Effective Productivity Hacks from 80 Startup Founders

When I was a kid and procrastinating my homework, my father would sit me down at the dining room table, stand over me, and command "put the pencil on the paper. Move your hand. Move. Your. Hand."

Productivity hacks are nice tricks to get you over a little resistance sometimes. But for really bad blockings, nothing beats just sucking it up and doing the work. I can't always get the perfect cup of coffee. Sometimes I'm forced to work with unfamiliar tools. Occasionally, I might not even have my desk available, say nothing about it being clean and uncluttered.

That said, one of my favorite productivity "hacks" is to take a long train ride. Amtrak has free wifi and coffee in business class, the seats are large and comfortable, and lunch is pizza and beer. Airplanes don't do it for me, I think because I've never been on one with free wifi, they are uncomfortable, and most of the places I'd be traveling to are only two or three hours away. I take the train any time I'm traveling on the east coast.

Semi-related to that, I also accompany my wife on her business trips. Since she will already have a hotel room paid for, I use the wifi while she's working in a helicopter somewhere. I get a ton done during the day and then feel absolutely no guilt about kicking off at 5pm and doing nothing for the rest of the night but sit and drink with my wife.

I really like it that most of the hacks aren't polished too much; makes it way easier to read for me. Often all those startup tips'n'tricks can be cheesy and distract.

Many notes were useful to me, but this one struck me as I was dealing with it yesterday:

> "Writing everything down. After years and years of assuming that I can rely on my memory, I finally realized I was wrong about that. Even if I can remember something, the task of my brain holding onto that little piece of information is taking time and energy away from whatever task it is that I’m working on in the moment. I’ve cobbled together a handful of products/services to achieve what has become a pretty efficient way to keep track of everything." > By Kendall Guillemette

I was thinking about creating a website with categories/hashtags/search/calendar (could use something like WP/Drupal) and using it for the same purpose.

Did someone else have the same problem? How did you solve it?

"My favorite 'magic pill' productivity hack is my Seiki 39″ monitor" - bountify founder

wouldn't 39" monitor be too big for programming? what is HNers' preferred size?