Productivity

This article was shared with me recently, it’s an excellent read and provides some good reasoning for why people feel that vague sense of living an unaccomplished life. I’ll admit it, I am most definitely a Gypsy. My garden right now it full of flowers of unrealistic expectations. I’d begun to discover this while meditating and watching my emotions daily. In Headspace there’s a section called the discovery series. You begin to focus on watching your emotions throughout the day and when your mind gets distracted and wanders. More specifically you watch the ways in which you wish things were different. You begin to notice the gulf between reality and fantasy. ...

In the mornings I had a very structured routine. The first thing I would do is meditate as for me, all other habits flow from this. Then after my meditation I would either go for a run or do some dumbbell based strength exercises. The reasoning being that as exercising was also a quiet periods, I could try extending the mindfulness and clarity gained from meditation into my exercises and have a better chance of remaining mindful throughout the day. ...

Xmonad - Xmonad is a Haskell based window manager for both Linux and Mac(sorry Windows users). It’s highly configurable but for me it’s lack of features and application bar crap is a real advantage. The application your currently working with takes up the entirety of the screen and you navigate to other applications using keyboard shortcuts. Using this and disabling notifications in your IM/Email/whatever clients forces you to work on the task in front of you. It’s very pleasing to use after a while. ...

So you’ve removed your distractions and figured out how to maintain focus. You’ve a set of good habits you’d like to being implementing. Well firstly, read this. Don’t jump head first into habits you’ve never gone through before. You’re expectations will be too high and sadly, you’ll likely fail. Patience is a virtue. So, after you’ve chosen the habit you’d like to begin with, here are some tools to help keep you focused on those good habits. ...

So the final process I use to help me get shit done is reviewing. Each week I do a fairly lengthy review of the last week. I see what habits have been successful and which have been a struggle to maintain. I look to see if there are appropriate alterations I can use to help improve. Here’s a list of the things I tend to analyse while reviewing, and the questions I’ve asked. ...

Most of my distractions currently come from within. I hit up social media or news sites. Also my email is a big time waster. I needed a way to remain connected but while preventing regular access. Here’s what helped. Get Shit Done-A cross platform OS level site blocker. Simply install the script, add your distracting sites and run ‘get-shit-done work’ in a terminal. You only notice sheer number of times you find yourself flicking to those distracting sites when a big error is thrown that the site is unavailable. It’s a learning experience. Your browser however, may cache URL lookups and you may still access distracting sites when I shouldn’t and visa-versa. On Firefox there is an extension called DNS Cache. It allows you to prevent Firefox caching DNS entries, I presume this slows down URL requests but I barely noticed a difference and GSD now works as it should. ...

I created a number of long term goals recently and have been trying to work out a system within which I can continue to keep my focus on those long term goals and reduce procrastination. I try to promote a daily focus on long term tasks through reminders and regular reviews while reducing procrastination through a set of core tools. I tried multiple tools/tricks and what I’ll post a series on the tools and tricks I used. ...

Productivity has never been my strong point. I’m the ultimate procrastinator. I will literally do anything other than the task at hand. In fact this post is likely being written purely as I don’t want to study. But, the post itself is useful in it’s function to push me forward. I’ve gotten attracted to a very simple idea of “Just keep going”. In my head I imagine the Terminator, after being blown to bits, still getting up. I suffer from “Goldilocks procrastination”, essentially everything needs to be just right before anything can happen. On top of that everything needs to remain perfect for me to maintain it. On paper it’s insanely obvious that this will fail, but a lesson that’s taken me a while to learn. If I don’t have all the study materials or if I miss a run during the week and boom, never again. What’s the point? ...

Pinboard: social bookmarking for introverts _For a few more bucks a year, Pinboard offers an archiving service which saves a copy of everything you bookmark, gives…_pinboard.in

Evernote Although I use evernote as my brain online for everthing, it is incredibly useful for programmers too. Where I work things like requirements can be captured on almost anything, so snapping photos of whiteboards/notepads/beer mats that become OCR searchable is very handy. On top of that it’s nice to have all notes auto stored up on the web(I’d have a fit if I lost my developer diary over a hard drive crash). The client application for evernote could be better and I’d consider Microsoft’s OneNote a much better application but Evernote does everything I need it too. The killer feature being the iPhone app that lets me capture text, voice and snapshots everywhere. Coupled with JotNot it gives me a very powerful information capturing device that I simply cannot live without. This is one of the truly killer apps for my iPhone. ...