Productivity Tips

These tips should all be relevant to Programming, but most of them will be relevant to other creative tasks. I'll give three: >To estimate how long it takes to complete a task, then time the completion of the task. This is fun and also can help you estimate the size of tasks in the future. It also discourages you from straying from the task you decided to do. >To break the task up into many small tasks. This one I'm sure you've all heard multiple times, but it is SO helpful, and this reminder won't be bad. >To consider what the task truly is. For writing a TV show for instance, the thing you're doing is writing dialogue 90% of the time. Similar ideas can be in programming, where by changing the wording of the task you help yourself a lot.

Nobody wants these productivity tips? Don't be remisce if i kill myself over it and name you all in my suicide note, just to teach you all a fuarrrking lesson

I don't care about productivity. I do things because I enjoy them, so I don't care how long it takes because the process is fun. For me, there is no point in trying to hurry up everything.

>>36898 Use Pomodoro Technique or some variation of it. Write weekly To-Do lists (they make easier to remember deadlines and without To-Do lists, it takes some time to actually remember what you are supposed to do). When you are writing, first make an outline with bullet points. Do not stop writing to fix mistakes, instead go until you stop getting new ideas and the text stops flowing from your head. Then go back to fix the mistakes you made. Rewrite section(s) later, if it's something very important. Programming: * add TODO/FIXME comments * add comments that tell what each non-trivial function does (also explain their input parameters and their return values). Explain what the program does at the top of src file that contains the main() function. * make a quick prototype first if you can. Chances are that you will find out something you didn't know about the problem before you tried to actually solve it. * use Git or Fossil even if you are working as solo developer.

>>36915 Personally I find TODO lists to be terrible for productivity. Making a decision takes a lot of energy and TODO lists just force you to continually make prioritization decisions and juggle abstract contexts. There are much better solutions for this than a flat TODO list.

productivity methods are simple, 6 cups of coffee, snack policy of no more but a set amount of nuts and dark chocolate alongside ur coffee intake. in terms of tools if you suffer from adhd use the plain org-mode plain text solution within Vs or Emacs or Vi or whatever you are using there. it allows you to do everything you have described from a rather plain and simple environment, keep web browsers closed, 3rd party applications out of the occasion, music is allowed but make sure its something that you have downloaded and playing on ur VLC player. its about countering things that not only may but will highjack the very little attention span you have. from food to the very machine you are using for this work. here is an example of very broken indexing i personally somehow navigate.

>>36966 These sound like good tips. thank you. I will try this out, I eat too much junk food lately anyway. One thing I've found kinda odd is if I get fidgety I play a round of emacs tetris. Then when I finish I close the buffer and continue working. I'm pretty bad at tetris so a game doesnt go for long. I call it streamlined procrasination. It's not perfect but better than getting sucked into youtube Also I find myself highly productive when I am not meant to be doing whatever it is I'm doing. E.g I have homework due in two days, suddenly I'd rather work on anything else but that. I wish I could leverage this feeling for gain.

>>36917 i would say that do to list are bad because they just show you all the tasks and tasks tend to pile up and at some point you might have too many tasks which causes stress in of it self. the method that i developed for me was 3 tasks a day. tasks could be minor. major tasks are broken into minor tasks (up to 1hr). the way i write down the tasks is by sticking a notepad on the board. this way a task is movable and could be taken in my pocket / wallet to remind me when i get out of the house. it also allows you to plan a task in advance. usually when im stressed and felling bad it is due to a pileup of tasks in my mind and this method allows me to sort through it. notice that weekend isnt actually fri-sat. its thu noon - sun noon. i define a weekend day by a day where i can sleep until whatever time i want to. and on sunday you gotta go to sleep early so that you can start your weekend fresh. there are also 2 tasks you can perform on your weekend days if you want to. i usually write stuff like "swimming lesson" "laundry" "buy XXXXX" (a note that i take with me so that i can but only what i need) "change the bed sheets" attached is my board. hopefully someone can get inspired by it. main problem is that i stop writing tasks for the board once i get in motion with my life and a pileup eventually occurs. but maybe its just meant to be :)

ty all for sharing and thanks for making this thread! cant wait to try some of this stuff out! :)

90% of being productive is simply not letting yourself get distracted. When you're programming, you should for the most part only be programming. This sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed how often you interrupt yourself when you're not thinking about it.

>>37900 i found pomodoro to be helpful for practicing not getting distracted and also developing my mindfulness for how often i both get distracted and engage my distraction. what helped was just writing any ideas that were percieved as a distraction as quickly as possible and not changing course until end of the working period.

These tricks never really work in the long-term. I find that if I'm procrastinating, there's a deeper reason for it. When everything is aligned, the work just flows by itself and I don't have to trick or force myself into doing something. Like, if I'm procrastinating on reading a book that I think that I want to read, on a deeper level, my intuition tells me that there's nothing worthwhile at the end of it. In contrast, when I'm really curious about something and it's like I can feel the answer at the tip of my tongue, I can read through it fast and even enjoy the process. Same activity but a different experience. If I'm procrastinating on a project, it means I'm not really excited about the idea anymore, I don't see it working out or paying off, so even when I force myself, it ends up being mediocre, my intuition ends up being correct. So there's two ways you can look at your emotions. As a barrier, this lazy, "ugh" feeling that's stopping me from getting work done, or as a signal from the world, information, a sense for how things are going. To get past procrastinating, you need real insight, you either realize you were going at the thing wrong or you realize you have to do something else more worthwhile. Part of the reason that I always procrastinated on studying is because I had a really ineffective method that was frustrating and boring and also based on experience never lead to much success (like most students), so my intuition was always pushing me against doing the work - signal that I should radically re-think my approach or give up. It's much harder to whip out insight from thin air, so obviously you're going to delay making the decision in the hopes that something comes to you, the famous "i'll do it later", or you go on a youtube "productivity" binge, trying to find something to get you over the hump, but the advice is so general that you'll rarely get any real insight from it that can help. My productivity "tip" is to not look at productivity as a general problem, but rather highly specific and task-oriented. The solution to stop procrastinating on task X is different from task Y, because the "block" you feel is just a subjective sense of things not flowing, and the reason they are not flowing is usually highly specific. Trying harder, brute-forcing things, just means hitting your against the wall until something gives. Going against your deeper judgements can work out, but it isn't sustainable. It's basically manual override and takes a lot of effort and is obviously stressful. The myth is then that you have to be "disciplined" and that it's always supposed to be hard like that, but in reality, when things truly flow, you don't have to try at all. When things flow, you also get better results and outperform people that are brute-forcing through something they know doesn't really work.

>>36898 been studying drawing for the past few months under this method, getting around 6-7 hours of study in per day. art is a practice grind, so this is most applicable to similarly long-term time-investment-based tasks. first set a time-per-day goal. personally using five hours minimum, stretching for 7.5, but anything over three should work fine. grab neil cicierega's work timer (https://neilblr.com/post/58757345346) and start every day by opening it. it sits on your screen over every other window and tells you how much time you've spent in x software, your ide in this case. if you unfocus the window, or idle for ten seconds, it stops. this is your "push" - you can see that you are six hours into your day, and you've done two hours of work. you can work out the percentages - maybe 40% through your day and 25% through your goal - and work out if you need to get some extra time in. the goal itself can be intimidating, so to "pull" you through it, grab a pomodoro timer [pomofocus.io works well enough, you can use whatever] and run the basic "four sets of 25 minutes with 5 minute breaks, 15 minute long break" timeboxing scheme. you can do the rest of pomodoro if you want, with the task lists and whatever. seems like needless hassle to me, though i do keep a small list of shorter spur-of-the-moment tasks to fit into any loose 25 minute sprints.

>>37931 Quality post, anon, I like it. >Going against your deeper judgements can work out, but it isn't sustainable One useful thing then is to question and reframe those judgements. At that point - the point you're talking about where procrastrination happens due to lack of "ROI" - if you let yourself think about WHY you don't see ROI usually it will become obvious that your mind & body hunger for instant gratification and are trying to dissuade you. If so, the decision is then to trust either your original decision to start doing said thing (basically yourself) or to trust your wetware's craving of sugar and entertainment. Immediate profit seeking instinct is the direct consequence of not cultivating the skill necessary to maintain delayed gratification. >The myth is then that you have to be "disciplined" and that it's always supposed to be hard like that, but in reality, when things truly flow, you don't have to try at all. True. Culturally, discipline is a dogma of habitualizing grit and it is faulty due to being an _external_ thing and as such it easily falls out of habit. This is what happens for lots of people. By external I mean one could, for example, be educated into being disciplined by way of rudimentary Pavlovian training at an early age. This is what happens with lots of people. But again, it falls out of habit.

Weightlifting lends itself to productivity nicely. You write down the workout, track the weights and reps, then evaluate performance to plan the next workout. The key is progressive overload - you slowly increase the weight / number of reps once you hit your previously set targets. You can do this when building a routine. You start light, set a few tasks with set times. Track your performance and use it to progressively improve your plan. As discipline is built you'll be able to manage a more demanding routine. Soon sitting down to work on a project / get some exercise / stay on top of sleep becomes effortless habit. There are a few scripts I've written to manage routine tracking so far. Recently starting putting it together as a convenient app.

>>37931 Good insight anon. I have had a similar situation with books, especially when I have 6 or 7 books waiting for me to read them. The problem comes with the idea that I'd have to read them linearly, front to end, and absorb every information in it sequentially before I can say I know this subject, and somehow expecting to come out an expert afterwards. I've found it's a lot better to treat them as a reference of sorts, or to read them once you come up with a need for the contents of the book. Another corollary is that one reads sections of the book as the need arises, not the whole book, and that one can skip around, forward and back, so that the pieces fit together. Kind of how a program, which is stored linearly, executes. The great thing about programming, which is said often but seldom really emphasized, is that the computer itself is the teacher. You try things, and the program responds, and there you both gain tangible experience and the need to understand specific things relevant to your current problem. As with studying, you go and address those things that are relevant to your task. In the end, the stuff that's in the books isn't going anywhere, so really there's no hurry. The setting of deadlines is sadly a product of our complex society. If you have a deadline for a term paper, well, that is an external motivation not really your own; in that case you'll have to find your own reasons to get this task done, even if it's just freeing up your weekend.