Marc Andreessen - Guide to personal productivity | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen - Guide to personal productivity

pmarca-archive.posterous.com

155 pointssuprgeek27 comments

Great summary and some interesting ideas - especially 3x5 cards, no schedule, and structured procrastination.

While I agree with his point on structured procrastination - sometimes the most inspired work is done while avoiding something else - it's also important to balance that with focus. I find my focused procrastination valuable and my scattered procrastination frustrating. Procrastination is rarely productive when it means bouncing between four things (reading HN, hacking on a library, writing a blog post, and buying a book at Amazon).

Procrastinate in serial, not parallel.

I find more and more recently I'm not just procrastinating in parallel but generally working in parallel. I'll switch from task to task and keep forgetting what I was doing, go back to a tab and realise I've left something half-done, walk through my office on the way to the toilet and sit down and do the crossword instead... I actually feel like an absent-minded professor!

I can't really figure out why I've started doing this or quite how to stop it; it feels a bit like those Choose Your Own Adventure books where I used to skip ahead to see if certain choices would end up with death, end up with about ten branching paths (I couldn't mark any more than ten pages with fingers!), then collapse the paths one by one. I ultimately do get everything done and marvel at it, but the sheer bamboozlement I face when realising I've "done it again" is getting annoying.

Oh man, a lot of the local tradesmen practice the "no schedule" thing. Drives me crazy. "Can you come fix my electrics" "Sorry, busy right now, call me in a month". No dude, I will call someone who can actually give me an appointment in a month - I'm not going to keep calling you like a stalker.

In other words this is a great strategy if you are trying to turn away business (which for people with too much business may be an advantage I suppose) but it's kinda rude.

I think as a hacker you may enjoy working on electric systems. So why not do it yourself ? The tools will cost you about the same price as a single repairman-call. The process of searching for an insulation fault is very debugging-like - they both use the scientific method after all. And electrical engineers are the original hackers!

Of course, hope you know the safety rules, would not want you to get hurt. Encouragement void where forbidden by local law :)

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I am the clumsiest person this side of the Magellanic cloud. You should see me fumble with paint - you wouldn't want me to mess with electrics :-)

It's nice to see a productivity article that admits that most of it is person-specific. Everytime Tim Ferris, David Allen, et al announce to the world what they think precludes success, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and alters the minutia of their lives. The best strategy is to take all advice with a pound of salt, experiment, and develop a system of your own.

People, for some reason, feel much worse interrupting you if you are wearing headphones than if you're not.

I love my headphones, but this doesn't work at all for me. Usually it just means that I'll get startled by someone tapping me on the shoulder. I'd love to hear more thoughts along these lines though, i.e. how to keep people from interrupting you during the day.

Work remotely. Block off time in which to be productive on your calendar. Turn your phone off. Log out of any instant messengers.

If you can't work remotely, find a conference room.

I guess it may work better if it's your underlings trying to interrupt, as is likely to be the case with Andreessen. Your boss or your users will probably be less impressed by an iPod.

Maybe if it was a phone headset...

I wear earplugs to help concentrate. When co-workers chat it does not interrupt my flow. If someone speaks directly to me I can usually detect it. If I make the decision to remove the orange foam in my ears I give that person my full attention.

I sympathize with your situation. I wonder if it would do any good to challenge each person who taps your shoulder. How about: "You really startled me. I was concentrating and your touch felt like a lightening bolt. No harm done but in the future would you mind approaching my desk more from the front? I'd really appreciate it. So would my cardiologist."

The "no schedule" and the "index cards" seems to be a little contradicting. If you're setting yourself up to do 3-5 things the next day, you are setting a schedule for yourself; it's just not time specific, that's all. In effect, you're limiting yourself to only those tasks. Eg., if one of the task involves research on coding solution, and the solution you found uses a nice coding technique you are not familiar with, you wouldn't have the freedom to learn it right there. If you have to put it off, most likely it will be forgotten or will lose interest in it. The counter argument of say putting only 5 hrs or so of task on the index card so you can still have freedom to do the example I mentioned doesn't hold since one of the task may be to fix a minor bug that turned out to be more involved than you thought.

For me, instead of putting the time to create such a "next day" task list, I just have a list of task I know I need to do for work and for myself. For work, trac is used (or whatever the company uses). For myself, I keep a list of project goals, but no task lists. The time I saved for making and planning task is spent on jogging down how much time I spent doing what at the end of day instead. This keeps myself honest in not wasting time yet have the freedom to do things I like at the moment.

I don't see them as contradictory at all - "no schedule" is about not putting anything on your calendar (say in three weeks time), which frees you up to plan your day 24 hours in advance on an index card. It's also suggested that you don't have to commit to getting all 5 things done, so you can still pursue new things if they come up.

Some really interesting ideas that are close enough to what I already do that I might well try them. Working to no schedule would be brilliant if I could pull it off, but I worry that as a mix of coder and pointy haired suited type, my conflicting need to fit in with the rest of the world's "let's meet in two weeks' time at 3pm" and desire to have things just happen will lead to frustration rather than fulfillment.

Only doing things that both your head and heart say yes to - yes. Once I started doing this and followed a piece of advice passed down by a fellow entrepreneur - "You don't have to do anything" - my load felt so much lighter. Why was I wasting time? God knows.

The phone/voicemail checking doesn't really for me, though (whether that's a UK thing or not I don't know). I tend to do this automatically for unknown numbers since I get plenty of calls I don't need to take; I also forget my phone far too often. Instead I get nagging emails, or worse, someone recently emailed my cofounder since I didn't answer the phone. They had my email address. I don't get that.

Strategic incompetence, though, seems too close to passive aggressive workplace politics (I don't want to organise the office party so I'll just balls it up..) to my liking.

Working with people who are "strategically incompetent" is a nightmare. Don't do this.

It can backfire, too. A recent conversation:

Manager: Why are you working on system X?

Me: Because cow-orker Y says he doesn't know how to do it

Manager: But he's on-call to support that system!

Me: Perhaps this is an issue that you ought to discuss with him.

This is excellent advice.

Answering e-mail twice a day and leaving the inbox empty every time is crucial to email productivity. It's obvious how it saves time - the more you answer emails, the more people reply. So you end up sending three times as much email each day as you would have if you only answered twice a day. You do more "work" but get less done. On the other hand, answering email twice a day gets things done and keeps your mind clear.

I never thought about that effect of answering emails promptly, but you're absolutely right. The more emails I send, the more I receive, which creates a vicious circle.

Unfortunately for me right now, many people know I respond rapidly to email, so they email me for urgent issues that need immediate attention since they know I'm generally available. That said, I probably just need to start giving out our support email address and telling them it'll be dealt with by the team as a whole, since there's no guarantee I'm not in a meeting or out for the day (or, as the case may be, not answering emails any more because I read this comment!)

So slow it down. Respond five times a day for a week. Then four, three, etc. After a couple of weeks you'll be down to two emails a day.

Of course it's tough if you're on support, but then there should be a separate account for handling support issues. All other email should get the "two respones a day" treatment.

Doing email twice a day seems too much for me. I think I can get away with once.

Also, there's IM. My IM client doesn't autostart; I start it manually when I want to chat with someone or when I get to know that someone needs to chat with me. It seems to look very radical for the folks in my company, but I think it's common sense.

Sheesh. "If you can get away with it," indeed. Most of these 'strategies' simply say: I am far more important than you, and if you want any of my time, you'll get it when and if I damned well please. In particular, strategic incompetence is the most obnoxiously passive-aggressive behavior ever. This might work for pmarca or Arnold, but for most of us it is career-limiting for everyone to think you're a dick.

I had no idea who Marc Andreessen was until this post. I clicked through to http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/10/15/a-marc-andreessen... and discovered a whole new universe of "how to get funding" He seemed to have written some posts in conjunction with Paul Graham

I used to love pmarca's blog post. I think it's great someone dug up his old posts. It's so sad he took a hiatus from blogging. I guess he found more "productive" this to do and writing blog post fell off the to-do list.

Thanks... I'm the someone who put the archive together. :)

He wrote so much good stuff, and I wanted to make sure it was saved and available to entrepreneurs. The full story is on my blog at http://blog.jedchristiansen.com

His anti-todo list starts with "don't be(come) a parent."

Reading comprehension problems can really mess up snarks, can't they. His "anti-to do list" was of things he DID that day.

Excellent article. I just wish I could do two upvotes.

please stop saying this

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