
Ask HN: What tools/methods do you use to focus your time well? - nikivi
I wrote a piece in my wiki about tools &amp; methods I use to stay focused.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz&#x2F;focusing<p>I found this system to work well for me. It&#x27;s a Trello board of goals separated by time. Weekly&#x2F;monthly&#x2F;quarterly&#x2F;yearly. Where month goals are ideally based off my year goals and week goals are based on month goals. This kind of system gives me structure and focus and I allocate time with events based on the goals I have set. And more importantly it gives long term perspective to the things I do now &amp; the things I want to achieve in life.<p>The link also goes over some nice tools I use to automate distraction as I have most &#x27;news feed&#x27; like websites blocked (front pages of twitter&#x2F;hn&#x2F;lobsters&#x2F;github&#x2F;..). And only have few times I can actually visit those sites with goals of intentionally viewing them and not out of a habit.<p>I also try to systemize as much as I can to the point where I create some guidelines ([rules](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz&#x2F;focusing&#x2F;rules)) I wish to follow. It helps me keep things in order and I iterate on them as I gain more experience.<p>I am curious what systems &amp; methods you guys found that work well for you to achieve this goal of being more mindful of your time and the things you truly want to be doing in life?
======
juvoni
I utilize a similar system to "reverse engineer the year".

Breaking down the major outcomes I want for the year into quarters which each
having a specific focus and theme. At the end of each quarter I have a 90 day
review to reflect on how I'm doing, where I'm heading and if there is any
recalibration that needs to happen from changing priorities.

Each month I is essentially 3 "Acts" that play out the goals of that quarter
and those in turn have weekly sprints.

With all that said the day is the most important of it all. What I choose to
do each day reverberates across the year. This is where deep investment in
intentionally building habits and focusing on systems over goals come into
play.

I write more about that system here: [https://juvoni.com/you-are-a-
rocketship/](https://juvoni.com/you-are-a-rocketship/)

A great book that talks about that system is The One Thing by Gary Keller

As for time management tools I’ve focus on four categories

\- Tracking

\- Quotas

\- Blocking

\- Scheduling & Task Management

I talk about the tools I use here: [https://juvoni.com/tools-of-the-time-
manager/](https://juvoni.com/tools-of-the-time-manager/)

Big highlights are:

\- Rescuetime

\- Freedom

\- TickTick

~~~
ceetronic
Put noise cancelling headphones on and go to musicforprogramming.net, select
random mix.

------
twodave
About 10oz of coffee first thing in the morning. Then I let the world come to
me ;) Being more of a maverick personality type, I don’t even entertain
“methods” or “systems” to structure my life. I pretty much just follow
whatever thread I’m on and do what seems best in the moment. At least this
hasn’t failed me yet.

I do tend to struggle with a little ADHD, which the coffee helps with. Other
than that I just try to have fun and blaze an interesting trail each day
(though hardly ever consciously).

~~~
mbrock
This has been my approach but I’m getting fed up with my consequent inability
to manage my time, which is way more precious and easily wasted than money,
and harder to budget well. There are a lot of things I want and need to do but
find very hard to do consistently.

I want an app (for iOS) that helps me “budget my time” but I haven’t found
one. It should help me with goals like “30 minutes daily housekeeping, 4 hours
weekly woodworking”, etc.

I’m also getting assessed for ADHD. Reading about it is extremely interesting
and seems to explain a lot of my life: fidgeting and leg bouncing, constant
awful backlog of bills and paperwork and late fees, moving to new jobs and
cities and countries, obsessively stimulated fascination with a series of
interests, learning basically all the programming languages by age 16, having
a “projects” folder littered with a hundred sad subfolders, struggles with
grocery shopping, acute restlessness during cinema screenings, embarrassing
and damaging failures to perform rather simple tasks in a timely manner, and
so on.

~~~
tepidandroid
>I want an app (for iOS) that helps me “budget my time” but I haven’t found
one. It should help me with goals like “30 minutes daily housekeeping, 4 hours
weekly woodworking”, etc.

Have you tried Habitica?

~~~
mbrock
I’m trying it now, thanks. It seemed a bit too much when I considered it once
but I can see the appeal.

~~~
eswat
As someone that likes the spirit behind Habitica and has tried it a few times
– also contributed some bugfixes I desperately needed – I’m curious what you
found a bit too much, since I felt the same way.

I’ve toyed in my head with the idea of making a similar app, still heavily-
inspired by gaming but without diving deep into the 16-bit RPG pixel
atmosphere and the baggage that carries.

~~~
mbrock
It just seems a bit optimized for people who actually love RPGs in all their
complexity with different items and stuff, when I might prefer something that
has a game aspect while staying quite simple. I’m less motivated by the
possibility of spending gold coins to buy a new hat for my avatar than I am by
simple and beautiful app interactions and just managing to remember and track
my real life duties and desires. But I’m giving Habitica a try, I never
actually played it before. So far it seems fun.

~~~
PenguinCoder
You seem like me a bit. I also wanted app like this to track and improve
habits. Habitica, while interesting, just took too much time and effort. I've
since started using 'Loop habit tracker' for about a year now and I prefer
it's simplicity much more.

------
tedmiston
The most useful tools for me are:

1\. Pomodoro sessions and timeboxing with a visual timer. I like the Time
Timer brand.

2\. When I'm working I take notes for personal reference in markdown files of
things like bash sessions and code or approaches I tried to a given problem
that did / didn't work. Project-wide searches of my notes repo save me a lot
of time later.

------
odomojuli
The most optimal strategy I can consider towards making efficient use of my
time is to spend absolutely none of it researching methods or techniques to do
so.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
Your reply is a little bit facetious but it is a valid point, very often I
find myself hiding behind 'optimizing my work' research as a very circunvented
way of procrastinating on actual work.

------
neilv
I've been trying out a slight variation on todo.txt format, for a lightweight
way to prioritizing and scheduling things I should spend time on, including
bumping tasks to the next day (to narrow down what I can do today). I have a
bunch of low-priority tasks that have been getting bumped for maybe a year,
and sometimes I remove tasks that I've been bumping for a while and seem like
they'll never be worth doing.
[https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/)

Empty email inbox is another. Stuff in the inbox is stuff I either haven't yet
read, am dealing with immediately, or haven't yet decided whether to star (for
attention later) before "archiving". I have a search folder that shows
everything in the archive that's starred. (The archive gets purged
periodically, after some time has passed, and once I've resolved all the
starred messages.) I usually start checking email first thing when I wake up,
but am careful to leave stuff in the inbox until after I'm sure I've woken up
fully (had a decaf, exercised).

For things to very quickly note in the moment, and possibly deal with someday
later, I have a very simple Emacs package that quickly creates a timestamped
text "document" file in some category directory. This can also be good for not
getting distracted thinking about problems to solve: you've quickly captured
the data you might need, without distraction or even worrying about grammar or
format, so you don't have to deal with it further right now.
[https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs-qd/](https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs-qd/)

------
Glench
Concentration meditation is an extraordinarily powerful method. Ordinarily,
the mind wanders haphazardly from topic to topic even in the middle of tasks
[1]. Most people find it a challenge to focus on even one thing fully for 30
seconds without their mind wandering. With good concentration practice, the
mind concentrates fully and effortlessly for as long as the meditator wants.
As you can imagine, that can be a real boon for productivity.

[1]
[http://www.danielgilbert.com/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBERT%20(...](http://www.danielgilbert.com/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBERT%20\(2010\).pdf)

~~~
victor106
Interesting. How do you practice concentration meditation?

~~~
Glench
Pick something to concentrate on, like the breath. With your awareness, focus
and get absorbed in the details of the concentration object. When your mind
wanders from the object, bring it back. With good practice, it starts to
become automatic.

~~~
szaboat
I've started to practice vipassana meditation and this book was gave a really
practical approach. It's really pragmatic and describes everything, position,
breathing, problem handling, pacing. I recommend to give it a try.

[http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_eng...](http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_english.php)

shameless plug, I made an ebook from the online texts

[https://github.com/szaboat/ebook-mindfulness-in-plain-
englis...](https://github.com/szaboat/ebook-mindfulness-in-plain-english)

------
egypturnash
1\. pomodoro method (plan out the day in half-hour time blocks, there's a
bunch of other stuff I don't do)

2\. build sunshade for laptop, go work in the park, turn off all laptop radios
to save battery

This won't work if you need the internet to get stuff done of course. Works
for me though.

When I am really fighting to Be Productive, I will take out a physical timer
that I have modified to be my Pomodoro Timer by painting over everything past
twenty five minutes. When I am not I will just loosely track my time with Time
Sink.

~~~
sdan
Whenever I'm doing work in remote locations, I just tether my laptop to my
phone which automatically makes a hotspot for me.

~~~
egypturnash
And then you have all the distractions of the Internet right there on your
computer. Being offline because I'm saving battery is a productivity boost for
me.

------
jwho82
I use my own time tracking tool
([https://logmyhours.com](https://logmyhours.com)) along with rescuetime.com
to make sure I'm keeping focused. I can actually tie my timesheets right into
rescue time to see how productive I was during the time period.

Ive been using clubhouse.io recently to help me keep my many todos a bit more
organized.

I want to try to plan out my day the night before, but that almost never
happens.

------
chipuni
I also use a Pomodoro-style system to get myself to concentrate. Right now,
I'm using the _Forest_ app on my Android to tell me to concentrate.

Good luck!

~~~
RugnirViking
what do you during your breaks? This I think is the greatest pitfall for me.
Get up and walk around? I usually find that I just want to go back to work
once I let my mind wander.

~~~
nefitty
I check email, read a bit on info relevant to other projects, take a snack or
bathroom break, do some typing practice, daydream, etc. It’s just about
shifting your focus away from the main project and doesn’t necessarily have to
be an unproductive task.

------
Jefro118
I've been using the Chrome extension I built [1] to set a task and block
distractions that aren't relevant. This turns my browser into a less
distracting environment which is a big help.

Even more important is setting the right physical environment - I'll try to
find a relatively quiet coffee shop that doesn't play music (or at least not
pop music). This is still fairly suboptimal though, especially because I am
addicted to people-watching. After a couple of hours I usually find myself
observing the facial expressions of baristas as they go about their job. The
best working environment I've ever found was when I used to sneak into the
psychology experiment cubicles at my university - small, isolated white rooms
with no visual distractions.

Taking a small dose of dried psilocybin truffles (about 0.25g) can be quite
helpful for focus. It puts me in more of a third-person view where I'm less
likely to get distracted by external things although it also makes me more
emotional which can sometimes leads me to get distracted by internal things.

I've used modafinil in the past which definitely aids focus (I think partly
because it alleviates depressive feelings) but the long half-life ends up
affecting my sleep and it becomes a negative trade-off in the end.

Morning is definitely the best time for getting work done. I find it very
difficult to reach the same level of focus after lunch so I try to squeeze as
much as I can into the first four hours of the day. This might be related to
nutrition so I could do with experimenting with my lunch diet to improve this.

To-do lists and calendars are helpful to a point but I'm so bad at sticking to
them that I often end up feeling deflated.

[1] - [https://deepmode-website.herokuapp.com/](https://deepmode-
website.herokuapp.com/)

------
eswat
I’ve realized lately that I do most of my procrastination either in Firefox or
on my phone since those are the places I’ve naturally bucketed my
consumption/lizard-brain-behaviour to.

So when I need to focus I’ll just start a Freedom
([https://freedom.to/](https://freedom.to/)) session that prevents me from
using Firefox (I use Firefox Dev Edition for work instead and don’t tend to
use problematic websites in it anyway) and keep my phone far away from my
field-of-view (it’s 80% of-the-time on silent mode).

If I’m still managing to fritter my time away then it means whatever I’m
tasked with isn’t very important to me and I should strongly consider doing
another project, whether it’s a personal or professional one.

------
diweirich
I've tried many things, to-do lists, timers, etc.

The only thing that has ever worked for me is Qbserve because it tracks
everything in the background for me and lets me know if I've been off task too
much. It is relentless in its tracking which is exactly what I needed.

------
tmaly
I read the David Allen GTD book a few years back. I have not fully committed
to the method. But a big take away for me was keeping lists of things to
review. This closes the open loops in your mind so you don’t feel stressed
that you forgot something.

I use Things 3 app on ios for lists and reminders.

Staples sells an ARC notebook system I use at my day job. I like the ability
to rearrange things and they have a nice page template for notes and action
items. I use this for meetings both in person and on the phone.

I use the 5 minute journal to help me keep focused on 1-3 top items at night.

If you can have at least 2 kids, that is probably the best way to learn time
management. Everything else pales in comparison

------
behnamoh
Before focusing:

1\. Write down the list of things I need to do today AND tomorrow. (If there
was a list of things that I like, "list" would be at the top of that list :)

2\. Draw "points" beside some items, indicating their urgency.

3\. Choose one which better fits my current state of mind (late at night I
work on repeating tasks, in the morning I work on creative stuff, in the
afternoon, esp. after lunch (!) I mostly think and strategize, so I do
programming then).

During the focus:

Either

1\. Café noise app (or online web apps)

2\. Nature sounds (rain, thunder, ...)

Or

3\. Soft music (if what I'm doing requires attention) or chill music (if the
task is boring and repetitive, ugh!)

4\. keep going as long as I __feel__ doing it. I don't believe in Pomodoro or
similar apps.

------
vga805
Meditation, exercise, and a diet that includes no caffeine, no added sugar, &
no processed food has done wonders for my ability to focus. I also made it a
point to become a morning person, usually up by 5:30.

------
wintercarver
Stephen King’s Book on writing has a few fun quotes which seem related. Here
are some samples:

On protecting your focus/writing space: “The space can be humble (probably
should be, as I think I have already suggested), and it really needs only one
thing: a door which you are willing to shut.”

More on the importance of your physical space: “put your desk in the corner,
and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in
the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other
way around.”

~~~
TheHegemon
Could you explain the part of the desk being in the corner, not sure I
completely grok what that means.

~~~
latexr
> Could you explain the part of the desk being in the corner

That idea is continued in the rest of the quote:

> Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

The desk isn’t at the center of the room because art (writing, in his case)
shouldn’t be the center (the most important thing) of your life. You shouldn’t
sacrifice your life to produce art, but create art to improve your life.

Zen Pencils has a short comic with the surrounding context for the quote:
[https://zenpencils.com/comic/king/](https://zenpencils.com/comic/king/)

------
notaboutdave
Journaling. It feels like modding life with extra memory and save states. I
made a tool for it. Thinking about doing a "Show HN" some time.

~~~
JHonaker
What do you write about?

------
cauterize
The most barebones pomodoro for Linux: ‘sleep 45m

~~~
cauterize
Oof. My mobile client cut off the best part. It was supposed to be `sleep 45m
&& xeyes`.

------
m33k44
I use switch_off Firefox/Chrome addon ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/switch-off](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/switch-off)) to keep me focused. Other than that I just
maintain a simple TODO text file in the home directory.

------
weka
Ever since I've started using Todoist, my life has gotten a lot more
structured. With pro membership, its feature pay in dividends. From reminders
to tags to "English-pseudo code" query language for task due dates and more.

It really has helped me organize my life.

------
ellius
Loose interpretation of "tools" but I pair program. It does wonders for
clarity and focus most of the time, but can be exhausting and sometimes
counterproductive for deep thought and analysis.

------
jascii
I practice yoga (mostly pranayama, and ying) I find this helps me not be
invested in my surroundings(distractions). After that it becomes a simple
matter of prioritization and bookkeeping..

------
bigred100
I have a checklist app on my phone where I just have all the stuff I want to
do daily/weekly. Then I check it off as I do it

------
acl777
pomodoros have been mentioned quite a few times, but I love using Apple Watch
as a pomodoro timer

[http://redgreenrepeat.com/2016/04/01/apple-watch-beyond-
fitn...](http://redgreenrepeat.com/2016/04/01/apple-watch-beyond-
fitness/#silent-alarms)

~~~
tmaly
I use Focus Keeper on Iphone for this

~~~
acl777
hmm... I'll have to try this out too. Love the charting feature (which I do by
hand in onenote)

One thing about timers on iPhone is when I look to see how much longer I have,
other notifications distract me.

Does Focus Keeper solve for this in some way? Or do you turn all notifications
off?

~~~
tmaly
That one of two reasons why I switched to Iphone from Android. Ability to turn
off all notifications from one screen. Focus from distraction is paramount

------
rurban
Good tools are my brain (to focus and concentrate), and my mouth (to keep
people away). But there also exist doors or earplugs.

------
davidw
An office with doors? I wish...

------
mfatica
Make discipline an important part of your life. Do not rely on motivation or
passion or interest to get things done. Tell yourself what you will do and
then do it without question. The more you practice this the better your time
management and focus will be - your mind has nowhere to wander for excuses
because there are no excuses to be made.

~~~
dmos62
That's good advice, but it must be mentioned that discipline (and attention)
are like muscles, you can strengthen them, but you can also strain them to
dysfunction. A one-sided approach, where you're always "on" can't work, it
needs to be intermittent. You have to pace yourself. In a way, discipline is
to be able to do when you're not doing, and to be able to not do, when you're
doing. This last point should ring true to those with tendencies to obsess and
burnout (like me).

