Productivity

Just some notes. Eventually I'd like to turn this into a longish article to shortish book.

Intro

Most Writing is Crap

The internet is full of "# tricks for being more productive". They're mostly crap filled with things like "Make lists" and "don't procrastinate". These won't help.

One of the longest standing works is "Getting Things Done" not necessarily because it's great, but because it goes into depth. I don't even use the techniques in the book and I still read it every few years because it helps me think through what I should be doing.

Why I'm writing this

I've had issues with productivity through my whole life. I'm forgetful, I struggle with procrastination and distraction. I've struggled with these as a student, through internships and jobs and now as a small business owner.

My Approach

We're going to build up. I'm used to programming where the problem is broken down, then solved in pieces.

• Defining the problem
• Measuring the data
• Body
• Psychology
• Habits
• Systems
• Accounting

Defining the Problem

The first major challenge is that "Productivity" is a big, fuzzy, ill defined problem. And it means different things for different people. There are two core issues. The first is somewhat obvious; we the ratio of "things accomplished" to "time spent" to be higher. That could mean getting the same amount done in less time, or more done in the same amount of time, or many other variations. But every hour "after" we've "mastered productivity" should be more efficient.

But that's not really what people after. We're after a psychological change. We want to feel as though we've accomplished more, we want less stress about what needs to get done.

Reliability

I will argue that every one has tried keeping a "To-do list", probably many. They fail because at some point, we can no longer count on the things on the list getting done.

Body

I'll start here because the research on this topic is the clearest and it can have the greatest impact at the lowest cost.

Sleep

There are so many myths and bad beliefs around sleep. And almost everyone has bad habits. Fortunately, sleep is simple. That's not to say it isn't hard, it's just not complex.

The first thing is that you probably need 8 hours of sleep. The 8 hours is not a hard and fast rule, but it's a safe bet. If you ever have the opportunity (a week or two where you don't need to "get up"), a great experiment is to let your schedule drift and see how many hours of sleep you tend towards. Take note that your schedule may drift, but after a few days you'll find you're sleeping a consistent number of hours.

Another approach is to get your schedule stable at 8 hours (or more) and try cutting back by 15 minutes once every week. You'll find a time that works for you. However, for the rest of this section, I will refer to 8-hours as definitive because it's simpler.

The important thing here is to break any screwed up notion that getting by on less sleep or waking up earlier is somehow impressive or shows character. I cannot say how stupid this is. In particular, there is overwhelming research that diminished sleep can have enormous detrimental effects on decision making and critical thinking. And the best part of that is it impairs the individuals ability to recognize their own reduced capacity.

Falling Asleep

I have the great fortune of finding it easy to get to sleep. And I recognize that some people seriously struggle with insomnia. But there are a few things that can help.

I have done some research into this, both out of curiosity as well as to help my wife who often has trouble falling asleep. What I've found has helped her and even made it a bit easier for me to get to sleep. The first, most important thing - falling asleep can be a slow process. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. For some people, reaching stage 1 sleep can take half an hour and during stage 1 you will still be semi conscious, and that can last 10 minutes. So when going to sleep, commit to laying down, closing your eyes and waiting there for what will probably seem like hours.

But that's only half the battle. The other problem is that being locked in your own mind can be rough. It's easy to start worrying, start planning or anything else that will keep you awake. There's no silver bullet for this, but there are a lot of techniques. Try a few and one should work, if you exhaust my list, there are others, try those.

• Word Games: These don't work for me, but they work for my wife. There are lots of variations, but one example is "find a category and a word that belongs to that category so the last letter of the category is the first letter of the word", an answer would be "Food:Date".
• Counting breaths: this works best for me, I focus on slowing my breath down as much as is still comfortable and my breaths down from 100. I almost never make it down to 1.
• Clear your mind: this is difficult but can actually be a lot of fun. Try to clear your mind of any thought. When I do this I start by focusing on the concept of nothing, then on nothing at all.

Accounting

Once you have a system in mind, make sure you have a way of accounting.

Units

The most important key here is to have some "units" of productivity. For me, I assign every task a point value. One point is equal to ten minutes, if it's something I enjoy, I may assign 2 points to a 30 minute task, and if it's something I strongly dislike, I may assign 6 points to a 40 minute task.

How you actually do this is unimportant. What is important is that you can look at a block of time