
Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient - mikesun
http://blog.idonethis.com/post/34170232603/marc-andreessens-productivity-trick-to-feeling
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pnathan
I approximately "invented" this after reading tons of productivity blogs and
stuff.

I keep an org-mode file with 3 headings:

    
    
        * week range
    
        ** day-in-week
    
        *** major topic
    

And then I log what I did in the day. It is unbelievable how much you
_actually_ do some days when you feel like you did nothing but yammer and poke
small problems.

edit: I've done this for about 47 weeks now. I keep a single file, synced out
to a backedup location periodically. Anything worth writing about goes in
here. My hope is that any professional conversation and act is captured here,
ready for later searching and review.

I also keep a high-level TODO list at the top of the file when I'm pondering
priorities and direction.

~~~
minimax
Do you use much of the other org-mode bells and whistles when you do this?

~~~
pnathan
Nah, not really. I really hit a comfort zone with this tracking system, so I
haven't felt the drive to improve it.

The only thing that niggles a bit is that I'd like to check in/out on tasks
sometimes. I know it's _possible_ , but I don't have the urge to figure that
out.

I use more of org-mode in other arenas: agenda preparation, PDF creation, and
the occasional spreadsheet.

~~~
minimax
I have tried several times to get into org-mode and for whatever reason it
just hasn't stuck. I'm going to give it another crack for daily logs.

~~~
pnathan
Honestly, you don't need org mode to do this. You just need a way to have a
hierarchical folding tree (an outline) that takes text for both the headers
and contents. I implemented a half-baked similar system in C# years and years
ago - that worked really nice. I just use org-mode because I'm an emacs user
and hey, it works well for me.

~~~
npsimons
The nice thing about org-mode is it's as involved as you would like it to be.
Sure, the beginning is a bit steep, but if you're already using Emacs, it will
be a breeze, and you can keep it light (as pnathan is doing). I've been slowly
inching my way into using it over a long period of time; I have to admit, it's
quite involved for me, but it never felt forced, it was always "cool, that
works nice; but I wonder if I can X?" and with org-mode, you can almost always
do X. Or not, if you don't want to. Unlike a lot of other "productivity tools"
it's very flexible.

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beambot
Anti-Todo List... otherwise known as "Lab Notebook"? This process is
commonplace (and often required!) in academic settings. I love looking through
mine and reliving the discovery process!

~~~
barbs
I get a similar feeling when looking over my git commits. So satisfying!

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CodeCube
This is actually why I tend to be pretty granular with my commits ... I just
like looking at the list and saying, well, I done that!

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javajosh
I've started writing myself "work receipts" - slips of paper that are dated
and recount what I did for whom. I stick them in my backpack and then transfer
them to FreshBooks. I find it very satisfying to have a pile of small squares
of paper that represent real progress and are worth _real money_ at the end of
the day.

I've considered using a logbook, something bound so that it's neater, but I
have to say I just love having a single small slip of paper sitting there
beside my computer as I work. It is a testament to focus - it is a physical
talisman representative of singular focus.

It works really, really well.

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b_emery
Funny, I sort of did this yesterday and it worked. In the act of planning my
current week, I took a look at my log of time spent last week. The log was
much more detailed than usual because I was auditing my time pretty carefully.
After adding it all up and listing how I spent my time and what I got done, I
had quite a list, much to my surprise - and just the neurochemical reward
suggested in the post.

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pbreit
I liked Marc's "Structured Procrastination" a lot better.

[http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-
pers...](http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-personal-
productivity)

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JohnsonB
>The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself
and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.”

Wow, that sounds like an incredibly unjustified relationship, with only the
superficial support of its counter-intuitive nature. In my experience, the
opposite happens, the more you do in a day, the more you recognize and
remember that you accomplished that day, and consequentially, feel that you
accomplished. Which by the way, is exactly what the anti-todo list is, except
with a mental list of remembered accomplishments, rather than manually
recorded ones. The latter act should only be necessary if an individual has a
particular problem recognizing what they've accomplished in a day; I don't
think this is some deep insight or universal principle.

~~~
NathanCollins
In the context of the article, I think the justification was: assuming you're
more productive in quality and not quantity, because you're working towards
ambitious goals, then on most days you will not complete a recognized goal.
The suggestion is to go out of your way to recognize your smaller day-to-day
accomplishments which help you reach the big goal.

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nostromo
We use iDoneThis and really like it. We tend to use it when the team is
distributed. When we're all located in the same place, usage wanes (but it's
cheap enough not to worry about). But during times that people are working
remotely, it's the best way to keep everyone on the same page.

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jasonwilk
Nice product! Just started using it and realized it's far different than my
Yammer and/or Wunderlist. This is especially good for writing simple daily
recaps which I can then compress into weekly update to my investors.

It would be awesome if you could notice trends in things I write such as
People, Companies, etc so I can search by popular tags.

~~~
smalter
Thanks, Jason! Much appreciated. We do have word clouds that show you your
frequency of word use. It's basic now, but we plan on sprucing it up. Tagging
is something that's in the plans.

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hboon
Here's something I've been doing for the past 3 years ago since I've gone
indie.

I have a text file which I keep open in vim, called "wip" which I have loose
sections of content. Let's call them section 1, section 2 and section 3.

I list TODOs which I want to accomplish recently in section 3. When I start
working on an item, I might expand on it and add additional sub-items,
indented. I mark items I'm working on with a "@" and when they are finished,
with a " _". Sometimes I'm on several items at the same time (too many is not
a good sign), I will add a few @@@@ to the start of a line I'm_ really* on, no
biggie.

I mentally group my items into projects/types of activities like Project1,
Project2. Each time I start working on Project1, I add a new line which says
Project1 and the start time to section 2. When I stop working with Project1, I
add the end time to that line.

Every morning, I run a little script which scans through section 2 in "wip"
and extract out the time I spent on each project and inserts that at the
bottom of section 2. I then copy section 2 and section 3 of "wip" into a new
file giving yesterday's date as the filename. Then I go into "wip" and remove
all the items marked with " _" as well as section 2 and then copy section 1
into section 3 as well. Section 3 contains things that I want to do daily,
such as stretch myself in the morning or to manually check if a specific
service is up (enough till I automate them or build a habit out of it).

A great side-effect — the files that are created everyday becomes my work log.
I can run scripts to generate how much time I've spent on a specific project
or how much time I've work in a given year.

My wip file looks like:

section 1 - template TODOs

section 2 - projects and their start-end time

section 3 - TODOs (each like might start with a @ or _ and might be indented
to various levels, seldom more than 2-3 levels). I don't keep the entire
project here.

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jkeel
This idea is similar to a pet project I did a looong time ago while learning
C#. It's still up at <http://getmicromanager.com/> but honestly I'm not sure
if it still works with the current version of .NET (it was written on .NET
1.1).

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rdsubhas
Productivity Level measured when going to sleep:

 _Overworked_ \- "I still haven't done XYZ..." (fall asleep and work in the
dreams as well)

 _Great_ \- "I did so much today!"

 _Rhythmic_ \- "Everything went as per schedule"

 _Bored_ \- "Today was probably same as yesterday"

 _Lazy_ \- "What did I do today?"

 _Loafer_ \- " What is today?"

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niels_olson
Happy user of idonethis here. Love it. My only complaint is that gmail now
guesses my idonethis email instead of my gmail when I try to send myself a
reminder to do something. Which might represent some weird pseudo-AI
insight...

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mmahemoff
I do something like that in Trello, which is to retrospectively create
spontaneous tasks and drag them straight to Done. (It's more satisfying to
drag them across than just create them in the Done pile.)

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DasIch
You can be even more productive by not making any (Anti-)ToDo lists, thereby
reducing management overhead and the time spent figuring out how to use, using
and reviewing todo list techniques.

~~~
scotty79
Lack of productivity is rarely due to lack of time. Almost always due to lack
of motivation. If you can trade excess time for some motivation by playing
with lists then why not?

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tathagatadg
Started doing something similar on a private twitter account which follows no
one, and no one follows it. Once I do something, I tweet. Benefits: Using
twitter as a platform, keep description in 140 chars, search, timestamp etc.

However, I violated the first rule of using the organization tool i.e. _Trust
your tool_. Yet another post on hackernews and I got distracted into trying
Trello, and what not for a promise of increased productivity.

~~~
antrix
The trouble with Twitter is that you can't go back and find tweets from the
past to figure out, say, what did I do in the 2nd week of November last year
or when did I send that notice out.

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nicksergeant
Shameless plug for a stupid little web-app I wrote for exactly this purpose...
years ago. It was my first foray into Django, and it's open-source:

<http://finisht.com> <http://github.com/nicksergeant/finisht>

~~~
adastra
This is great. Is the app pronounced "finished", "finish it", or "finish
shit!" ? I kind of like the last one, haha. Seriously though I'm curious which
one.

~~~
nicksergeant
haha, it's pronounced "Finished". I also built <https://snipt.net> so I stuck
with a similar theme. "Snipped, Finished", etc.

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asimjalis
I find Mark Forster's FV (Final Version) to be a great synthesis of structured
procrastination as well as a way of creating the feeling that I got stuff
done. Plus it's so minimalistic.

<http://markforster.squarespace.com/>

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Apocryphon
Can't you just have a regular todo list where you check off or cross out items
when you're done with them? Doesn't every single todo list app/program/notepad
already do this?

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yresnob
waits for flurry of Anti-todo list mobile apps to appear...

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gprasanth
A friend of mine actually does this. He's an MS hire. No wonder he figured it
out long ago :)

<http://coderuns.co.cc/>

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ryanwaggoner
This is what excellent content marketing looks like.

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FreshCode
Like a commit log.

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mediocregopher
wutdo: <http://sprunge.us/OhOS> donewut: <http://sprunge.us/OiAL>

Two little scripts I just whipped up that'll help you record the things you do
throughout the day. I'm definitely going to try to use these as much as
possible, it's kind of like a personal micro-blog.

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1602
`git log` command works too. or, if you need activity across projects -
github.

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brianmcdonough
Sounds more like a ta-da list to me. As in, TA-DA!

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IheartApplesDix
Combine this with pomodoro technique and you'll never have free time again! /s

