Category: productivity

Brilliant article by lifehacker editor Gina Trapani. She compares your productivity system to the ultimate example of robustness – the UNIX operating system. A must-read for everyone – either if you are just designing your productivity system ; or if you are relooking/rehashing your productivity system. These rules should give a good foundation for you to base your productivity system on.

I have just listed the rules below.

1. Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces. (Rule of Modularity)
2. Clarity is better than cleverness. (Rule of Clarity)
3. Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust. (Rule of Representation)
4. When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible. (Rule of Repair)
5. Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time. (Rule of Economy)
6. Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it. (Rule of Optimization)
7. Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think. (Rule of Extensibility)

Read the article here for the full meat.

Awesome productivity blog thatvoodooyoudo.com 🙂 writes an indepth article on how to get into the zone at work. Some very good advise. Some exerpts:

Your ability to concentrate can be trained, just as your body can. It is a slow, incremental process, and just like with physical training, the real gains are made through consistency rather than occasional bursts.

The Nine Components of Flow

• Clear goals.
• A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
• A loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
• Distorted sense of time. (he talks of power-of-48-minutes here)
• Direct and immediate feedback; behaviour can be adjusted as needed.
• Balance between ability level and challenge.
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• Intrinsically rewarding action, so there is an effortlessness of action.
• Focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself.

Read the full article here.

Turn your computer OFF !
Yes. I mean it. LifeDev has a beautiful post on how he did a 5 day PM Computer Fast. Read Fast as in abstinence (not as in Fast and Furious).
For 5 days, he turned off his computer in the evening 6PM for the evening. He switched it on only the next day morning. I think this is good advise.
He talks about the benefits of this in this nice post of his, the crux of it being:

Essentially, your mind will focus more if it knows that it only can work on something for X hours. When it knows that it doesn’t have the luxury of slacking off, it kicks it into the next gear and amazing results follow.

The same is true with my study. When I knew that the computer was going to be turned off at the same time every day, my productivity soared to new heights. Now that I only had a static, limited amount of time, I had to squeeze the most out of it. I had to plan, and only work on the most important things that had to be done that day.

This brought a smile to my face, because yesterday I did the same thing, and found it awesome, and was telling my wife about it. Infact, I was telling her that I think I should be doing this more often. I came home, and did not even take the laptop out (not even to check email). Usually I pop out the laptop to check email, and then I figure, I will post something in my blog, then I will meander to lifehacker, and then maybe feel guilty and code a little bit. This is what happens.

Check the full post here.

Nope. I am not talking about any address book software here. I just happened to see my sister’s phone/address book lying on my desk (she is visiting us this month). I noticed that she has all her contacts pencilled in, in the book. I thought about it for a bit, and the bulb glowed on my head. Most often, I have seen people getting dis-illusioned by phone/address books mainly because, as people keep changing their contacts, the address book degenerates. You scratch out a number, write it below it. You scratch the whole entry sometimes. It becomes a mess after a very short time.

If you pencil in an address book contact, when somebody’s contacts changes, you can erase it and modify the contact, without much of a mess !

David Seah in his ever-interesting blog produces a masterpiece. David is a compulsively organized person. Come on, what do you expect from a person who had designed the ‘Emergent Producitivity tracker” and stuff like that.

He talks about some times, when there are just way too many things to do, too many goals, and we are just short of time. Within these ‘too many things’ also lie some things which do not have a specified goal. In other words, progress towards these goals cannot measured. They will be done, when they are done. Now enter the roomba.

Getting back to the idea of “unspecific goals, unspecified time” being something that could be worthwhile, consider the Roomba vacuum cleaner. It goes about its cleaning chores every day, sweeping the room in an algorithmically defined, but not time-bound operation. It doesn’t even have a specific goal, as in “clean the living room”. It just goes and does its thing, which is to vacuum whatever surface it happens to come across. The net result of this action is a clean living room. Amazing.

In other words, sometimes, just getting in, and ‘getting things done’ – not towards a specific goal, but just getting parts of it done, helps.

A beautifully written piece. Check it out here.

Dave Cheong in his most enriching blog, has a nice post on 18 ways to stay focussed at work. Makes a very interesting read. I have started implementing a couple of the tips. It has been working out well until now. Some interesting tips are :

Write out a daily task list and plan your day.

Setup filters in your email.

Clean up your desk.

Change your mindset and make work fun.

Read the full list here.

Update: Found another Being Focussed article on the same blog. Man, this guy is amazing. Check out his list of things to do, for keeping his blogging consistant:

• Having a goal to write 120 articles in a year.
• Working on 3 articles each week, or 2 paragraphs in each sitting.
• Prioritising bill paying before working on writing tasks.
• Tracking the number of posts I have done each week.
• Planning the topics for future articles in advance.
• Taking time out to do searches on Technorati and Google.
• Waking up at 5:30am and working on an article before work.
• Asking my wife to wake me up if I fail to get up on my own.
• Unplugging the Xbox to remove distractions.
• Watching TV to relax my mind after completing an article.
• Visualise the growth in subscribers to my feed to maintain motivation.

Wow !