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Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as a solopreneur, I work only 3 hours a day, more like 3 x 50 minutes laps with 15 min breaks in between.

Also each lap is dedicated to one activity, first is manufacturing where I work on my project (the actual coding part), second is traffic (this is the dreaded marketing/outreach part) and finally is the optimization part (seo, increasing conversion rates, improving design, etc).

I've seen that the diversity of this work prevents you from getting bored and also is very good for your sites because if you keep working on just coding your sites seldom make any money.

The 3 hours limit is because after that i can happily watch tv, spend time with my family or just work on my other hobbies besides computers guilt free.

P.s. When you try to do as much work as you can, i believe you still only get 3 hours of work done - yet you feel guilty of not doing enough which causes unhappiness.

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Sorry is this is rude but how do you make a living only working 3 hours a day? Are you products already established?

No it isn't rude at all. Yes, some sites are already established but I also launch at least one new site every month to add to my income.

3 hours is a lot of work if done without distraction. I think the key is to make your work more mechanical and less creative.

I have a system that I have perfected over the years which helps me do this[1]. It's like a stupid step by step list where each item links to a document which is another stupid step by step list that I follow like a "Robot" for these 3 hours. When you do it this way, it makes it quite easy and 3 hours daily is more than enough to launch a small to medium size project in a month (I think there are less than 200 items in total and about 50% of it you can easily outsource).

[1] http://i.imgur.com/i1oBM2t.png

I've had some success with that approach and am considering adopting it as my "goto" approach (over my current approach, Trello, for which I just stare at all the cards on the board and panic at how much I have to do).

When a deadline is coming up, I take a 10 minute "organization break" and list the actual, concrete steps that need to be mechanically performed in order to complete the task. I think the problem is that my mind tends to get hung up on abstract task descriptions and I start overanalyzing. For instance, "Design welcome page" will turn into a wasted day of messing around with colors, fonts, and layout positioning. On the other hand, "Add X, Y, Z to prototype welcome page" is a much more concrete task and it defines completion so that I can move on to the next task on the list.

(Btw, you could turn your nested-robotic-link-list into a quick webapp that I bet would get a decent number of users.)

That's great - mind sharing the other tabs as well? :)

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