Absurdly simple productivity hacks

These are the tried and tested, environment-agnostic productivity hacks you can apply anywhere and see the results for yourself. Getting the fundamentals right is very important because if you can’t understand the small stuff, you’ll never understand the bigger stuff.

Learning from others

Some might say that this is the only productivity hack there is. Because if you think about it, it encapsulates all other productivity hacks out there.

Need to learn how to manage your tasks better? Someone most probably has figured it out. Need to learn how not to mess up a relationship? Someone already has and knows what to do to avoid it.

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” -Confucius

Go to sleep

Seriously. Go to sleep.

I’ve learned this after a lot of hit and trials, but having a fixed sleep schedule is something that should be the backbone of your personal productivity system. I’ve experimented with sleeping late, sleeping early, sleeping in shifts and this is what I’ve learned: No matter what your sleep time, have a fixed schedule and be disciplined about it.

You can create your own sleep habit, you don’t have to follow anyone else’s. Some people need 8 hours, others just need 6. Just listen to your body and mind, understand how much rest it needs, and try not to lie to yourself. The dividends this habit will pay are enormous.

Saying No

Read overcommitting.

You don’t need to go to /r/RoastMe to feel bad about yourself. Just overcommit and you’ll be there.

Yes, you can accomplish everything on your plate. No, you can’t do everything at the same time.

Or at the very least, you can’t start doing everything at the same time. If you have one goal on track, you can maybe take another one on. But if you try to accomplish 10 ambitious goals at the same time, you’re most probably going to stress/burn out. Because if each of your goal requires 2 hours of your time and there are only 24 in a day, the math doesn’t add up.

Pareto principle

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.

Following the Pareto principle, here are the 20% of the basic and universal productivity “rules”, and not hacks, which cover 80% of what productivity is all about and how to be more productive.

Have a separate place to work

• Kitchen is where food is made, bedroom is where you sleep and rest so similarly create a workspace where you only work.
• Keep boundaries between these places because if you try to mix up the environment and the task you’ll only get the lowest common denominator of both.

Black and white time

• When working, work. When playing, play.
• Focus on having either black time or white time. Never try to have grey time that is working or thinking about working while playing and vice-versa. It leads to marginal returns on your focus.

Productivity starts with 5 minutes

• We need momentum to keep going but ironically you need to move to create some momentum. Give it 5 minutes of undivided attention and you’ll have that momentum.
• “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Divide and conquer

• How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
• Big tasks are daunting. Divide them up in chunks and keep tackling one chunk at a time. Focus all your energies on that one chunk and before you know it, that big, daunting task is complete.

Take a walk/break

• Don’t stay stuck on a stupid problem just because you spent a lot of time being stuck on it.
• If something isn’t working, stop working on it. Walk away from it for a while. Your problems also need room to breathe.

Set deadlines

• “Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.” - Parkinson’s law
• Don’t start work without a deadline in your head. If you don’t assign a deadline to a task it’ll take much much longer than it should have.

Don’t multi-task

• Doesn’t work and leads to poor results than compared to uni-tasking. Every time.
• If you don’t stop multi-tasking, it can become a nasty habit and seriously harm your ability to focus on one thing.

Deep work

• Deep work is a skill or habit that needs to be cultivated for a long time and not to be cheated with. The dividends it’ll pay are immense.
• Everyone’s peak mental performance hours in a day are different. Recognise yours and work completely distraction free on your most important tasks at that time.

Don’t overuse todo lists

• It’s very easy to just dump things in your todo lists thinking you’ll get to them later. It gives you a fake sense of accomplishment.
• If you use todo lists, try to put some arbitrary limit on the number of tasks each list can have. Todo lists are there to manage your work, they’re not your work.

You have limited mental resources per day at your disposal

• Decision Fatigue: Deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making
• Use your mental resources wisely, on things that matter the most, before you run out of your limited resources for the day.

Your mental resources work like your physical muscles.

• To increase the ability to lift more, you make yourself lift more little by little, putting yourself out there. All your mental faculties function similarly.
• You increase their ability by working on them, giving them more and more to lift.

Have good measures in place

• You improve what you measure. If you don’t measure your work the right way, you’ll keep fooling yourself into thinking that you’re getting a lot of work done.
• Productivity is concerned more with how much work you do, not how many hours you work. Having good measures in place is essential to see where you stand and improve.
• Just finishing routine work doesn’t count as being productive. Depending on the nature of your work, productivity can mean many things.

Prioritise

• Yes, you can do everything. No, you can’t do it all at the same time. Don’t spread yourself too thin trying to achieve all your passionate goals at once.
• Don’t fall into the trap of feel good procrastination by putting off the important tasks and keep working on your easy ones.
• Also, have very few priorities. If you have a single priority, you’ll get it. If you have many priorities, you’ll get to none of them.

Discipline >>> Motivation

• Consistent intensity over consistency over intensity.
• Don’t wait for motivation or inspiration to come before you can start working on your work. Motivation is flaky and inconsistent, relying on it to get your work done is almost like playing a gamble.
• You can’t just work on days only when you feel like it. Put systems in place and enforce them. Put aside the reliance on motivation. Treat the motivated days as a bonus.

Reset mindset

• Don’t wait for a Monday, a new month, a new year to get started on your goals. You can get started right now.
• Don’t reset often because you’ll loose a lot of progress but if you think you need to reset your approach, don’t wait to do it.

Don’t go for the productivity ‘hacks’

• Hacks are cool, fun, new and shiny - but they’re ineffective.
• These hacks are dopamine inducing, short term solutions that will probably only work once or twice. You don’t repair a hole in your ship with hacks. They might offer temporary relief but sooner or later you need to find some permanent solution and fix the problem at its root.

Don’t focus too much on tools

• People often get stuck on which tools to use rather than focusing on the actual process. There’s a simple reason for that: It’s easy to talk about the tools your role model uses than put in the amount of work your role model puts in.
• Imagine playing a 1-1 basketball game with Michael Jordan but you have all the best gear on you, the latest Jordans and the whole deal but Jordan is in battered old shorts and barefoot. You think you can beat Michael Jordan?
• Tools are there to help, augment your work. It’ll never replace the work.

100 days principle

Whenever I want to accomplish something beyond my current level of competence I say this to myself:

”Your 100th [insert what you want to improve] will be good.”

Examples:

• I want to be a better writer? My 100th article will be good.
• I want to make great meals? The 100th meal I prepare will be good.
• I want to have a better body? I’ll get one on the 100th day at the gym.
• I want to become a good photographer? The 100th photo onwards will be good.

100 time’s the charm

I don’t think much about the most talented people around, people who create literally anything and it’s great out of the box, people who can shit roses figuratively speaking. They got lucky playing the genetic game or the talent game.

I’m on the side with people who work, the ones who are not given any talent or chance but create one with sheer effort. And learning from people on this side, I’ve made this ‘100 times the charm’ rule/principle for myself.

• If I want to become a writer, the first piece I write won’t be any good but the 100th piece might be worth some attention.
• If I want to create music, the first thing I’ll create will be so bad that I myself won’t like to hear it but the 100th track I create might be worthy of some ears.
• If want to have better physique, which is often seen as something largely controlled by genetics, I won’t start looking good on the first day at the gym but I might see some changes on the 100th day at the gym.

The first 99 iterations are the tax I pay to make something happen, to force it into my destiny. The rule also helps you to not get demoralised because you kind of know when to expect some results.

Quality vs Quantity

And it follows the same theme of quality vs quantity. You don’t have to be the most talented person that can create quality all the time and you don’t have to be the dullest person who only churns out quantity. You can be the other guy, that uses quantity to reach quality and have a nice little journey to look back on.

What we actually want to improve is the quality of our skills and what we’re doing is providing the quantity of work.

The following is an excerpt from a book called Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

It’s not Quantity vs Quality, but in fact Quantity leads to quality.

Does this even work?

Mostly it does, many times it doesn’t but it doesn’t matter. The point is to get to action.

The 100 days rule might just be a placebo you tell yourself that a definite milestone exists and upon reaching that milestone you’ll improve some skill.

In reality, some skills are far too complex to be learned let alone mastered in 100 days. But having a 100-day track record of actually working on it is far better than planning/talking about how to get it done or far worse - not doing anything about it.

They say it takes 10,000 hours of work to become a master at something. I don’t want to become a master at something, I just want to get visibly better than my previous self and 100 days of continuous effort over a few hundred hours of work seems to be a good way to get there.

3 day sprints

In my endless list of productivity and time management experiments, this is the latest: 3 day sprints.

The title sums up what it is pretty well; which is I work in sprints that are 3 days long.

The why part is explained below.

Consistency and Intensity

I found myself shuffling work between 2 kinds of work styles:

• Work that requires Consistency

These include work that needs to be done over a long period, day in day out, to get any visible results. These are my long-term goals, or much simply put they constitute my current habits. For example gym, coding, reading, writing, journaling, morning/night rituals.

The goals under this category follow a general direction where I want myself to be. For example, I want to get better at journaling is a general goal.

• Work that requires Intensity

These include tasks that have a deadline and need to be done immediately. For example Office work, reading challenge progress, writing/reading about a particular topic of interest.

The work under this category is very specific, about what, where and when to do something. For example, I want to journal about my improvements and notes in the morning for half an hour for a week is a very specific goal.

What I realised was that work that required intensity was getting ticked off pretty fast but the consistency work was either making slow progress or required a lot of willpower to be completed.

So I decided to shift all the work to intensity mode, which has two benefits. One, things get done pretty quickly. Second, things are kept very interesting.

For example:

• Going to the gym is a consistent effort goal, but doing compound and maxing out power workouts for 3 days becomes the intensive goal.
• Reading a lot of books is a consistent effort goal, but reading two small books on psychology I’m pretty pumped about in a week becomes the current intensive goal.
• Writing code is the long-term goal, working on only one app and trying to complete it in three days becomes the focused goal.

So the undertone is still consistent effort, the general direction, but the execution is in intensity, the specific direction.

Why 3-day sprints work

These three days prints are great because they force you to work better. When you have fewer hours and days to accomplish something, you spend them a little wiser. It’s just Parkinson’s law put into practice.

Parkinson’s law: Work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion.

So if I’m allowing only 3 days for something to be done, I notice that I’m spending those three days much better than when I know I have a lot of time to complete some work.

One important thing to note here is I’m not just planning my work into these three days sprints, but I’m also scheduling my entertainment and downtime into these sprints. One such goal I set was, along with the ambitious examples above, to watch five movies in three days.

The ideas that give these sprints power are:

1. There is a deadline to everything - even entertainment, a deadline which is not too short and not too long.
2. And having a nice little feeling of accomplishment and confidence of how much can be done in just three days.