Why I do Time Tracking | Hacker News Reader

Why I do Time Tracking

swaroopch.com

47 pointsswaroop17 comments

Realizing that I am more productive if I wake up early but I just love being a night-owl. A hard problem to solve.

Yeah, this one's stumped me for years, too.

Naps.

Why I don't do Time Tracking: I find many creative tasks require a lot of distraction time in order for my brain to process what I'm doing. Many times, it helps to "be productive" for an hour, then go use twitter for 20 minutes. When you come back, the solution is magically there.

Then again, maybe you could track "productive zoning out time" as one of your categories.

I'm a fan of the 48/12 system for creative work.

A simple timer and a list of 'stuff i did' per work chunk have been getting me all the useful information without becoming a burden or forcing me out of my natural rhythm.

Also reminds me of the "Pomodoro Technique": http://www.bestbrains.dk/Blog/2009/02/21/CanATomatoChangeYou...

One of the things I was pleased with in Stuff To Do is that you don't have to monkey around with starting/stopping a timer. You just have a task that you're working on, and when you're doing email/HN/otherwise wasting time, you just set 'time wasting' or whatever as your current task.

This whole article can be summarized in one word: DISCIPLINE.

Reading about how to stop being un-productive is .. well .. unproductive. Not getting shit done? Go do something!

The question is how to attain discipline, not whether you need discipline :)

There's an amazingly good article on the subject here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/

Actually, a mini-series of articles. Both useful and inspiring.

Discipline is a decision. That is all. You decide to goof off. Be responsible for making your decisions, and you will find a way towards better discipline. You could say that discipline is "recognition of having made a decision" ..

I somewhat disagree. It is _difficult_ to change certain aspects of yourself. If it were so easy, everyone would do it; nobody would be lazy, nobody would procrastinate, nobody would be addicted to any substances or have bad habits. Nobody would get into (or stay in) depression.

The human condition is such that, with respect to various things, what we are and what we know we should be are different, and sometimes quite distant from one another, and moving from the "are" to the "ought to be" is often a struggle.

I have learned some strategies over the years, but these strategies are not ones that everyone is willing to employ.

> I have learned some strategies over the years, but these strategies are not ones that everyone is willing to employ.

Share please!

Well, honestly, after going years trying to change myself with "decisions" or willpower, I eventually allowed myself to receive the graces that God has been offering. I put "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" together with "ask and you shall receive".

Take this advice however you will. shrug

The hardest part is knowing what you need to do next, versus what you want to do. Speaking as someone who wasted 5 days architecturing some fancy ajax<->CLOS thing instead of implementing the simple admin interface that I now desperately need (was working at a library today which filtered all non web traffic and cut me off of ssh)

    Listen 443

OT: I don't even have ssh on 22, thanks to lamers and a bad experience with fail2ban and spoofed IP. The library system doesn't even let you do https; I was locked out gmail even. Not cool.

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