Productivity: summary of an article
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Below is just my summary of that article
Time has quality — 1 hour of reading news isn’t the same as 1 hour of programming
Spend time efficiently
Choose good problems — what you should be doing now?
Have a bunch of them — focus on 1 doesn’t work. Have many projs at once to have different options to spend time
Make a list — put all your to-do’s on a list, not keep in your head
Integrate the list with your life — make it impossible for you to not do the tasks (put books to read on top etc)
Make your time higher quality
Carry pen and paper — you will be able to write down something everytime
Avoid being interrupted — put headphones on and don’t let anyone speak to you
Eat, sleep, exercise not to get hungry, sleepy, tired = unproductive
Talk to cheerful people
Share the load — share the hard job with a friend
Procrastination
You can’t put 2 magnets togetehr no matter how hard u push — so you can’t fight procrastination by your pure will
Hard problems
Break down — make a task, not a goal. Task is a concrete step you cant take toweards a goal (next step)
Simplify it - start with not an essay but with 1 paragraph — simple but gets you going
Think/research — sometimes you need to learn the problem better before you can start dogin something
Assigned problems — our mind does everything to avoid it
When the task is being assigned you have a resistance doing it
Create a false assignment — need to work on X? Tell yoursekf to do Y instead.
Make the task fun
If a hard task is fun you enjoy doing it and enhoy the success
Try to solve the meta-problem i.e. the higher level problem that solves the assigned one (create a framework, not a web site)
