Stop being a productivity nerd, and chill out

http://feint.me/2009/12/chill-out-productivity/

by feint • 17 years ago

80 45 17 years ago

feint.me

bgray• 17 years ago

This reminds me of another post which had a great quote, "Make Lists. Not Too Much. Mostly Do."

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989424

augustus• 17 years ago

I agree.

What works for me as a programmer is to get into the zone as quickly as possible. I like to set aside one day of the week to handle miscellaneous tasks. Other days its all about the zone.

There is a story about Schwab (Carnegie Steel) hiring a consultant to gave him the best productivity advice. The advice was to start with the most important thing first. Stick with it and when its done move onto the next important task.

Schwab loved the advice and promptly paid the consultant his fee. It worked even then.

trapper• 17 years ago

I'd like to know, does anyone actually do all these "productivity" methods? I've never known anyone who tries all the things you read on blogs and sticks with it for very long.

mstevens• 17 years ago

I've stuck with a fair bit of Getting Things Done for a couple of years. And I think it really helps me keep organised.

mschy• 17 years ago

Me too.

I get a lot more done, and have a lot less stress.

JeffJenkins• 17 years ago

I have a friend or two who do fairly significant amounts of tracking and auditing. I think the key fact is that they are doing that about their work time, not their play time. It's especially important if you're not working from an office and have a dangerous amount of flexibility.

Aegean• 17 years ago

Really good point. By nature of my startup, I have to achieve highly complex tasks in short time. These are heavyweight tasks that require high precision design decisions and, I often find the following two things happen to me in cycles:

1.) I feel highly motivated to achieve the task, and I become a very high achiever. I finish a task in 2-3 days that would otherwise be achieved by inefficient communication and discussion of a 5-employee team in a month. I do this without feeling any obligation to do it and without thinking about schedules, startup deliverables etc. I concentrate solely on the design problem and the reward of achieving it. I feel rewarded when it is finished. It feels like a celebration of the mind's capabilities.

2.) I look ahead and start planning about deliverables and deadlines. Since the tasks are so overwhelming on their own, the overall project looks very complicated. I feel overwhelmed, freaked out, and immediately stop having progress. I also start to have stress-related health degradation signs, and I get into an unproductivity cycle that is very hard to break.

I got this so many times that now I try hard to find ways to keep myself in (1) without going into (2). I find that keeping my focus on the challenge but not the time schedule helps. Think of it this way, if you stay in (1), you will get very timely progress anyway, so no need to think about schedules and deadlines.

It is also ironic how the same task may look so overwhelming and so much fun in different perspectives. It is actually fun that becomes your hell when you get schedules, deadlines, competitors and finance in the loop.

philk• 17 years ago

I think the problem with these productivity methods isn't that it's bad to track what you're doing but that:

a) They impose a mental tax on you; it's hard to get into a flow state when you're busy thinking about whether you're doing what you should.

b) Make chores/minor tasks, etc., appear to be a good thing (after all, you're doing something productive) and idly staring into space a bad thing, even though the latter enables you to recharge your batteries so you can focus more intently on what's important. I think this is exacerbated because if you can't think of what big important thing you're supposed to be doing right now it's tempting to do something small just so you aren't "wasting time".

c) Also I've found that when I've done these things I wind up gaming the hell out of them so that I end up looking good by whatever metric is measured without actually achieving much more.

rapind• 17 years ago

Stop telling me what to do.

shimon• 17 years ago

Right on. And stop assuming that the work habits you feel match your personality and goals are fully generalizable.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

> "If you’re boring, predictable and don’t enjoy having fun, then you should follow this advice."

and stop judging me.

redherring• 17 years ago

I support the author. I might get things done faster than you while I manage to chill out. There is no blueprint on how to be productive. We just have to try different things and adapt it to ourselves. He posted his thoughts, and he didn't ask anyone to follow it.

mtoledo• 17 years ago

"You’ll end up spending your entire day “being productive” without actually achieving anything."

Well, if you didn't achieve anything, you aren't really being productive.

I think a lot of people get confused between 'what you do' and 'how you do'.

Choosing the most important thing you need to do in the day first, or the 3 most important things you need done, etc is "what to do". When you have issues with that you spend your day working in things that dont optimally lead you towards your goals.

Doing it in the zone, at night while you spend the day on twitter or hacker news, etc is 'how you do'. When people have issues with this they get to the end of the day and notice the tasks they set up to do haven't been done to the person's full potential.

Auditing your time and thinking 'should I really be doing this?' is a 'what to do' tool. It has nothing to do with the fact you work at night or during the day.

feint9• 17 years ago

"You’ll end up spending your entire day “being productive” without actually achieving anything."

it was a pun (an oxymoron to be exact). Im sorry im so unfunny.

Whats wrong with doing things that don't lead you towards your goals?

arnorhs• 17 years ago

The main argument of this article seems to be that it is not fun to spend time on what you should be doing... Actually, if you have two options, one is something you should be doing, the other something you shouldn't, both are fun.

Personally, I'd work on whatever I should be doing.... If it's as fun (or serves my long-term objective, need, wants, better)

feint9• 17 years ago

no thats not the point - sorry if i didn't make it clearer. I love my job and love working.

my point is people get too caught up on time tracking, goals, gtd etc. Im wondering if they will look back in 5 years and go - sure I got things done, but did I have fun?

discojesus4• 17 years ago

"Honestly if you were to work like this you may as well work for a big corporation where you can save yourself the hassle of having to audit your time – as some jerk of a manager will do it for you."

Your managers have other crap to do than to watch what you're doing 24/7 (or "8/5" for that matter) - they're much more likely to just hand you something so they can get it off their own plate and just expect you to handle it.

" You’ll end up spending your entire day “being productive” without actually achieving anything."

"Being productive" == achieving things. If you're not achieving something, you're not being productive (either because you're not doing anything [procrastination] or because you are doing the wrong things [i.e. your priorities are not set properly])

"Rather than this stupid auditing crap, come up with 3 tasks that are most important to your success. Do each one first thing in the day (my day is backwards btw, as in my day starts at around 9pm at night, im a bit wierd). Take a break in between each task and then feel free to procrastinate after."

This DOES NOT WORK. The only case in which this is a viable strategy is if you work for yourself and have no hard deadlines and you just want to keep yourself from reading reddit all day long - it doesn't work in most real-world situations. Like for example, your boss puts another project on your plate. But that never happens...

Take the advice of the late Randy Pausch - keep a time journal [http://www.scribd.com/doc/2519267/Time-Log-Sheet], and REVIEW that data (the data is useless if you just fill out time journals and let them sit in some folder somewhere).

feint9• 17 years ago

"This does not work"? It works for me. and i think you missed the joke about being productive and not achieving anything

discojesus4• 17 years ago

""This does not work"? It works for me."

Inheriting money might make someone a millionaire - that doesn't make "Have a rich uncle" a viable financial plan. "Having a rich uncle" therefore "does not work". The same goes for making a simple list of your three goals for the day - for 99% of people, it just doesn't work because your simple plan is most likely going to be blown to hell by some emergency/meeting/new project that just landed on your plate. I believe you when you say that it works for you, but it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people.

" i think you missed the joke about being productive and not achieving anything"

I got the joke - you almost certainly meant that someone who is "being productive and not achieving anything" is engaging in busywork but not doing anything worthwhile, which would mean that they are active (i.e. they are not procrastinating), but they are not properly prioritizing the actions they take. I covered that case explicitly.

socratees• 17 years ago

Very truthful. Stop following what everyone does and create your own plan. Besides, only you really know when you do your best, and you don't have to audit 24 hours of your day.

Unearned guilt is a bad thing.

btilly2• 17 years ago

The article missed the most important point, which is mental flow. If you are engaged in anything complex then a certain amount of your job can only be done when you have established a good mental flow. Tracking your time closely will keep you from ever entering mental flow, and therefore blocks productivity.

Put into pg language, detailed time tracking only works for people on a manager's schedule, and not those who are makers. See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html for an explanation of that.

mikemainguy2• 17 years ago

I disagree, part of the value of time tracking is that you can illustrate the many distractions you have during a day and consciously block off time to get into flow. Obviously this doesn't apply if you set your own priorities and objectives, but often (in organizations bigger than 1) your priorities are set or impacted by someone else's contribution.

btilly2• 17 years ago

That depends on how you do time tracking.

The most commonly described strategy is to write down what you are doing every 15 minutes. That definitely kills mental flow. A more useful one is to get a Freshbooks account and track whenever you change tasks.

When someone talks about time tracking I usually assume they are talking about something like the first strategy.

tel2• 17 years ago

This blog scrapes HN comments and reposts them on the blog without permission.

In the process it serializes the threading and so it's going to destroy the threaded nature of these reposted conversations. In this way it's rebranding the information served here, misrepresenting the attention commenters here give the post, and confusing the outside reader.

I know there's an attempt to smooth these difficulties with the "This comment was originally posted on [[Hacker News]]" line but that leaves me still confused as to the origin and meaning of the comment quoted. I interpret that to mean, ridiculously, that commenters at HN gave their permission explicitly to repost comments on Feint. Actually, it even appears to me that they personally moved it.

This is, of course, very similar to the the controversy AllThingsDigital stirred up a little while ago (http://waxy.org/2009/04/all_things_digital_and_transparency_...) but I don't think Feint is really making a large improvement over that situation.

feint9• 17 years ago

its a backtype plugin used by hundreds of blogs

sfk• 17 years ago

And it's equally idiotic on your blog as it is on hundreds of other blogs. What is the point of having the same "content" posted over and over again in a multitude of venues?

tel2• 17 years ago

Like sfk, I don't think its popularity makes it any more valid, though similarly I also don't mean to single you out. Linking and sharing information is undoubtedly one of the foundations of the internet, but at the same time identity/anonymity is important. Backtype provides an interesting consumer service, but at the same time its plugin is destructive to maintenance of identity.

If you're drawing from HN, separate it clearly from the comments left on at your blog and somehow summarize, emulate, or eliminate threads. Otherwise it's damaging to all around.

edw519• 17 years ago

When I was a junior programmer, I wanted to maximize productivity which I defined as output / input.

As I gained experience, I wanted to maximize output only, figuring that input would naturally minimize itself as I got more proficient.

Now I only worry about 2 things:

  1. maximizing output of the top item on my list
  2. making sure the right item is at the top of my list

This seems to be working much better than any other approach I have ever taken. When I make the most progress on the most important item, things like project management, efficiency, and time management suddenly seem much less important.

xcombinator• 17 years ago

Well put. With computers you can replicate something ad infinitum. If you get to do something no one has ever done before, you can make input irrelevant.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

The only thing I seem to worry about is making sure that the total amount of work on my 'list' is smaller when I quit the day than when I begin it. Most days I seem to be losing that battle.

discojesus4• 17 years ago

I don't think this is the criterion you want - if I won the lottery, for example, my to-do list would explode with all the new possibilities presented before me; however, if that happened, I certainly wouldn't consider it a bad day. :)

dchs• 17 years ago

Everybody's different.

mikemainguy2• 17 years ago

Spoken like a young creative (at a startup? in the valley?) who is only responsible to himself. Once you need to work as part of a team, time management becomes important because you have to manage the interruptions + coordination with other people who depend on each other to be productive.

Yes, however, time management and team coordination do add overhead. Teams, however are much more scaleable that individuals. In addition, they are also fault tolerant.

Put in hacker terms... a great programmer is an superfast solid state drive, whereas a team is a raid 6 array with a bunch of disks that are slower and of varying speeds.

Overall, the solid state disk might individually perform better (and possibly be cheaper), but generally most people tend to agree the RAID array is a better way to go if you can afford it.

feint9• 17 years ago

yes, im young and possibly creative (debatable) and do work at a startup...but unfortunately not in the vallley.

I do manage a team (of 8) very creating and talented developers and designers. I don't force my ideas on them - in fact i let them work however and whenever they want.

The reason why I don't like time management - it focuses on time rather than result. Tim Ferriss explains this much better than me. 80% of the work you do will only result in 20% of the product. Therefore most of your time is actually wasted. To fix this, one needs to focus on results and efficiency rather than time. Pick the three most important tasks (which more often than not aren't the most urgent, suprisingly) and tackle those.

aditya• 17 years ago

I know this has been asked before but are there other people that focus better at night? Have you modified your sleep schedule to do this more? If so, how?

msie• 17 years ago

My best hours are between 12am and 4am. It seems that I have unfortunately fallen into a rhythm where my brain is ready to tackle programming around that time. All other times I find it hard to concentrate when I have opportunities to watch tv or walk around outside.

So my sleep schedule has adjusted to this. I sleep at 4am and wake up around 11am. You just have to be working late enough for so many nights for this to happen. I think my biggest problem is working from home.

chewbranca• 17 years ago

I used to be just like this, (and still am in some ways) where I am most productive at night. I enjoy the peace and quiet when no one is around to bother you. During the day there are endless distractions but at night that all goes away. As I said, I used to be like this, now I have a baby and being a night owl is no longer an option. I have been progressively migrating towards starting my day at 7am, and I have to admit, I enjoy it. Yeah I've had some great late night hacking sessions, but being able to start working early and be done by 5 or 6 is very nice.

I find it much easier to separate work from home life when I start my day with work, as opposed to spending all day knowing that at some point I will in fact have to get to work. I've found that having things hang over my head like that really messes with my motivations, I prefer to take the approach of work or don't work, but nothing in between.

I also work from home, which is not only complicated by the fact that I have a baby at home, but also that my office is sitting off in a corner in the living room. The best solution I have found is to find a way to isolate yourself and convince your mind that you are in the same mode as if you were working late at night without anyone around. I have a nice pair of headphones that block out most noise, and I purchased standing paper room dividers so I can 'shut' my door and focus on work.

So while I've had a lot of fun being a night owl hacker, I find I live a more balanced productive life getting work done first and early. As they say, business before pleasure, with a personal corollary of don't combine the two.

Stop being a productivity nerd, and chill out

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