For the last few months, I've been working off a varying series of to-do lists to drive my life. I use a mix of the Things app, my bullet journal, and a calendar. Basically, my setup is to have annual Smart Goals, broken down into achievable chunks, then broken down …

This is part 3 in a series on lessons I've learned from several years of freelancing. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here, though you can read these in no specific order really.

Watch your mental state

When you're working a full-time job, you'll have people around …

This is a series of posts on lessons I've learned while freelancing for the past four years. You can find Part 1 here.

Focusing on "profits only"

I've alluded to this in my previous post, but, now that you're a business, you may start to make decisions that optimise being …

Looking back on this year, many of the lessons I've learned had less to do with specific technologies and more to do with long term career growth. I've been a developer now for 9 years and as a result, I'm starting to think more about longer term goals and happiness …

Recently I've written on another site how I use Rescuetime to provide metrics on my overall productivity that I can review each week. One useful feature I noticed was Rescuetime highlights, which gives you a good overview of your accompishments throughout the day. The first thing I wanted to add …

Over the last few months I've been trying different ways to increase my productivity, specifically during work hours. From todo lists to pomodoro's, xeffect cards, the autofocus method and even back to GTD. I've noticed a pattern with a lot of these techniques. They all require a pile of maintenance …

Four years ago(to the day) I wrote a post on why I was Giving up on wikis and I have to admit, four years later my opinions on the topic really haven't changed.

It's been 4 years, 700 questions(with 800 answers) and several server moves later and by …

As Lance Armstrong has shown the world, putting the right thing into your body can greatly improve performance, I myself have been looking into more maintainable alternative. More and more I'm experimenting with diet as a means to improve my mental performance as well as my running ability week on …

A little while ago, I read a post on Sebastian Marshall's blog about cutting caffeine, in which goes into the benefits and a method he uses for quitting coffee. He suggests cycling off it to reset your tolerance every so often. I figured that was a really good idea since …

After reading up on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning I decided I would implement a habit called Morning Pages. Effectively you commit to writing several pages of writing each and every morning, for me I intended to write a blog post unit each day, and decide which ones were worthy enough …

Leo Babuta describes meditation as the fundamental habit, the underlying habits beneath all others. Personally, I disagree. I wrote recently on how I cope with meditation when you haven't had a particularly good nights sleep.

Realistically washing your face is like taking painkillers after a serious injury, it's only painting …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Going to spend St.Stephen's day going over Dalio's Principles. I always find the holidays a good time to get a high-level view of things.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I bought a book, basically because it was a GTD technique that came off the pragmatic bookshelf so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Explanation:

To give a very brief explanation of the technique. You have a sheet with Today's Todos, each time you do 25 minutes of work …