How can founders become more productive?
I had a quick listen (it's less then 10 minutes) to this SaaS Boss podcast on productivity from @NatalieLuneva (I'd love to see that spreadsheet you mentioned Natalie!)
There's some good tips there on being purposeful and strategic. And the tips of backwards planning is one I've heard a few times too.
On one hand I feel like I'm fairly productive, but on the other hand I just don't set goals. I feel like I should and perhaps I would do better if I remained focused on set tasks, but whilst I've set some structure around my work/life balance, I've not yet found a model that works for me.
I do feel I'm purposeful and strategic in how I do things. These days I use Notion to log things and keep it updated with relevant tasks. But I don't sit down at the beginning of each day to create a list of the things I need to accomplish.
There's a monthly list of 'IH community' things that I keep constantly updated. I also log my ideas of things to action and I come back to it constantly.
Such is life, I get a bit more organised as life goes on. I make constant improvements. I have habits of just doing stuff ingrained into me. But I'm also clearly guilty of procrastinating on stuff too. Plus I do myself not to give myself a hard time.
How do you feel about your productivity levels? How important do you feel it has been for your business? What seems to work for you?
Do less!
I struggle with this greatly.
I keep saying I should do less, but in reality I'm not sure I want to.
Like I was supposed to take time off after Ministry of Testing. Instead I dove straight into doing more work (here at IH).
There are things I do less though: no commute, no meetings and stuff like that.
Something that has done wonders for my productivity is to intentionally engage only in deep work in the morning before lunch.
I normally let myself get distracted really easily by email, twitter, IH, HN, etc. The internet is full of interesting things that feel semi-productive. However, I found I spend way too much time being distracted.
9am-12am is for deep work now. I don't read news or my email in the morning anymore. I block all input so I can focus on output. No push notifications. No social media.
In the beginning it was awkward to have my morning coffee without news or checking email/social media. Now I use the time to plan for the day. I try to plan a quick win in the beginning of the day and then move on to a hard task.
After lunch I have my scheduled meetings, I do my email, tweet things, get on IndieHackers, etc. Usually by that point I have already accomplished quite a bit so the day feels like a win.
This. Yes. It's true that if I can get just a few solid hours of deep work in, that's all that really matters and the day feels like a win. I've used an approach similar to yours and it was great at the time.
I'm doing a little twist on this these days. After getting up, eating breakfast, etc., I head to the library, coffee shop, park, etc., and take an hour or two to try and get through whatever shallow work I have to do: emails, admin tasks, etc. (I barely use social media or read news so that's less of an issue for me.) Then I come home with the intention of doing nothing but deep work for the rest of the morning and afternoon – plus non-cognitive activities like lunch, stepping outside, etc. to give my brain a rest; see @armgitaar's post about breaks below 😁). It's a bit counter-intuitive, but the thing is, I know I'm going to have to deal with my inbox at some point during the day. If I have an inbox full of unknown variables, then when my deep-work momentum starts to slip it can be an easy distraction. But if I've already taken care of anything that needs to be taken care of today, I can more easily ignore it completely for hours at a time, knowing that nothing that urgent ever shows up in my inbox anyway.
Just sharing because it's not an approach I hear of very often, but it works well for me.
Big problem for me this. I use trello and try to update it weekly to get on top of tasks.
Some weeks it works great others I lose control. Always trying to improve everyday is a school day :) .
love this:
that's one-hundred! being a n00b is the best place to be! glad you're here friend!
Take breaks. If you are being a bottleneck, bring in someone who does that task better than you (if you are in the position to afford that type of move). Also, take breaks. And, don't forget to take breaks.... 😂
I think I need a break right now...
Not sure you are being clear. Do you recommend regular breaks?
😂
At some point, I became obsessed with personal productivity and together with our friends we created an app that allows tracking:
In the long run, we wanted to apply some simple algorithms to find correlation between what you do and how you feel because of that, but we are not there yet. LMK if you're interested to try out something like that - the app isn't production-ready, but totally free.