduced number of com channels: people must know that they can reach me ONLY physically, by classic phone (VoIP, few numbers with a small domestic pbx) or mail. No n-th chat apps, no third party modern suite (Meet, Teams, Zoom, WebEx etc);

- anything that can be done quickly done ASAP with the old military adage "if it's a life-or-death urgent: ignore it, they are already dead; if is very urgent next: week might be good; if it's just a bit urgent: tomorrow it's ok; if it's NOT urgent: do it ASAP!!!" so I try to avoid piling up things to have the emptiest pipe possible when a peak arrive, that's the part that work less though...

> ...- anything that can be done quickly done ASAP with the old military adage "if it's a life-or-death urgent: ignore it, they are already dead; if is very urgent next: week might be good; if it's just a bit urgent: tomorrow it's ok; if it's NOT urgent: do it ASAP!!!"...

UI never heard of this before! This is both hilarious, and oddly in *some* cases i can see the rationale with the thinking. Either way, quite interesting and TIL; thanks!

Your welcome :-)

In the end my real point is: I have no special revolutionary solution, just suggesting to do their best to live the life since we work to live not the contrary and living is our real "target".

The tooling part is just a suggestion and a reminder about how much we need and how useful are classic desktop systems where the user is at the center, not the service like modern ones...

Morning, my friends and I have been working on a tool called Futureland (https://futureland.tv), that helps you connect your daily actions with your long term goals.

It might be worth experimenting with, we have a little community of people from around the world who have been using it to form new habits, learn skills, and see through their projects.

Hey, I came across this the other day and thought that it looked really interesting but other than the initial landing page and the login page I couldn’t find any other information on it. Is the tool more like a social platform for sharing habits and skills or a private space primarily? Do you have a privacy policy at all or list how you handle user data?

Not sure if this is the advice you are looking for but what helps me most is to plan every next day in advance, usually the evening before. For this purpose I use Microsoft To Do with due date on each task. It allows me to have all my tasks on all my devices (iPhone, iPad, PC, apple watch). So I always know what I want to focus on and have my tasks with me wherever I go.

As valuable as a routine can be, IMHO you're putting the cart before the horse. The root of your question is "What should I be doing?". That can't be answered by adopting a routine. Better to start with your goals (not too many of them) and then work out what you think is the best course of action to achieve them, then create a routine around that plan.

Even once you have goals, there's a big question of how rigid a routine is optimal, which is a highly personal question. I've found that process and routines should be minimal to allow for greater focus on actual work with more space for first-principles thinking, but that's just me. Find what works for you.

For me:

- Have a regular start time

- Have a morning checklist (mine just consists of "check email", "clear the github notification queue"

- If you're having trouble starting, just tell yourself, "I'll just open my editor, and jot down the first baby step for my current task, then I can slack off."

When I leave work in the evening, I generally add a todo task to my morning list (e.g. noting where I left off: "Get tests passing in the foobar branch and open a PR").

I find the "just open my editor..." thing really does work. It's the same principle as putting on your workout clothes when you don't feel like working out. It's just a mental trick to kick yourself in the ass.

I don't think the details actually matter that much, what matters is having some way of planning and structuring your work, a basic TODO list in notepad goes a long way, it doesn't matter how you set it up.

A lot of people are majoring in the minors when they try to optimize various aspects of their lives. Most of the benefit comes from getting the basic stuff right. Obsessing over being optimal rarely beats consistently being good enough. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

It may not matter for you, but it matters for others. I have to structure my routine in a way that allows me to get through it while balancing things like time, mood, energy, etc. Otherwise my routine itself costs me energy, which is counter-productive. You don't have to optimize every second of your life, but for me it does matter what order and what time of day/week I do things.

I leave my phone out of my bedroom. I just bring my iPad, which is disconnected from everything and has all notifications disabled. It's basically a fancy notebook and ebook reader.

In the evening, I think about what I want to do the next day in broad terms. If there isn't much to do, I'll make plans to bike somewhere or work on something specific. I might even do a bit of preliminary reading (e.g. how-tos, documentation).

When I wake up, I read a bit in bed, then have coffee and breakfast on the balcony. I won't touch my phone or laptop until I'm done with breakfast. During that time, I write down what I want to do that day. Just having that uninterrupted time makes a big difference. If I start checking emails or browsing the internet I easily get sidetracked.

I'll try to do as much meatspace work as possible before I check my phone or sit at the computer. I know that once I do that, I'm trapped for the rest of the day.

Through the day, I'll look at my daily todo list, and see what's left to do. When my productivity wanes, I try to force myself to leave the computer and go do other things. Otherwise I'll just dick around on the internet until bedtime.

After 2+ years of WFH, I realised that the thing I most needed in my routine was blocks of time where I'm not with anyone, or doing anything. (I live with my family) Could be opposite for you. But think it helps to create your routine around things that work needs from you plus things that you need from your days.

What I do is make my to-do the night before, wake up and do yoga (in quiet), block non-thinking meetings together and thinking meetings away, use pomodoros for work, have meals with the fam without my devices, and end the day with an hour of solo time, listening to music, reading, writing, and planning for the next day.

Also, in case you haven't, recommend reading "Four Thousand Weeks" and Austin Kleon's work. You got this. :))

I have Streaks app set up on my laptop, phone and watch. I try to earn five dots each day: remembering medication, morning work routine, noon work routine, afternoon work routine, evening exercise. The dots remind me if I forget to do any of them.

For each of the three work routines I have a short TODO list in Logseq. After I complete the list I mark the dot in Streaks.

Each item in the routine TODO lists is short and easy to do, such as “check email”, “do 40 pushups”, or “decide what’s tomorrow’s big task”. One of the items is the question “do I want to change any of my routines?”

The trick for me is to keep the real work separated from the routines. Routines should be simple. Real work at its best is complex and varying and does not lend itself easily to routines.

I organize my life in pillars. One of them is Occupational pillar, made of Profession, Projects and Leisure. Profession is my main occupation, but I have other side projects as well.

I usualy book time in advance to work on my projects, but I also work on them when I have some free time from my profession. If I'm too tired then I go for my leisure time (rest is also important).

About routines, I have a morning routine (that I do everyday when I wake up) and a night routine (before going to sleep). Other than that I have simply morning, afternoon and evening work slots. These work slots changes depending on the day.

I simple way to avoid the "what should I be doing now?" is starting doing "what should I do tomorrow?"

Freelancer, consultant, course/content creator here. Here's what works for me:

1) Make a list of all the tasks necessary for work and play

2) Rough timeline for how long each task takes

3) Work: Business drivers prioritization

4) Play: Fun / Relaxation driver prioritization

5) Build a graph of how things are related (work & play)

Once you have this then it's easier to deal with free time and crunch time.

If free time opens up, you can ask yourself once "what should I be doing now?" and look at your work graph or play graph.

Then you start something from there based on your prioritization and how long you have.

This is helpful because it lets you be more fluid with deciding.

So instead of 8am-9am, I do x, you can now choose what graph to work on.

I like to have a fairly regular routine with consistent time to wake up every morning. The typical day is divided into four phases:

- morning: start of with yoga and focus on most important work before noon - noon: take a breather with running, have lunch and read up on hacker news - afternoon: more work, mix in nap and meditation to get through the afternoon - evening: wind down, prepare for next day

You can find a detailed breakdown [here](https://kevinslin.com/notes/qm4lvh7xusf8tufke30gr2q)

Gotta have a system, and it's likely you're the only one who can build one that works well for you. I started over 5y ago with a bullet journal (quad-ruled moleskine cahier notepads and a pentel graphgear 1000 mechanical pencil) which tools I still use daily and recommend. The "Tools for Thought" communities on Twitter and Discord are great resources too. For digital tools I spent a year using Roam but switched to Obsidian.md maybe 18 mo ago and love it. Obsidian's Discord is friendly and helpful, v highly recommended. Good luck!

I've done well reducing the amount of things I have that can distract me for long periods of time.

These are things like news sites (don't visit much anymore), phone, social media (don't have anymore), news aggregators like HN (only visit very occasionally, never on phone).

Then... when I get that gnawing feeling of "What should I be doing?" I just stare out the window or at the wall or ceiling until I end up getting up and doing something. I mean, even Buddha probably had to walk around his tree sometimes.

It works pretty well!

Check out the Getting Things Done and The Now Habit books. There are also great systems and services to keep you accountable. Focusmate, Beeminder, RescueTime, Boss As A Service, etc.

> I'd like to know how other engineers that don't have a strict work schedule manage to organize their spare time without the feeling that you are wasting your precious and short lifetime.

The other replies are focusing on how to organize your work, but I'll answer how I avoid feeling like I'm wasting precious time.

I think first, you need to ask yourself what do you truly enjoy doing? Organize your life around that. I love surfing/snowboarding (despite still being shit after many years). That is the priority, how do I make sure I have time to do that? I found living east of my colleagues so that I could do that activity in the morning and then work afterward is best for me. Everyone is different of course, but I found doing exercise in the morning and then working clears my head.

I find I also need an activity where I can veg out, I like Netflix & video games (not competitive multiplayer ones, those tire me out). I make sure I have some veg time to recover mentally, usually after work.

There are things I hate doing, I tried to optimize them out of my life. I only eat Huel, get a takeaway, or eat out. This means, no more cooking, going to supermarkets, washing dishes, and spending mental effort trying to plan meals. Everyone has different things that they hate doing, optimize them out as much as possible.

So an ideal day would be: wake up(9am) -> snowboard/surf/gym -> (12pm)work -> veg out/go out for dinner/drinks, the entire day is things I enjoy/want to do which makes it easier to do the things I have to do. I also usually enjoy what I'm working on, which means sometimes every single thing I did that day, is something I wanted to do and enjoyed.

tl;dr fill your day with things you want to do, limit things you have to do on days you work. I find it makes it easier to stay motivated whilst working.

Optimal formulas usually have a very strong subjective component. It makes them very hard to find via search. It also makes them hard to package and recommend as a package.

Personally I had this problem you described for many years and even found that it powered overwork and workaholism cycles.

What I did was shift the perspective from the work/rest dichotomy to the reflect/program dichotomy.

Work and rest were clouding the other out. There is too much awkward overlap. For example there are types of rest that can't effectively be scheduled on demand, but which will be felt to still require work. And there are types of work that will require intentional rest or forbearance. So both of these situations leave you with a problem of a dichotomy that breaks or hinders your ability to execute appropriately.

My system involves a lot of different prompts that get at the intuitive day-state in this kind of case.

What I want is a sense of where I'm at metaphorically and emotionally (interests, values), as a way to be comfortable and ride the current wave. Examples of tools I use:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/intuition-cues-for-advan...

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/frontdooring-a-new-form-...

(I'm offering these but also offering them as examples of things I built myself, that you may need to build for yourself)

These tools will help me understand: What is this time good for? What kind of schedule is appropriate for that?

The schedule, even if loose, and quite different, is still worth aiming for. I also refer to this schedule as a program and consider it central to computer programmer psychology (personal theory).

I also set a sort of meta-timer on my watch or desktop during these times, usually from 15m to 30m intervals. This is associated with a meta-loop framework with things like: Hydrate, stretch, ask if switching contexts is appropriate, and so on.

Overall this is less of an optimization issue now that I understand one's lifetime as less in one's full control. There will always be some annoying chaos, and psychology has taught us that denying it can be very unhealthy and even make it stronger.

In order to have more control over the chaotic parts one must first be willing to understand the voice of the chaos as fundamentally opposed to dictation and turn it into a lightly-structured listening and checking-in exercise. (You can view chaos as fundamentally tractable to processes based in some depth of consideration, and intractable to blanket, machine-like dictation)

Just some of my own perspectives--good luck.

PS I've shared my text file structure in recent comments as well.

Read. Read anything that’s been commercially published on paper.

You need to organize for a specific goal, and then the routine will fall into place.

Have you read Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life book? Might help you understanding more deeply and develop an importance of honing your aim.

For example, 2 of his 2 rules basically summarize down to: - Clean your room [keep your room/house clean] - Make at least one room in your house beautiful

And then he writes a whole chapter explaining why it's so important.

If I could edit the above comment, I'd add that Peterson should have added a 13th rule: "Every time you downvote you lose."

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