I have never achieved something through systematic work, my productivity consists of aperiodical peaks caused by fads. I am tired of this, because I feel I lose a lot of opportunities of self-improvement despite the fact I drown in free time. My suspicions are that this problem is known to non-trivial amount of HNers. This makes me wonder:
Has anyone managed to really overcome problems with low productivity?
It wasn't an overnight change, I just tried to be aware and accountable to myself, tried lots of different things, and gradually improved. It took about three years or so, and I'm still working on it.
My friends often ask me how I'm so productive, which feels really weird to me because I still feel like I'm lazy and unfocused. I only have maybe 1.5-2.0 hours of "free" time these days, with occasional weekend days where I get 5-6 hours of project time. I think part of it is just knowing that my time is so limited, I had better make the most of it.
To "drown in free time"... I can't even imagine. Don't take that for granted. Don't judge yourself for wasting time yesterday, just sit down and do something.
The key here is consistently finding where your passions lie... I haven't solved that problem.
I've accepted this fact rather than attempting to overcome it, because coding for coding's sake doesn't appeal to me (it may appeal to others).
1. Keep a very regular and healthy sleep schedule.
2. Setup a nice and clean working environment.
3. Start working early in the morning.
4. Work on something you deeply want to exist.
5. Exert discipline at maximum levels.
Right now you get a nice dopamine rush when you start something, but as soon as it gets a little tricky, you quit and go looking for the next thing that gives you a dopamine rush. Productivity has no value for you, because it doesn't make you happy - you're stuck in a local minima. So what do you do? You have to go through a period of suck to get to the much, much bigger reward.
This is exactly the same as dieting, exersise, learning to draw, learning a musical instrument, anything.
Here's how:
- Recognise that productivity and motivation are not related.
A lot of people will tell you that the way to be productive is to find something you're passionate about, or only work on things that motivate you, or that the only way to be productive is by working on something that makes you happy all the time. That's garbage. Every productive person has periods where they feel like what they're doing sucks. Motivation will get you started, it will point the way, but it will absolutely not keep you going.
- Recognise that discipline beats motivation.
Discipline boils down to accepting that something is going to suck, then doing it anyway. Don't try to convince yourself it doesn't suck, because it does. Don't try to convince yourself you love it, you don't. But you have to do it anyway. A lot of people think discipline is about willpower, as if you can will yourself to do something that sucks. You can't. Discipline is about submission to the task at hand. If you like, you can visualise this as submission to your past self as taskmaster. Present you thinks this blows, but past you said you had to get it done.
- Relentless focus.
Being disciplined is hard. You only have so much space in your head to keep track. You can't be disciplined about everything. That means you have to cut stuff out. Write down the tasks you are going to do today on an index card. Do only those tasks. You're going to get that wrong a bunch of times, so you can fix it up. Look at that card every hour, and ask yourself whether you did something on it in the last 60 minutes. Set an alarm in your phone to remind you to do it. You're going to notice when you're spending time on HN a lot more, trust me. It will make you feel bad, but it will make you submit to the task at hand.
- Pick an end.
'Learn C++' is not an end goal. Build a raytracer from scratch is. Don't put a time frame on it. Don't set about breaking it into little tasks, that will happen automatically day-to-day. That thing that motivated you at the start? Write that down. When things start to suck a bit much by going through the 'this sucks' loop day in, day out, you can look at it and remember past you.
Then do that loop, over and over and over until you get to the end. Now you are going to get a huge reward, very different to the one you get just by starting something new when you're motivated. In fact, you're going to get addicted to finishing stuff and being productive because the dopamine hit is so so much sweeter.
That's just what I did.