How do you manage your energy and get disciplined to get stuff done?

a feeling of underachievement

This is common, especially if you don't plan / schedule realistically for each day. You will have something unfinished ALL THE TIME and if you only look on what lies before you you'll never feel you got something done. So take the time in the evening to define the ONE most important task for the next day and check if you completed your one most important task for this day.

There will always be something undone. Just track yourself if you completed the most important task for today and your fine.

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An interesting concept I stumbled upon is the idea that there are tasks for three types of people in a company:

• Entrepreneur / Founder
• Manager
• Specialist Worker

And in the early days (or as a solo founder) you need to do the tasks of all three "personas" yourself. But the feeling of urgency / importance for any task is different, depending on which persona you are at the moment...

And if you take on the view point of another persona, you value your tasks more than the tasks of the other persona. So therefore if you did Manager-Tasks the whole day (writing emails, calling clients, managin team members, planning next month, etc.) your "Specialist-Worker = developer" mindset will tell you "you accomplished nothing today". But this is only because you evaluate the "things done as a manager" with the developer mindset.

The same thing goes if you do Entrepreneur-Tasks like defining strategy, talking to customers about potential new products, thinking about the vision of the company... Both your manager-mindset and your developer-mindset will tell you "that was worthless and you did nothing today". Which is just wrong of course, just a different perspective on the business ;)

Here is my recipe :

• A bit of work out : 1 hour in the morning, 1 hour in the afternoon, except during winter, only 1 hour in the afternoon (actually, it's my 30km commute)
• Eating light : less fat, more vegetables, in particular for lunch. I'm not telling you must be hungry, but that eating easily digested food is important to keep productive afterward.
• Cold shower : I'm new to this, but when I get out of the shower I could do anything. I start with a normal hot temperature and then slowly go to the minimum (might not be feasible during winter in Canada). Doing so, it's not even unpleasant, contrary to going right away under cold water.

It's not magical, I've always some good reason to procrastinate, but I'm more produtive than before.

I don't have an exact answer for you, but the following works for me.

• Choose to work on something which you like (between freelancing and building a product I would like to use, I am more productive on the later)
• I am most productive in the morning (4h) and at night (3h). I only manage 1-2h of work in betwen 2pm-6pm, which I get tired easily and took a nap. This cycle could changed, as I used to be productive at midnight.
• A good task management tool with time tracking helps. I am using Pomodoro, which help me focus into a flow of 25m productive block with 5m break.
• I label my tasks Work (official work / income generator), Fun (experiment with new ideas) and Chore. I get around 60% work, 30% fun and 10% chore.
• I don't do hard deadline (unless I'm freelancing), but I make sure I work on the task in hands consistently towards my goal of shipping.
• Don't beat yourself for working less than 8h per day. Everyone have a different working hours and style, as long as I manage to ship the delivery consistently (making progress). I am productive about 6h per day, need to take afternoon nap, take small break in between or take a big break to watch 30m anime as reward or play a 30m short game. If I am free on weekend, I am motivated to work 3-6h per day as well.
• My productive hours per day fluctuate between 2h - 12h per day, which is fine as long as I manage 6h per day on average within a week or a month.
• I go for hiking on weekend, 2 classes of QiGong per week, sometimes 15m exercise on Yoga mat. I enjoy the weekend hike, I manage QiGong consistently because it's a class and I went there with my family. I dislike exercise on Yoga mat, but doing it together with my wife and the short period make it slightly more bearable.
• It took me a year after quiting my job to get into the flow, and gets better as years go by.

Looks like you are building a great product. I gather you are tougher on yourself than most.

in the morning, accomplish 2 or 3 tasks, then in the afternoon I am super slow

I've found this key. The morning is when you are fresh.

For myself first thing in the morning:

1. 5 minute journal (focuses my mind and reminds me what I'm already grateful for),
2. Workout/run (wakes me up and grants me energy in my life)
3. Breakfast of eggs, bacon, and black coffee (fuel for the day and reward for the first step 1 and 2)
4. THEN I start in on two focused hours of my most important task for the day.

I use the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize my tasks.

I've really struggled with this at times in the past - funnily enough an excellent post about this very subject came up on HN a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411662). Some really great insights there.

Hi Robin! All the answer here have very good nuggets. But each response is the point of view of who are answering. It's what works for them. Maybe not for you.

As you say, you are very productive in some timeframes, or under certain circumstances. Try to be aware of it and design your schedule keeping that in mind. Maybe you have to fragment your sleeping schedule in two, or waking up at 4:00 am and go to bed at 8:00 pm or whatever works for you.

That needs a lot of self-knowledge and experimentation. But it's worth.

I like what Patric Scmid is telling about the three hats. It's related to auto-exigency and unrealistic expectations. So it's good to learn how to handle that.

I also like the idea of doing the most important task first. But a lot of highly achievers procrastinate a lot before actually doing their work. Examples are Tim Ferris, Paulo Coelho... Every one is different, so figure out what works for you.

Hope it helps :)

What works for me, from top of my head:

• Limit the amount of time you will invest into the problem/project/work per day. You will naturally ignore the non-important tasks and procrastinate less.
• 8h worktime does not mean 8h of productive work.
• Have some basic organizing system - tasks, lists, calendar, ...
• When I get super excited about something, I try to do it asap - you may not be this productive (I mean on this specific problem) ever again.

tldr: Schedule.

I come from a family where we tend to be overweight. Everyone, except my grandma. She's got the same genetics, but she always had a breakfast at 6am, lunch at 12 and dinner at 6. She would never even thought of eating when it wasn't time to eat. (The term "snacking" wouldn't make any sense to her.)

This is old school self-discipline, but you can apply it to your work schedule.

Set a same schedule for every day and follow it religiously. Start exactly 8:30. Take no more than 60 minutes for lunch. Be done exactly at 5pm.

Start easy: Schedule 6 hours a day. After doing a good job for a full week, make it a little more difficult - same as when you add weights in the gym.

If you find your attention drifting away, use Pomodoro technique (I made this: http://focuslist.co/). If you're tempted by social networks, use SelfControl to block them.

Let us know how it goes for you.

Hello indiehackers!

1. Read motivating books on the psychology topic and always self-improve. Red pillow by Andrew Kurchatov is overwhelmingly inspired, advise this all people who feels stucked.
2. It is normal, but you can force your brain to feel different if you teach it. For me, it's so simple as buy a new clothes or playing darts wisepick.org/best-steel-tip-darts btw, which one you prefer?

Agree with a lot of what has been said! Looks like the question on how to feel productive has been covered well. Diet and lifestyle design, however, are improvements that I made over the last two years that changed my life.

Ultimately, training mindfulness has been extremely helpful. Allows me to constantly check in with myself and assess what I need. Yoga practice has helped me strengthen that skill.

It sounds like you're on the path of understanding what is working, but also noticing when it isn't. Lifestyle design is plugging into those findings and really understanding what works best for you at what times. Then create a schedule that utilizes this understanding. As you start to see patterns, take action on them. Plug the positive patterns into your schedule, remove the negative and try something new.

I notice my productivity is a result of the routine I keep, but the exercise and food intake are the most important factors.

I notice that I am dramatically more effective when I eat a very clean diet. For me, clean means eating no processed foods/sugars, dairy, or gluten. Most of my meals are veggies based and I now use a company called Thistle for food delivery. It fits my diet and reduces my time needed to cook to 0. In between meals, I always have a bowl of nuts & dried fruit so I can don't get low blood sugar.

Changing my way of thinking about food has helped. I try to think of everything as fuel. If the food isn't positive fuel, don't eat it. Honestly, I think diet was the #1 thing that pushes me to my best self.

I also find it important to exercise in the ways that work for me. I rotate between cycling, running, yoga, and strength training. For me, both morning and lunch are my preferred times. Wakes me up in the morning and revitalizes me for the afternoon.

I strictly start bed process at 10 and sleep by 10:30-11, then get up at 6am. Each night I outline what is important for the next day and commit to it.

Finding what worked for me was a lot of trial and error with mindfulness to know what is working and what isn't. I also can fall out of routine pretty easily and it just wrecks my productivity. It is a constant exercise in discipline for me, but very worth it.

😊😊 Great question @Vinrob!

• Big ego combined with the self-awareness that my actions need to back it up.

• Enjoyment from working on your side hustle also helps when you need to dedicate disciplined time to it.

• Remove pressure:

  1. Financial. In my case, I still work a full-time job, which pays the bills, rent + lets me invest any savings back into my business.
  2. Manage expectations. Huge long-term ambition, balanced with short-term patience and understanding that building anything substantial takes time.

Wow, you're doing fine, I have problems:

• knowing what to work on
• scheduling tasks
• avoiding distractions

AND getting actual stuff done :)

Lately, I've started doing a couple things differently and I think this might help you.

1. Work on the task for at least 30 minutes every day.
2. At the end of the day reflect on what was done and feel good about it. You did something, not nothing.
3. Stuck on a hard problem? Take 5 and think about it at the end of the day then go cook dinner or workout or whatever. Now when you do those things or go to bed you will put your brain to work to think about that problem.

I've been doing this lately and it has improved my feeling of accomplishment and I'm actually doing stuff. Plus working on it everyday bit by bit is better than sitting and trying to crank out stuff for hours.

Sometimes that approach works but the long play is what you should be about. Stick to a routine and process and trust that it will yield results in time.