Productivity

I don’t like to talk about productivity too much. It gets toxic. But yet, productivity is important. For me, honing these skills will allow me to achieve more in the future.

Knowing what to optimize for. You are at your most productive when:

1. It aligns with your interests
2. You have momentum going

Also see Time Management for good tips.

If you don’t feel productive, it’s also probably because you are not tracking it.

2022-08-09: Update, NO, I absolutely want to be 300% productive. It is not toxic. People who think it is toxic are not successful. Maximum productivity will allow me to reach my full potential.

• But before you try to maximize productivity, make sure you have the right objective. It’s the same thought about Ambition. It would be sad to get to the top of your ladder only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall.

BE EFFECTIVE, not Efficient

This is the MOST important tip I heard for Productivity from The 4-Hour Workweek.

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task in the most economical manner possible.

In other words:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

Being busy is a form of laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

To maximize productivity:

1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80-20 Rule)
2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law)

More ACTION, less Motion

Motion = planning and strategizing and learning Action = behavior that delivers an outcome

Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done, but really, you’re just preparing to get something done.

Priotize Action. Preparation is just another form of procrastination.

“Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in-between. Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.” → 4-hour workweek

Also look into the Compound Effect.

2023

i find myself still slow. I think I need to set timers, and create better deadlines. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siimonreynolds/2013/11/06/4-ways-to-work-much-faster/?sh=c9c385e78c79

1. Use A Timer On Every Major Task
2. Pretend Your Day Ends At 11am
3. Work At Home For An Hour Each Day
4. Try To Do Unimportant Tasks Within Ten Minutes

Bottlenecks

I think my goal is really to remove these bottlenecks that prevent me from doing maximal work. Such as connecting to these remote servers, which take so much time to set up every time.

Thinking and Typing

See Touch Typing

For beginners, I really like this site: https://www.keybr.com

Vim Dark Mode There are two aspects to being fast: Being able to think fast, and being able to convert what you think into code fast.

• Oftentimes, the bottleneck is not how fast you type, but rather how fast you think.
• There is this article that details some things to work on to improve the speed at which you think.

To think faster, you should PRACTICE. Also, you want to outline things before jumping into it. You want to understand 99% of it before coding. Once you have a clear path, you can just dive into it.

Do this with CS assignments.

The most common reason developers stop to think is that they did not fully understand some word or symbol.

Other Reflections

Rewarding yourself after a long day

November 26th 2022: I’m writing this note because I would like to reflect on what I am doing with my life. I just played 4 hours of online Poker last night, staying up to 5am. Why did I do that? It was terrible, I could have gone to bed at 2am but no, I had this urge to play Poker.

I think I Have this need to reward myself whenever I have a SUPERR productive day or week, like why? There really isn’t this need, just keep focus and grinding. Okay I also have this reflection about Meeting New People