

Ask HN: what do you do, when you are not productive? - gedrap

I am freelancing from home so productivity is a big thing for me. Today, I was thinking what&#x27;s the best way to deal with the days when you are simply not productive, easily distracted, etc.<p>In the past, I used to feel bad about unproductive days, I&#x27;d try to make it up by staying up till late and trying to get something done. The next day I would get up late, it would propagate, one more &#x27;make up&#x27; night. Few months later I just felt like an exhausted zombie.<p>After taking a break for a month, I am trying to cope with it in a different way. If I am just feeling unproductive, I do something that charges me with positive emotions (e.g. video game) or take a few hours walk. And if the day wasn&#x27;t productive, I just go to sleep early, no more late nights.<p>I was wondering, how other people are dealing with that?
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ArtDev
Have you tried RescueTime? There is a free tier and the paid version has more
fine-grained reports: [http://rescuetime.com/](http://rescuetime.com/)

Using Rescuetime I am able to see how long I at the computer vs what I am
actually getting done.

When I working on a client project, I track productive time as billable time
(hint: create a goal for all productive time and use the calculated number).

I also have an alert for when I go over 30 minutes of "distracting" time. This
applies to weekends too!

Flaking out then staying up late to finish your work.. join the the club! I
noticed that I am like 3x as fast though, so it might be a good thing.

I think the answer is to just enjoy the day and work at night. That is my next
experiment.

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gedrap
Yes, discovered it last weekend! Interesting tool, it puts little pressure to
work more because it sucks to see bad stats :)

And yes, I noticed the same about the night. Most of my work gets done between
8pm-1am. Sometimes this is a problem because I am still doing degree at the
uni and missed many morning lectures... But I guess it's the nature (plus the
clients in the States, while I am in Europe). Although it feels pretty great
to finish everything at 8pm and just playing around for the rest of the day.

