
Ask HN: What was your most productive (day|week|month|year) ever? - daryllxd
It could also be someone else&#x27;s. What happened that day, and what techniques have you developed to try to recreate that day?<p>I&#x27;m asking because I&#x27;ve been more productive these past weeks since I completely blocked out social media on my machine and I put my phone in another room during work hours, and I should have done that years ago. :(
======
psyc
The funny thing is that I knew the answer immediately upon reading the title.
I got the flu (the actual flu) about 10 years ago, and was out of work for
over a week. It was my very first staycation, and I didn't have any contact
with anyone. During that time, even though as sick as I've ever been, I
completed and released my first iOS game (a very zippy direct-to-OpenGL
implementation) and added a substantial number of features to my desktop game
engine.

It was amazing. I felt so alive. However, at this point, I could (somewhat
tongue in cheek) credit this week with ultimately ruining my life and career.
I became obsessed with recapturing that feeling, and with finding a way to
support myself with my own work (as opposed to the company's work). I quit my
job one year later and happily worked on my own stuff for the next 2 years.
This began a pattern of living on the ramen budget, being a single hermit,
only going to work when I'm broke, and quitting after a year or less.
Disastrous. Why, as I write this, I haven't gone to work in over 2 years, and
I'm broke again and looking for a job. I have unprofitable side-projects and
repos out the wazoo though.

What makes me most productive is when I truly love what I'm working on.

~~~
Vinnl
Same here. Half a year ago I quit my job to start working on something I
consider important (open access to academic articles), and it's been my most
productive half-year ever. That said, I have set a deadline for myself for
having to be able to fund my regular living expenses in six more months
though, either by having obtained a grant to cover the remaining start-up
costs, by working part-time given that I still believe I can make it self-
funding if I spend more time on it, or give it up altogether and hopefully use
the experience to find a more stable job doing something I consider important.

~~~
psyc
I encourage you to stick to these realistic plans. I have succumbed to
bargaining with myself lately. I said, "If this project does not get X users
or make Y dollars in Z time, I will get a job." Then, I said, "I will make a
smaller-scoped thing that may have more mass-appeal, and if that fails, I will
get a job." Then it was, "I will go all out trying to market these things, and
if that fails, I will get a job." I made the decision to stop the foolishness
and really start looking for a job full-time only yesterday.

~~~
Vinnl
Thanks for the advice. I'm very aware of the inclination to start bargaining,
although I'm not sure yet it that's enough to prevent it properly. To be fair,
there's been some bargaining already, which I feel can't really be avoided
given how some initial assumptions may be wrong. For example, I've observed
that I've had retention problems after my first launching, so I'm currently
switching things around a bit to see if I can lower that barrier to entry.
Initially, I'd planned to have x users at this point, but I don't think it's
that odd to try a few more small experiments to see whether there's still
potential in it. I just hope that not being afraid to throw them out will be
enough to stop in time.

However, I also know that especially the part where "I might start working
part-time if I feel there's still potential in it" has a lot of wiggle-room
for bargaining in terms of whether there's really potential. But then at least
it'll just be a side project again, which will hopefully keep me grounded :)

------
tinco
I had slacked off for a semester in university and got 0 study credits, where
nominal study performance should have yielded 30 credits (EC). This worried me
because some of those points were part of my freshmen year and the university
had just instated a rule that students entering their third year without
having completed their first year would be expelled (the p-in-2 rule) designed
to get rid of slackers prevalent in the otherwise lenient European style
university.

My best friend was also faced with a harsh deadline at the time, having to
finish his bachelor degree before a certain date so we made a covenant to
study at the library together this entire day, every day, for that quarter.

I made a crazy ambitious plan to complete exams for 9 courses, worth 45 EC in
total. There was some low hanging fruit that I just had to read the course
material for, but also some (for me) hard courses. I think 2 calculus courses,
Algorithms Data structures and Complexity and a Discrete Mathematics I.
Especially that last one was giving me a hard time, having failed the exam
three times already even though most of my friends felt it was a fairly easy
maths course.

I look back at those few months fondly. Although I was socially isolated, not
going to parties not seeing any friends besides just that one, I grew closer
to him and I felt good because we just were so productive.

Of those 9 courses I failed two, yielding 35 EC in just one quarter. I know
there's geniuses out there that do that sort of thing on the regular, but for
me just passing a single maths test was an achievement, let alone passing 6
more in the same week.

------
froindt
During college I had a semester with 5 engineering classes and was the
president of an engineering club. I didn't realize when signing up for
classes, but all 5 courses had engineering projects worth 25-60% and still had
final exams. I had no choice but to suck it up.

I started something I called "12 hours of productivity". It didn't matter what
time I got started in the morning, but from then until 12 hours later I was
being productive.

* I wouldn't get on reddit, Facebook, or similar sites.

* I could be doing class work, be in class, do club stuff, or study. I would eventually run out of club stuff. Even if I procrastinated with that, eventually I'd have to move on to school work.

* a few short breaks were included

My productivity soared, though I couldn't have done it for long term (years).
It got me through the semester from hell though.

------
patatino
I started planing my days around a 4 hour period where I am fully concentrated
with no mail, meetings etc. I set myself goals for this period and do not care
about the rest of the work day. Just get this 4 hours in and you're good. I
work more than 4 hours a day, but most of the work is getting done in those 4
hours.

Consistency is key in life! With everything, working out, eating healthy,
raising children.

~~~
Bizarro
I've been doing the same thing. Morning is my productive time of the day. I
work from home, so before I take a shower I make a pot of coffee and then
after shower I get on it.

If I can accomplish a couple (maybe only one) things in that four hour period
in the morning I feel good.

I also like to go to the gym around 3 in the afternoon. The gym time gives me
a little time to reflect and plan. And then after that I have a good 2 hours
of "endorphin" rush to work some more before I start getting tired and relax,
do some more planning, research (not implementation stuff) for tomorrow.

Eating healthy seems key too. I've never been a breakfast person, but I force
myself to eat some protein and maybe some fruit so I'm not crashing (and then
eating the wrong) thing mid-morning.

I've also got a 5 year which can drain the energy levels, so I need to plan so
I can spend time with him at night.

------
danielvf
Well, there's the day I knew I was a real programmer.

In a 24 period, I saved a customer's hundred thousand dollar sale by redoing a
hand written assembly function synchronized between three cores. I ended up
with something single core and 10,000x faster.

Before that day, I'd never touched assembly language, the customer's hardware,
the processor family, the problem space, an oscilloscope, nor anything
embedded outside an Arduino.

Story here, forgive the writing style:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859#14639134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859#14639134)

------
ambulancechaser
> "We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he
> was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but
> he was also telling me what to type.

> The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele
> says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the
> end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to
> just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time,"
> Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the
> screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

> The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI
> Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to
> find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was
> used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was
> different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external
> stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking
> back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and
> scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great
> experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my
> life."

> \- Guy Steele on a hacking session with RMS in the 1970s.

I always like this story. And I wish I had an experience like it.

~~~
Bizarro
A nice example of pair programming. I had never heard that story before.

------
EZ-E
I grew up disliking coffee - and as such I never got to drink it

One day I decided to order a coffee while eating at McDonalds because I didn't
feel like drinking soda and I wanted something different. I drank it, didn't
sleep for 24 hours but got a massive amount of things done with a new found
focus

Since then, I like coffee

~~~
alexdrans
I'm giving up coffee for lent, you just made me miss it a lot more :(

~~~
Bizarro
I'd like to give up coffee because I tend to crash from it, but it sure is
hard to resist that nice rush you get in the morning from it.

------
chrisvalleybay
My recipe for constentration is to eliminate sources of distraction. Simple?
Not so much. Anything can be a distraction today. This is what I do:

\- Delete Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger from phone

\- Disable notifications for all messaging apps (including badge count)

\- Keep Do Not Disturb (iOS) on a schedule during work hours

\- Disable all notifications on MacOS

\- Use software that distract less. For me this means removing every single
button I don't need. Hide all the things!

\- Eliminate clutter on desks. I don't keep anything on my desk that is not
related to the current task

Here is my favourite thing at the moment: set /ONE/ to do. To do lists are
productivity killers for me, because I'm constantly looking and thinking
ahead, instead of focusing the problem I am solving now.

In Visual Studio Code, for instance, I use the plugin `title`. This is very
simple, it lets me set the title of the window. In the title of the window I
write what I'm doing. For instance: "Clean up user model".

Edit: one more thing. Give your setup some love. If you're working on your
computer all day, keep making your environment more friendly and relaxing.
This can be software; customizing the colors to your liking, customizing
keyboard-shortcuts; or it can be hardware such as a better chair or a stand
for your monitors. I recently bought Ergotron HX Desk Dual Monitor Arm for my
monitors, and it increases my happiness and thus my productivity.

------
decasteve
If you asked me this a decade ago I would have said 2003, when I was working
80 hour weeks. But looking back now, in terms of what I accomplished and
produced, it was a lot less than I do now in terms of rate-of-production.

I’m writing this on an iPad Pro, which is my computing device for recreational
things. I don’t have social media. The niche sites/forums I belong to I can
only access from this iPad or my phone. My workstations are for work only and
Hacker News and other sites that I frequent are blocked. I disable
notifications—no messages, no popups, no email—just work!

In terms of time spent during a week, I spend more time as a single father
than I do as a software consultant. My time working is focused and productive
but short. On days that I don’t feel productive I tackle the low hanging
fruit. On days that I am productive, I go for it.

Sounds like you’re taking the right steps.

~~~
Nashooo
Do you work remotely ?

~~~
decasteve
Yes.

~~~
Nashooo
Any tips? I know there is a large amount of tips on the internet. But I find
it very helpful to talk to people who have done it themselves.

------
jchernan
Chemotherapy was accompanied with steroids (to help with sickness) which made
me stay awake almost all day. Instead of taking more meds to help with sleep,
I had many productive nights working on an iOS hobby project.

~~~
froindt
Probably not a system most people would voluntarily submit to, but I'm glad
you made the best of things. Hope you're doing well now.

------
bartedinburgh
I use [https://kanbanflow.com](https://kanbanflow.com) to manage my week.

Instead of classic Todo - Doing - Done, my board is divided into Todo - Monday
- Tuesday - ... - Sunday - Done. The board contains both work-related and
private tasks. If a new task comes up randomly during the day, I just add it
to the board and immediately resume whatever I was doing. Since I've scheduled
the new task for later, it's not occupying my mind anymore.

The app has a built-in pomodoro timer. I don't necessarily use it in a strict
sense (100% deep work) but I don't do any non-work-related tasks when the
timer is on, so it helps me fight procrastination and schedule my breaks.

I've blocked most sites that I identified as time-wasters. My phone is in my
drawer on "silent" and I usually don't pick up the phone at all during my
working hours.

I've noticed that one of the most important things for me is gaining momentum.
If I work 2-3 pomodoros first thing in the morning, it's usually going to be a
productive day overall, but if I start with procrastinating, the whole day
often ends up not very productive. So I pay much attention to how I start the
day.

On a not strictly work-related note, going to bed and waking up at the same
time significantly improved my overall life satisfaction. During my last
holidays, I took measurements how much sleep I naturally need (~7.5h) when
there's no pressure to wake up early. Then I started taking care to always be
in bed at a set time (11 p.m.) and get the right amount of sleep.

~~~
nfin
if you use kanbanflow the way you described, what is the difference with a
calendar?

------
zwischenzug
I once walked among London's canals and parks for 8 hours in a day and wrote a
script I'd been meaning to write for years that visualised in ascii the
degradation of server threads from log files.

Every time I got stuck, I stopped and walked again. I think I only did about 2
hours of 'work' that day, but it would have taken me weeks to do under normal
circumstances and distractions. I slept like a log that night.

~~~
georgewsinger
How did you stop to write code? Did you write your code in a notebook? On a
smartphone? Or did you walk with a laptop in a bag that you would take out
when needed?

~~~
zwischenzug
The latter.

------
rm_-rf_slash
When I was in college I did a startup. It petered our but my schedule was
excellent: Friday’s were for girlfriend and social life; Saturday’s were
nonstop startup work, and Sundays were for me. I was also taking an obscene
amount of credit hours, but I made sure to only deal with that during the
week.

The key wasn’t focusing on productivity, it’s balance. When you feel like
you’re spending the right amount of time on the people you care about, the
work you need to do, the work you want to do, and most importantly, yourself,
the productivity will happen. Otherwise, your body is trying to tell you that
something is off balance.

------
monkeynotes
2012 when I started a business with a friend. We moved out of the city and
into a small town in the mountains an hour away and lived off of our savings.
I wrote more code that year than ever before and I wrote almost all of it from
scratch, making my own crappy but perfectly suited framework. Because I wrote
it all, I understood it all and productivity was phenomenal. We self organized
without sprints, or stand ups, or any other processes, and we made some great
stuff. Many a day was spent writing code and then mountain biking in the
afternoon, some of it was bliss, some of it was horrible but overall a
valuable experience.

------
parallel_item
A semester during my undergraduate degree, my registrar account was allowed to
sign up for a class after I made a case they should waive the pre-requisite
for me. During my sign-up window, I was unable to enroll in the class before
it was filled, but noticed I could sign up for any class without being
flagged. I ended up taking the most difficult classes in my program all at
once, forcing myself to work near 24/7, riding the wave of volatility with
heavy consumption of substances. The final result was a firey explosion, but
at least it happened the next semester and I was able to graduate early while
mostly taking electives for my last semester.

This period of "productivity" taught me a lot. As a lot of folks here are
already aware, it is a slow and difficult process to increase the workload one
can handle. Temporary support from things like caffeine, sugar, alcohol or
drugs can extend these periods making it easy, but over time the effect
weakens as you become more familiar with the mental state, making the initial
support a crutch. Years later when completing my masters, I found the urge to
fall back on some of the habits incredibly appealing during the weeks when I
felt stressed and wanted to go on "autopilot". If I look at the future
productivity earned from the compound interest of staying up, angry and upset,
but still working through the discomfort, then I have had nights that were 10x
what that semester in college was, because those nights will yield 100s of
hours in the future that I would otherwise not be able to work through.

------
vivan
Spring of 2012. I ate a ketogenic diet and went to the gym (cardio) for half
an hour daily. Lost weight, felt great and was able to breeze through studies.

Haven't been able to recreate it, as it was only possible due to being at
university with a fairly light timetable and a very close gym.

------
wastedhours
Contrary I think to most of the rest of the audience here, my most productive
came when I was directly (in the same room) working with people on a specific
project.

I find being surrounded by people working on different elements to bring
something together much more motivating and productive than banishing all
outside disturbances. This might be because marketing is less in need of "the
zone" than programming, but frankly, having that direct accountability of
working with other people on pulling a campaign together really gets me
focused and firing at 100%.

When I'm doing that, I don't seem to get distracted by notifications, bloated
software, my phone, Facebook, HN etc...

My most productive period where I was managing a campaign launch, but working
with my peers. It skews a bit if you're either managing from atop or below,
because when you're at the same level there's camaraderie that makes it just
click (great colleagues being a requisite, of course).

[This isn't an extrovert/introvert point either, I'm the latter, and whilst
this way of working is draining from that perspective, it seems to be highly
productive for me.]

------
randallsquared
In 2003 I worked on the same project and nothing else for about 70 hours a
week for 3 months. In absolute terms, I'm a lot more productive now, but given
the tools I was using at the time, it was by far the most productive period of
my life so far.

Here's what I did:

* I went to a vacation rental * I had someone with me to handle non-code things who would leave me alone to work even though we were in the same 1BR apt * I had a tiny office with one entire wall being a window looking out over city, which was a wonderful combination of low local distraction combined with a broad distance full of things to occupy my surface attention while thinking * I ate only after work, by planning, so that I didn't think about meals or snacks for most of the working day

I did not turn off social media. Well, in those days it was a combo of
slashdot and about 10 messaging systems; the problem with actually not
checking messages is that I worry about what I'm missing, but if they're on
(or I think they are...) and I'm not getting anything, then I don't think
about them for hours on end.

------
VladimirGolovin
A 45-day off-the-grid vacation after several years of burnout. The result was
Filter Forge 2.0, which included a lot of new systems (Lua scripting, HDR
colors, ambient occlusion, non-seamless filters etc.)

The key was to get off the grid, shed all responsibilities, take long walks in
the woods, avoid dopamine loops, and let my mind wander without purpose.

~~~
danesparza
Wow. "Avoid dopamine loops' is a profound and succinct statement. Thank you.

Just out of curiosity, how did you prepare for this? Did you let your
family/friends know you were going to be off grid? Did you stock food in a
remote cabin somewhere? Did you keep regular working hours?

~~~
VladimirGolovin
My family was with me on vacation, but I could take long walks alone. No, not
a remote cabin, just a small resort town. Mobile internet wasn't mainstream
back then.

No working hours at all. Full vacation mode. No direction, no purpose, no
obligations.

------
winslett
I was riding my bicycle a lot at the time trying to figure out a availability
solution with Postgres. I'd ride my bicycle (40km) 24 miles one-way to work --
each leg took a little less than 1.5 hours. I really only coded and prototyped
about 3 hours / day. The 3 hours I spent at a keyboard were incredibly
productive. The time on my bicycle allowed me to digest information and let my
brain relax. By the time I sat down at a computer each day, I knew exactly
what I was going to code or test. I'd test and have information. Then, the
bike ride home would be thinking about the results. I was proud of the
outcome:
[https://github.com/compose/governor](https://github.com/compose/governor)

------
zappo2938
It better be today or I'm not going to survive. It's 6:47am, I better get some
coffee for what is about to happen.

~~~
jgtrosh
Reminds me of myself, last Friday. Just arrived in Vienna to learn I had a
presentation coming up. Had to plan my day, the presentation, type it out,
draw graphs, sleep, with not too many hours available. Plowed through
successfully but decided to start with a nap. Good luck!

~~~
zappo2938
We all have those creative moments when it is easy to produce. It is another
thing to produce when everything is complicated, we still have to imagine the
solution because we don't know it and it can't be searched on Google, and
disheartening. There is something to be said for people who are discipline to
keep moving during these times.

------
xbryanx
Tomorrow is going to be my most productive day ever!

------
pvsukale3
The week before exam and the days in between. I was trying to work on a side
project but could not get a lot of work done. But a week before my semester
exams I was very productive and full of new ideas. I completed most of the
work on side project before the last paper. I was highly productive and
creative before exams. This has happened twice.

------
rapfaria
Right after they released the HN api. I made an app called feedhint, that took
me three days non-stop. Not only that, I had a bunch of exams aligned that
very week, but that didn't matter. All I wanted was to create that app,
personalized HN RSS feeds based on keywords. Had some good feedback also! Felt
really great.

~~~
zwischenzug
Where is the app now?

~~~
rapfaria
Ended up selling the domain. hnrss is a much better alternative these days:
[https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/)

------
creativityland
I recommend blocking all social media on your desktop browser. I use
StayFocused [0] to help me do that.

On mobile, turn off all non-human notifications and alerts.

Sundays are the most productive for me. I use a weekly checklist on Taskade
[1] to help me track my progress throughout the week, and on Sundays I would
archive the list and start a new one from the templates.

[0]:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en)

[1]: [https://www.taskade.com](https://www.taskade.com)

------
yodsanklai
My most productive days were when I was a math undergraduate. I would work
pretty much all the time for weeks. This was before internet invaded our
lives. I was also very productive the last few weeks before I had to submit my
PhD thesis. No particular technique, just the stress of deadlines or studying
in a competitive environnement.

Occasionally, I work non-stop for a few days on some programming projects, but
I wouldn't consider myself productive. I get very excited and obsessed by the
coding but I'm not very efficient, in the sense I tend to code more than I
think and it's counter productive.

------
jiojfekjl
During a major hurricane I was without power for a week. In that time I wrote
more songs, more poems, and finished more paintings than ever before. The
takeaway: creativity requires occasional periods of boredom.

------
pmiri
For my final semester of university, I read tons of books, wrote lots of
essays (both for school and personal), worked a paying side-contract, and went
110% on a project for school.

My schedule made this possible. All my classes started in the afternoon and
ended at 10 at the latest. This matched with my natural levels of productivity
perfectly. Reading and podcasts in the morning, homework/class in the
afternoon, and pure output at night. It was perfect and I know I'll be
spending the next while trying create the conditions to live like that again.

------
nathan_f77
There was a week last year where I did a huge amount of work on a mobile game.
I was in a state of "flow" the whole time, and it felt like the time was just
flying past. RescueTime tracked over 100 hours. Many other weeks were around
60-80 hours, but I was having a lot of fun and learning tons of new things.
It's not too healthy though, and I took a long break after launching the game.

I can sometimes get into that state when working as a contractor, but it's
very rare.

------
yellowflash
I would say it was yesterday. Though I worked may be 2 hours yesterday, I felt
like the result was good. I think its mostly the clarity of what I need to do
that helped, (I had the idea the previous night and couldn't really sleep at
all the for the entire night).
[https://github.com/yellowflash/godel](https://github.com/yellowflash/godel) .
That's what I have been working on.

------
soroso
First I acknowledge that is not really useful to single out a day as
productive or not. The finest-grain level I check is days streak. And in that
case, I usually say that I had a good week or good weeks, or once I had a
whole good quarter.

When I average the year, I have been having more productive years more or less
consistent. Like the global warming, the year that wasn't really productive
was still higher than the least productive year before the last peak.

Well, with all that said, some patterns seemed clear to me:

1 - Societal overload: that place and country you live directly affect your
productivity. I lived for many years in the biggest city of a 3rd World
country, where the government works daily to make your life miserable and
hard. The moment I moved to Europe, I had a surge of productivity because
those "little" things that rob you of your energy were gone: the violence, the
crappy infrastructure, and a technology market generations behind than the 1st
World.

2 - Peers Level: being the ugliest among the pretty is better than being the
prettiest among the ugly. When you are the least good among very competent
engineers you have a lot of opportunities to learn from people that know more
and better than you. You become a sponge of methods that can help you to work
better and faster.

3 - Reused experience: The best world scenario is to be a generalist and be
able to work on whatever is thrown at your hands because you are clever and
skilled. However, it doesn't mean that you can't get really skilled and
experienced in some aspect of your craft. For instance, through the years I
become an expert on bootstrapping greenfield projects and prepare to hand them
over to a team that will look after them. This has been invaluable and my
longest days streak happened in this situation.

4 - Keep reassessing your toolset all the time: we tend to feel comfortable
and confident with the tools we know how to use. That's fine. But keep an eye
open to new technologies. There might be one new technology that solves (or
attempts to solve) some fundamental problem that you daily face - that if it
didn't exist, you would be even more productive.

5 - Manage your attention: nowadays we live in a world perfected to steal your
attention. Learn how to manage it effectively. You can't be productive if you
are distracted or constantly interrupted.

I hope it helped you. (PS: HN is a huge attention stealer.)

------
throwaway23424
I quit my job and started travelling. After finding out that I was much
smarter than most of the people who travel around all their life and who got
rich by investing, I started to read upon it. I decided that I put split all
my net worth between an apartment, gold and Bitcoin. It was incomparably by
far the most productive day of my life.

~~~
pinchharmonic
Agree on the first part, but what was so smart about the apartment/gold/BTC
combo? Just good timing on all? Or was it more thought out than just good
timing?

~~~
throwaway23424
It's more like before I was thinking of promotions as a way to move up the job
ladder and making more money, but my view changed to spending the minimal
amount of time working, not caring about promotions (which get you extra 15%
money with a lot of problems and more than 15% extra work), but getting out of
fiat currencies.

I don't think my investments were pure luck as I read a lot about the long
term pricing of commodities. Right now my net worth is mainly Bitcoin (I still
believe it's highly undervalued), and I didn't change it, but I didn't want to
sound like an average Bitcoin promoter, as that's not what I wanted this
comment to be about.

Also I quit my job as I don't need to work anymore in my life (that's why I
made this account as a throwaway)

------
motohagiography
I've given a bit of thought to these periods and the theme in them has a few
factors that indicate one general one.

First factor was reading a book that changed my perspective. When I was a
consultant, simply spending 5hrs reading a book on negotiation returned an
additional 200k over the next 36mos.

Second is the time I took all my vacation at once and spent three weeks with a
teacher learning a physical skill. It gave me the confidence to level up
massively in my career.

Third was after taking a month long motorcycle trip across the US. I developed
multiple decks and wireframes for startups I would return to and make the
focus of my life today.

The theme in them was interrupting the nagging chatter of my ego and its
anxieties and the need for external approval, which came from unstable
relationships and social media (same thing).

The result was periods of pure performance where stuff comes out like you are
singing it. The way I get into the zone today is to do something that pushes
me past a limit of ego/anxiety resistance. Either by getting coaching and
instruction, becoming absorbed in the complex ideas of a book or new area of
knowledge, or physical accomplishment.

There was a comment here the other day about junior and intermediate
programmers completing the fist %80 of a project, then leaving the remaining
%20 to the next person - who recommends chucking it and refactoring, only to
complete that initial %80 again.That %80 productivity that comes from learning
something new is massive, but it's not sufficient to deliver the polished %20
that makes a product.

The zone for me today is bursts of staccato productivity against that last
%20, with a view forward against where it will yield diminishing returns.

As a manager, the very best way to wreck flow is to put choices on staff and
then criticize them for the results. There is this anti-pattern (I call it a
false-Socratic dialogue) where ostensibly intelligent people present their
staff with choices, thinking it's educating them to "choose right," when the
overall effect is to just punish them randomly for making independent
decisions.

The constant theme in 10x developers I have observed is that they don't
internalize interruptions from others. Often this is because they miss or
ignore the social cues of concern and approval that derail others flow, either
because of a spectrum thing, confidence from better options, or the narcissism
that helps some people succeed.

The flow I develop through these other factors is related to that state in
that the anxiety from uncertainty in how I relate is silenced, and I can
create freely. As a result, the last 4 months on my demo have been immensely
productive.

~~~
aaronm14
Curious to hear what book you are referring to, and what physical skill you
learned that carried over into your career

~~~
motohagiography
Thanks! Specifically didn't mention them because the effect of activities
themselves is the point.

If you haven't read a book on topic-x, the first one is going to change your
perspective pretty radically and put you in that iterative and open learning
mode.

The activity (see post history for clues;)) was about sublimating that same
ego/anxiety by accepting guidance and instruction from a great teacher who had
mastered something.

Super productive and high achieving people tend to have absorbing hobbies for
(I think) related reasons. It's not that there is a "trick," it's that there
is a general effect that all those tricks produce, which is that state of
creative flow that results from removing our negative self-conscious
reactions.

IMHO, for me that included silencing self-critical mental filters by
overloading them with stimuli from things like constructive authority,
physical exhaustion, and awe and excitement at a new body of knowledge.

My thinking is that the things people do as flow and inspiration hacks roll up
into this overall process.

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vouhardy
I don't believe that repetition of an action will make you productive on the
long-term basis. It's all about being aware of the cycles, of which makes you
unhappy hence unproductive. I've been most productive when I have some
headspace and now all it takes is a cup of tea.

------
rogeruiz
My most productive time is when I am thoughtful of what I want to accomplish
and write it down before I start. It’s really helped me using a script wrapped
around Tmux sessions to achieve this. Two simple questions:

What are you working on? What did you work on?

------
overcast
The day I deleted my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Social Nonsense accounts.

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coinerone
The last day before bachelor thesis deadline. I peaked that day!

~~~
muzani
I went straight 3 days no sleep and wrote about 20-30 pages (against my
supervisor's advice).

------
bsg75
The last work day before I took a management role.

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pleasecalllater
I usually feel like it's yesterday :)

------
tomerbd
pomodoro

