Productivity

10 Ways To Improve Your Focus as a Programmer When You’re Distracted

Block Scheduling

6 Science-Based Methods To Stop Procrastinating

Get momentum by the 15-Minute Rule
Plan Your Days: proper planning prevents poor performance.
- A study in the British Journal of Health Psychology showed that when participants in the study intended to perform 20 minutes of exercise, only 34% of the study participants exercised that day. However, when the study participants actually scheduled their workout, 91% of them followed through with it.
Macro-Goals + Micro-Targets
Prioritize Your Sleep

How To Finish That Piece of Writing

... He suggested starting with 800 words. I was skeptical. 800 words seemed like such a piddling amount!

There was another unexpected benefit to my daily word goal: Before I started using this system, I had as much trouble letting myself quit for the day as I did getting started. After all, since I hadn’t finished my book, I didn’t really “deserve” to stop working, or so I thought. It meant that every day ended on a defeat, and I slunk away from my computer feeling disappointed.
With the word count goal, I felt successful, and when I reached it, I felt good about stopping.
In fact, after a few weeks, I raised my goal to 1,000 words because I knew I still had gas in the tank at 800 and I wanted a bit more of a challenge. 1,000 words felt really satisfying. A week of thousand-word days added up to a real chunk of writing, and a month of them meant I was sailing along.

Body Doubling

I work better in office. Maybe it works based on this.

Working together for better productivity

“WHAT IS BODY DOUBLING?

In simple terms, it’s merely being in the same room with another person who is having trouble getting things done on their own. As a body double, you don’t need to help or even say anything. All you need to do is just be there in the room, and through some invisible power, the other person is able to focus and finish their work. Buddies can do this over the phone for hours, simply keeping the line open—sometimes speaking, but mostly just silently being there.”

– Greg Riccardi in Sometimes It Takes Two

“Many people with ADHD find it easier to stay focused on housework, homework, bill paying, and other tasks when someone else is around to keep them company. The body double may just sit quietly. He may read, listen to music on headphones, or work on the task that the person with ADHD is working on. Hard work is simply more fun when someone else is nearby.”
– Patricia Quinn M.D., ADDitudeMag.com

Just 4 pages a day

kmt-lnh

In April 2021 I started to read 4 pages a day from big books I always wanted to read, but never had time for it. 4 pages and stop even if I get into the flow, 4 pages even if I'm falling asleep because it's so boring.

Not even 2 years in, I've already read the Bible, the Elements of Euclid, Zeldovich's Intro to Higher Math, and am in the middle of Das Kapital. The Great Books canon never looked more approachable.

Just 4 pages a day. It really adds up.

An On-Ramp to Flow

Before stepping away, leave the code in a state where it is Obviously Broken, but Easy to Fix.

Applying this technique means thinking about how to exit flow in a way that makes it easy to re-enter.

"Always know what the next thing to do is" is really powerful. I never end a work day without leaving a note for the next micro task I would have done if I could (or wanted to) keep going.

Getting things done in small increments

My trick for this, which has been working extremely well for me over the past few years, is to make very heavy use of GitHub Issues.

Everything I'm working on, no matter how small, starts as an issue.

I post a continuous stream of comments on that issue as I make progress - documenting what I tried, what failed, what I've figured out, what micro-decisions I've made.

Many of my GitHub repos, both public and private, have issues with dozens of comments, all of which are me just talking to myself.

This is the single best solution I've ever found to the "interruption" problem. If I get interrupted, or distracted, I can read through my issue thread later and pick up where I left off.

I wrote a bit more about this approach here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

A recent example issue: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-enrichments-gpt/issues/2

Collections

Children