Table of contents
Child pages
Related pages
- Becoming a better / more-efficient / faster programmer (Programming)
- /wiki/spaces/ds/pages/2163464
- How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
Related external websites
Books
The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
- Amazon
- Wikipedia - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- This has a pretty good summary.
- It's highly, highly recommended by Scooby: "This $8 book changed my life many years ago... it will change your life forever."
- 2012.09.17 - Time Management For Success In Bodybuilding And Life
- There's a really good summary of the videos at the bottom.
- Shorter summary:
- Lecture 1
- You need time management to make sure your time is not wasted on things that aren't important to you.
- If you don't know exactly what you're trying to achieve, or if you don't have a plan, you'll never achieve it.
- 7 Habits helps you determine what your goals are and break them into small chunks that you can work on every day.
- With this time management approach, every day you make a little progress towards your goals, and it makes you feel awesome that you're making your dreams happen.
- Lecture 2
- Good goals are:
- specific
- measurable
- time-bounded
- realistic
- The book "7 Habits" provides a great way to plan your day:
- You begin by defining your roles.
- Then for each of those roles, you come up with long-term goals,
- and for each of those goals you break it into daily tasks.
- Good goals are:
- Lecture 3
- Lecture 1
- Making Goals
- 2012.09.17 - Time Management For Success In Bodybuilding And Life
Getting Things Done
- Wikipedia - Getting Things Done
Time Management that Doesn't Suck
- Amazon
- Sample Chapter
- Results-fixated thinking makes it hard to achieve things. In order to accomplish really major things, we need to ignore the final result.
- From reading the sample chapter, this guy seems to know what he's talking about, although his style is unusually informal.
Summary
The Four-Hour Workweek
- Amazon
- TODO: Summarize the tips he has in this.
Other books
- First Things First
- The Habitual Hustler: Daily Habits of 50 Self-Employed Entrepreneurs
- Amazon
- this was by Corey Breier, one of Francis Pedraza's cofounders at their task-automation start-up, "Invisible Technologies".
- Heads Up: Software Development
- You need to write out all of the desired features for a product, estimate how long each will take to build, and then talk with the customer to figure out which are the most important to get done first.
- You then need to work in 1-week sprints.
Work habits of successful people
Daily routines
- Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
- 2015.11.24 - Thought Catalog - 12 Daily Routines Of Famous People In History – And What You Should Take From Each
- no citations :/
Articles / videos
- David Foster Wallace (Source)
- Charlie Rose (CR): What will you do with that year?
DFW: If past experience holds true, I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
CR: Worrying about not writing. Not: 'worrying about what to write'?
DFW: Right. Worrying about not writing.
- Charlie Rose (CR): What will you do with that year?
- Tom Francis
- A thing I've got better at lately is getting a lot of work done without burning out. Here's what I'm trying:
To avoid burnout: any time you're stuck, frustrated or distracted, be very willing to stop work and do whatever you want.
To get lots done: any time you're not working, occasionally ask yourself if you feel like working.
If the answer's no many times in a row, take a look at your to-do list and find something tiny, or break a bigger thing up into tiny steps. (Source) - Lesson I have learnt a million times but still frequently forget: always seriously consider doing the bare minimum effort version of a thing
So often assumptions about standards it has to meet, or flaws that would be unacceptable, are obviously false when you step back a bit. (Source)
- A thing I've got better at lately is getting a lot of work done without burning out. Here's what I'm trying:
- 2017.05.15 - Twitter - Tiago Forte - Twitter thread
- I'm increasingly convinced that THE most important thing in productivity is to end every cycle with a clear milestone or deliverable
- TODO: Copy over the rest of it.
Particular Habits
Focus
- “He that pursues two Hares at once, does not catch one and lets t’other go.” - Ben Franklin
Remove distractions
- Me:
- Use your hosts file to block all news / gaming / video websites.
- Have two users on your computer. Do work on a non-administrator account, so that you can't change the hosts file from within that account. It adds just a little more friction, hopefully enough to get you to think about whether you really want to procrastinate.
- Uninstall Steam and GOG Galaxy, and all other videogames.
- Use your hosts file to block all news / gaming / video websites.
- Block distracting websites.
- Block totally distracting websites via your hosts file.
- These are sites that you never have any productive reason for visiting. Examples: facebook.com, nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com. StayFocusd actually provides a pretty good list of distracting sites to start with.
- Use StayFocusd for potentially-distracting sites that you still want to be able to access.
- Examples: YouTube, Wikipedia, Quora(?), Reddit(?). I recall being frustrated on occasion that StayFocusd was blocking some useful information on those sites, but I'd already run down all my StayFocusd time on nytimes.com.
- Block totally distracting websites via your hosts file.
- Joel on Software:
- Get away from interruptions
- Don't keep your email / IM running. Open it every 30 minutes at most.
- NW: This one really works.
- Find an office / quiet place free from distractions.
- Get into work late and leave late, so you avoid the noise.
- Don't keep your email / IM running. Open it every 30 minutes at most.
- Get away from interruptions
Break up the task into many subtasks
- 2013.03.28 - Justin Kan (founder of Justin.tv) - How to Do Anything
- "I’ve found that when faced with a set of seemingly insurmountable challenges, the first step towards making it easier is to break things down into as large a set of small individual tasks as possible."
Don't think too much about it, just get going
- I remember when I spent two months in Spain I had some kind of epiphany at some point where I stopped caring if my grammar or pronunciation was bad, and I would just spit out my best guess. And I remember that I started learning a lot faster once I started doing that.
- Notch:
- "I bought a new midi controller I won't use because I gave away the old one I wasn't using."
Someone responds: "What's the point of buying to not use the product?"
"The false idea that if I only had the right tools I would be super creative."
"By the way, the real trick to being creative is to not think about it, just do. You can go back and fix it later when you're in the zone."
- "I bought a new midi controller I won't use because I gave away the old one I wasn't using."
- Ira Glass
- ...nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me–is that all of us who do creative work, like y'know, we get into it, and we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like, there's a gap–that for the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good, OK? It's not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you, y'know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be, they knew it fell short. It didn't have the special thing that we wanted it to have, and the thing what to do is–Everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you're going through it right now, if you're just getting out of that phase, you gotta know it's totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're gonna finish one story. Because it's only by actually going through a volume of work that you're actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. In my case, like, I took longer to figure out how to do this than anybody I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It's gonna take you awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. And you just have to fight your way through that, OK? (Source)
- Tom Francis
- http://www.pentadact.com/2011-03-12-analysing-happiness/
Do what you want to be in the mood to do. You can also get stuff done that you don’t feel like doing, just by starting to do it. Your brain only resists up until the point you actually start the job, at which point it starts to focus on doing it. You do what you want to be in the mood to do, and soon you’re in the mood to do it. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the single most useful piece of information I’ve discovered about the way my brain works in 29 years of having one.
- http://www.pentadact.com/2011-03-12-analysing-happiness/
Take a stimulant
- Get the Tony Hsieh quote on how he was writing his book: it was something like "I found it easy to write when I was in the mood, but I found it hard to get into the mood. I ended up just taking a lot of Excedrin since it has a lot of caffeine and I wrote the book in two weeks."
Misc articles to categorize the advice for
- Extract the information from this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html?emc=eta1
- Template - 2016 - Q2 OKRs, Calendar, and Daily Schedule.docx
- 2009.10.04 - Kalzumeus - Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity
- Working Longer Hours Is Not A Competitively Defensible Advantage
- Why Smart People Keep Falling For This
- Poor Metrics For Productivity
- Hours worked
- Good Metrics For Productivity
- Just assign an arbitrary value to tasks, based on your best guess of how much value they add for the business. Then, track how long it takes to complete the tasks, and figure out where you’re adding disproportionate amounts of value and where you are spinning your wheels. Do more of the former, less of the latter. When in genuine doubt about the value, guess what it would cost to have somebody else do it for you.
- The Pseudo-Wage
- If you want to earn $100 an hour, you’d better not busy yourself with $5 an hour tasks.
- You’re Measuring Productivity. Now, Improve It
- Productivity Technique #1: Outsource.
- Outsource anything that your personal presence does not add value to. Equivalently, outsource anything where the replacement price is less than your desired pseudo-wage.
- Productivity Technique #2: Automate Your Processes.
- A startup’s most important product is the process the startup uses to create products.
- Productivity Technique #3: Eliminate Unproductive Uses of Time.
- I use RescueTime. If you don’t, install it today and spend some time aggressively categorizing what websites are worthwhile for you to be on. Consider this a very, very effective process improvement.
- Examples:
- I used to spend much, much more time on blogging than I do currently. The shorter articles typically take me about an hour to write, whereas this article took me about four. However, my long essays produce more traffic, more discussion, more links, and better writing than the shorter articles — and vastly out of proportion to the time invested.
- Worker Smarter, Not Harder. Then Go Home.
- 2010.08.25 - Kalzumeus - The Hardest Adjustment To Self Employment
- 2016.05.17 - NYTimes - Where does the time go?
Exercises
- Exercise to help you become more productive: do some boring, repetitive task for 5-10 minutes to get you used to doing a boring repetitive task (which is a lot of what success is). I got this idea while creating calendar events every 30 minutes to remind me to log my time.
Misc ideas
- When you consider what you want to get done in the next week, you may know that certain tasks are large enough that they need to go on separate days from each other, and thus it may make sense to assign a task to a particular day without having actually scheduled a time for it (e.g. "I want to play chess one day, bridge another day, poker a third day, so I'm going to add one of those to each of several different days"). So you should have "buckets" of tasks for particular days, where the tasks don't have scheduled times.
- I should really have a set daily routine where each morning I decide what I will get done that day and each evening I review what I have done that day.
- The value you add when working is the product of the importance of the task you're working on and your level of effort on that task. So it may be better to work on some lower-importance task if you'll be more motivated to work on it.
- Consider getting a log book (moleskin) specifically for tracking your time. It's too easy to ignore it when it's on your phone. It's just like when I had to take the lsat advice to my wall so that I would be continually prompted to look at it.
- It might help to do some kind of fun warm-up exercise before you need to get work done so that you're in the right frame of mind.
- Examples
- Playing blitz might get you into a frame of mind of making decisions quickly.
- Examples
- Set an alarm on your phone for a certain number of minutes in the future (say, 15 minutes). Use that to time-box what you're working on.
- Source: Yang does this.
- 2016.08.22 - Agh, I've got it! I was frustrated that JIRA doesn't give me a great top-down view of what I'm working on, and it just struck me that I should use Confluence for that: have the different projects I'm working on as different pages, and then link to JIRA tickets where I can get more in-depth on how I'm solving those particular problems. The particular thing I was working on was making my WordPress mobile-friendly, and documenting on the wiki other ideas I had but didn't have time to implement now and didn't have time to create JIRA tickets for.
- 2018.04.10 - Twitter - ajlkn
How to ship daily w/o burning out:
Set a finite/realistic goal for the day ("add feature X" or "implement part Y of feature X")
Work until said goal is complete
STOP and go outside/read a book/do something else – even if you finished early and can squeeze in more work
- Use Notepad to keep a stack of tasks
- The current task is at the top of the list
- As you go down the list, you have tasks that are not going to be relevant immediately.
- Close any windows that are not relevant to your current task.
- Use alcohol / caffeine to make yourself productive during your free time!
- Don't use it while at work, save their effects for your personal projects.
- I did this while playing CS but it only occurred to me recently (2016/01) to use it for programming.
- Notes from work:
- Close gmail for 30+ mins at a time so you don't keep getting distracted by random emails / gchat.
- Move to one of the offices for 30+ mins at a time so you don't get distracted by noise.
- When working on a bunch of tickets, prioritize those tickets where you need to do something so that a dataset can start running, or a csv can start being scored, or a model can be passed to a co-pilot. Only after those are done should you then work on tickets where someone is asking you to investigate why something is the way it is.
- Keep a piece of paper or Notepad window where you list all of the model builds on your plate right now and what the next step is for each of them. This is really, really helpful for working on multiple model-builds in parallel! It makes it much easier to switch between them without getting disoriented.
- I've been finding whistling to Magician soundtracks to be helpful to keep me in the zone.
- I already knew that listening to house music helped me get in the zone, but it hadn't occurred to me that whistling would also help.
- 2015.12.03 - A big thing to learn IMO is to separate the act of remembering that there's a particular thing you need to do and doing that thing.
- In the past I would normally remember I need to do something and then immediately start working on it.
- The problem with this approach is that you can end up getting distracted over and over again.
- I think a much better technique is:
- have a system for organizing your tasks
- whenever you think of a new task, instead of working on it immediately, write it down and come back to it later.
- refusing to work on it immediately may be a helpful way to get out of your old habit of allowing yourself to be distracted over and over again
Prioritization / Focus
- I think one of my major weaknesses is not having an organized method of prioritizing my efforts.
- 2015.03.07 - today is Saturday. Before I started doing anything I forced myself to write up a list of things I wanted to get done today in Notepad. After I wrote the first thing I wanted to jump in and start doing it, but I forced myself to keep trying to remember other things I had wanted to get done today. Having all of them up in front of me definitely helped me to spend an appropriate amount of time on each.
- Get the quote from Tim Ferris(?) that talks about the four boxes: urgent / not urgent, important / not important.
Being Productive with Email
2014.07.14 - Infer.com CEO Vik Singh - 3 Gmail tricks that can save you hours every week
Take 20 Minute Breaks With Fun Stuff
2014.10.17 - One thing that has been working really well for me recently is that I'll read 10 pages of a book (which maybe takes 30-60 minutes) or work for 30-60 minutes on my AutoRespond program, and then watch 10-20 minutes of a fun YouTube video on how to make games with GameMaker. The video-watching relaxes me and I think it gives my brain a break, and then I can jump back into reading / working.
From John T Reed's book "Succeeding":
Making a daily to-do list is one of the best yet simplest time management tricks. I once had an apartment complex in Fort Worth where I employed a resident manager and a half-time maintenance man. The new manager was foaming at the mouth at me. She told me there was such a huge backlog of work that I needed to hire a second full-time maintenance man for at least three months. She said the current maintenance man agreed with her. I fired her and went to Texas and took over her job while I looked for a replacement. I made a list of the stuff that had to be repaired at the complex, prioritized each item by numbering them 1, 2, 3, etc., and gave it to the half-time maintenance man. He completed all the work in about two weeks. When I asked why he had agreed with the fired manager, he said, "The previous manager never gave me a list. There was so much to do, I didn't know where to begin."
Source: John T Reed, "Succeeding" (2nd Ed) - http://www.johntreed.com/
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight
But they while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night
------
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty-seconds' worth of distance run
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it...
http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hir ... ductivity/
Tools
- Lists
- Zapier - 40 of the Best To-Do Apps for Personal Task Management
- This looks really useful.
- Zapier - 40 of the Best To-Do Apps for Personal Task Management
RescueTime
Techniques
Time allocation
- Tom Francis, when working on Gunpoint (and presumably Heat Signature) would decide ahead of time how much time he wanted to spend on various tasks that he needed to complete. (Source)
OKRs
- Use OKRs or something similar: have yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goals. For each objective, define success in a measurable way, usually with several "key results".
Task Lists / To-Do Lists
- These are extremely important and extremely effective at making you more productive
- If you don't have all of your daily goals in front of you, it's easy to spend too much time on one task. But if you see the list of things you need to do, you speed up how quickly you get minor tasks done, since it's clear that there are X number of other things to do. By having all of the tasks clearly in front of you, your conception of "the whole task" changes from just the task in front of you to the set of all tasks for that day.
- Not using these makes you just forget what needs to get done
- The problem with forgetting what needs to get done is that different tasks may be best suited to getting done at different times / places. So you NEED to be able to know what ALL of your tasks are so that you can choose the task that is best suited to getting done at that time and place. For example, if you only have 5 free minutes and don't have a computer, you need to know all of the tasks you have that can get done in 5 minutes without a computer.
- Use 'Outline mode' in MS Word:
- https://support.office.com/en-nz/articl ... e650e5d832
- This is what Nicky showed me.
- Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity
What you do is this: every time you do something — anything — useful during the day, write it down in your Anti-Todo List on the card.
Each time you do something, you get to write it down and you get that little rush of endorphins that the mouse gets every time he presses the button in his cage and gets a food pellet.
And then at the end of the day, … take a look at today’s card and its Anti-Todo list and marvel at all the things you actually got done that day.
The Pomodoro Technique
- What the Pomodoro Technique has made me realize is that the biggest problems I have are that:
- If I don't have a set deadline to finish a task, I'll drag out the time I take to do it (eg reading a book, coding a problem). The 25-minute deadline really keeps me moving as quickly as I can move.
- I have a tendency to get sidetracked with reading articles which aren't that important. It's like a new form of watching TV. Now that I'm thinking in terms of 25-minute segments of productivity, it makes me look at reading articles in a whole new way: I think, "What a waste to spend 2 hours on those articles! I could do four 25-minute sessions in that time!"
Listen to music
- I spent a few days playing FF8 and then asked myself why I found myself getting swept into it, while that doesn't happen with work. I think part of the reason was that FF8 has constant music, so I don't get distracted by other thoughts creeping into my mind.
- Later: FF8 also doesn't really require much effort. It's like an interactive novel. I find that I often stop doing work when I get stressed out about it, and the same thing happens with games (eg 'rage quit').
- I tried applying this to work by listening to a Magic Tape and it worked. I had previously used Magic Tapes while programming but I can't remember having considered them for non-programming work.
Sleep
- I've noticed that getting enough sleep helps me to avoid procrastinating (see Journal entry below for 2015.12.08).
Paper systems
Franklin planner
43 folders system
- 2010.03.12 - YouTube - OfficeArrow - How to Create and Use the 43 Folders System
- Summary: get 12 folders for the 12 months of the year and 31 folders for the days of the month, and put any papers you need to refer to on a future date in either the month-folder (if it's more than 31 days away) or the day folder (if it's within the next 31 days).
- This method seems to be totally replaced by Google Calendar.
Articles / Videos
- Bart Procrastinates And Does Not Revise His Exam - The Simpsons
- 2018.05.21 - Gates Notes - Leonardo is one of the most fascinating people ever
- There was one downside to having such broad interests: He often switched his focus to new domains right in the middle of a project, leaving works unfinished. Here’s a classic example: After Leonardo won a coveted commission to create a large statue of a nobleman perched on a horse, Leonardo procrastinated by going down multiple rabbit roles. For example, he dissected horses to understand their anatomy, created new systems for feeding horses, and designed cleaner stables. He never completed the statue, and he never published the treatise on horses he started.
Journal
- 2015.03 - For a day or two I was finding it extremely effective to start the day by writing out a list of tasks I wanted to get done that day, and then keeping that list in front of me while I was working on each task.
- 2015.05.19 - I'm finding it very effective to schedule my time via Google Calendar. In the past, if I got an idea to do something (like "Oh, I need to order more protein powder..."), I would just do it immediately. What I've been trying the past few days is to not do it immediately, but instead to schedule it for an open block of time in the evening. I've been starting at 6:45pm and scheduling myself in 15-minute increments.
- 2015.12.08
- For the past few weeks I had not been getting as much sleep as I should have (~3-7 hrs/night).
- In the evenings I would always feel this kind of mental pain / anxiety that would compel me to try to relax by reading the NYT or RPS or Kotaku.
- Last night I got more sleep than normal (~8-9 hrs?) and I felt much more concentration today at work, and it's now 10:20pm and I'm still being very productive without feeling a compulsion to go read the NYT / RPS / Kotaku.
- 2018.02.01
- For the past few weeks I've had two Google Calendars open on my second desktop, with my Notepad++ "notes" file open on the right side (of the second Desktop). So what I do is, when I have a random thought or thing I want to file on my wiki, I instead just switch to my second desktop and put it in the "notes" file so I don't lose sight of whatever task I'm working on. I have the month-view of Google Calendar in the top-left quadrant, and the week-view in the bottom-left quadrant.
- 2018.05.11 - I took on an Upwork assignment where my client was a programmer, and we were kind of pair-programming the entire time (I was sharing my screen and he was giving me instructions of things to try), and we did a 16-hour day. I was pretty impressed at how long I was able to go. So maybe one way to help get yourself past procrastination is to pair-program, either by watching someone else code or by having someone else watch you code.
- 2018.05.20 - I did a pair programming session with John a few days ago where I watched him for an hour as he learned Angular, and then he watched me for an hour while I worked on Rhymecraft. While working on Rhymecraft I was thinking out loud, and I was relating how anxious and stressed I felt as I was working on it, and John at one point said, "Dude, relax." And from there on I focused on just trying to relax my body. A few days later I decided to work on Rhymecraft on my own and I focused a lot on my anxiousness and stress-level, and I just focused on making sure I was as relaxed as possible: so, not allowing myself to worry about how much more I needed to do, or how much I would be able to get done in that session, but instead just "putting one foot in front of the other" for two hours. And it worked! It was a productive two hours and I didn't feel at all stressed out while working, and the next day (today) I'm having another go at it. So: it may be a good idea to focus on your anxiousness levels and make adjustments to whatever you're doing and thinking to reduce them. It's a lot like when I was training for the marathon and would spend my time focused on how taxed my heart felt, so that I could adjust my intensity to not tire out my heart before I'd finish the distance I was going for.