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How I got to 200 productive hours a month
By
Ivan Mir
September 21, 2017
How I got to 200 productive hours a month
Discuss this article or ask me any questions you may have.
Great insight. I cleaned up my home screen on my phone after reading your article. Now I just have Pocket, Medium, Nuzzel, Inbox, and Quip.
Really good article. Especially the moment when you describe the priority of body over mind. I wish I knew this when I was younger. I did not put enough emphasis on body and now I suffer the consequences. I am also very much influenced by the environment. If the place is noisy or packed with people I just cannot do anything but browse the Internet.
I really enjoyed this article - so much better than any of the productivity BS that's currently being peddled on Medium. Thank you!
I've been tracking hours using RescueTime, but thinking of switching to Qbserve as it looks pleasant to use and doesn't send my data to a server. I am currently averaging around 30 productive hours a week. I'm looking forward to trying out the techniques described in the article to increase this to 40 productive hours a week. Mainly I am looking to make some extra time for my side projects, and an extra 10 hours a week will go a long way to make them happen.
Wow. That was a big insight.
I always try to get something done for my side projects after work. But often don't find the motivation to do so. What would be your advise?
Thanks!
I had a similar problem when I was freelancing 3 years ago. My solution was to picture the result more often. Not fantasizing about financial success (I did it on my very first personal projects and it made the failures painful!) but thinking about what you can learn in the process and how your project can help the world.
The idea behind this is to make long-term rewards more "real" in the mind, so it's easier to find motivation for working on them.
An almost, "Think and Grow Rich" approach: picture what you want to be and what it looks like, daily, and you'll achieve it.
If there is an average of 4.3 weeks in a month you should strive for only 170 hours of work for your job. Spend the next 30 on personal projects / development.
Thanks for that post! I have found a lot of useful points in it. I have quit my job and those days I'm building plans for my "after-job life". Do you have any hard borders in your schedule when you simply stop working? Like close your laptop after 18:00, for example.
Thank you! For client projects – yes, I stop at 20-21. My own projects are only limited with sleep around 1 AM because sometimes I feel very productive and creative in the late evening.
"Learning something new from saved articles in Pocket is a great way to spend time when you have nothing better to do"
Love this! When I am bored I just browse medium and I pick up some articles to read later on Pocket.
Thanks for the article.
Pd: I am uninstalling Overwatch right know.
Thanks!
I'm very vulnerable to PvP games like LoL, DotA, TF2 — I can't play just one match in the evening, it always ends in an all-nighter.
So I started to slowly increase the gaps between sessions: from two times a week to once a month. Eventually I just quit them altogether.
I am also vulnerable to PvP games, what I try to do is play a full day and then quit for a week, but sometimes I don't do it and I ended played more than I should. I am going to try to increase the gaps between sessions as you said.
I really liked the articled. I shared on twitter and fb.
If I'm being honest, I don't think quitting games altogether is a goal worth attaining. Playing games isn't a bad thing. I've started on Guild Wars 2 recently I love it. I love the social aspects and it's introduced me to some lovely people.
You just have to be sensible with how much you play and when.
More like competitive online games. I'm always happy to play something like Animal Crossing with my friends.
Good call. Those PUBG, Overwatch, etc, style games are crazy addictive: "I'll win the next one" ... 3am ... "OK just one more".
Looks like you're just like me because I am also play online game https://tictactoebeast.com/noughts-crosses-strategy this is very best game
Your game is nice! But I prefer another Tic Tac Toe with the same playing rules, but with rather strict design
This article!
This article changed my life, years ago. It sounds cheesy but I'm not kidding.
I was unfit, drinking way too much, smoking cigarettes and weed every single day, and eating sh*t.
This article got me interested into habit building. First I built a habit to do sport, then eating better, and so on. Here's the result:
You could think that I just subtracted every pleasure in life. Well, that's what my brain was telling me too. "He" was wrong.
This article alone didn't do all of that, but it was a key component. Reading the book The Willpower Instinct helped too, as well as another article pointing to something I was searching for a long time: how to do sport at home (GMB).
I don't know why this article resonated so much with me. I shared it at that time with many people, but it didn't have the same effect. I think deeply I wanted to come back to this "child" situation where I was full of energy, curious about everything, with many plans, writing stuff all day long, and annoying everybody 😀
I really came back to that, and I'm so happy about it. It's not even about being productive anymore. It's just about doing what I really want to do.
Wow, I couldn't imagine it was that useful for anybody! Happy to hear you've got so much done!
When you throw a piece of content on the Internet, you never know what will happen when people read it. We always try to find metrics to reassure ourselves, but we should never forget that the influence we have, as content creators, can go far beyond that. At the end, we have no clue.
It's reassuring I think, and motivating too. Each time I see my own blog visited hundred of times during a day, I always think that maybe for one person it's totally enlightening, for another it will make sense only in months. I like to imagine who's reading my content, not only because it's helpful to depict a persona, but as well because these people are not numbers. I think we change people lives all the time, to some degree. Most of them will forget, perhaps, but I don't even know what forgetting means; the influence the environment has on us is, for the most part, unknown, even for ourselves.
That's why as well we need to be careful on what we're creating.
Thanks a lot for this article! ☺ It's still the best I've read on the subject.
☺️
Great article! One of the most complete summary of what to do to be more productive!
I think this is the wrong path to take for anyone. You shouldn't be striving to figure out how you can work more hours. Your goal should be to figure out how you can do the same amount of work, in less time. Work/Life balance is why I do this to begin with. While also being happy with the work i'm producing. Making my own way in life is also very important to me. I hate relying on someone else for a paycheck.
Instead your goal should be to figure out how to get down to 120 hours a month and make the same hourly. I produce far better work around the 120hr mark. Anything more than that is really just ass time.
That way I can spend the rest of the time either doing passion projects or hanging with my family.
Anyway, whatever works for you I guess, but I think it's a really bad idea to work more hours. Doesn't necessarily translate to more work accomplished and I usually end up needing to refactor the next day anyway cause I wrote tired code.
I consider the time spent on passion projects productive. :)
What do you do for breaks? If you're logging close to 200 hours a month with 6h per day, then that includes weekends. I discovered that I need at least one free day a week in order to stay productive in the long run.
I don't do breaks and instead rest by switching tasks. For example, after 5 days of working on complex code, I can spend 2 days on marketing research which usually means going through hundreds of sites and filling data in a spreadsheet. This way my "programmer" part of the brain is relaxing.
One day off is totally fine though, I think I will rearrange my workflow in future to have it and maybe reduce the total number to 180 hours. Now I don't feel much benefit from getting it – the ideas are still in my head during the weekend, I just don't work on them.
I totally relate to that. To me, what I'm doing on side is not what I would consider "work". I really like all of that, and switching help me not having this weird feeling of intellectual tiredness. A bit like I use different muscles in my brain.
That said, I need to do breaks to move my body a bit, just walking around or doing light sport (or more serious one).
thank you for the Summary sections
the post is gold.
I have the "tame my inner monkey" as a goal for 2020, so the info resonates with me greatly.
though I still find meditations a bit difficult to perform.
Congratulations and thank you for the great post
I'm launching passportlist.co version one this week. WIll be very grateful for your quick feedback on how to improve it and grow.
Tnx
Great insight
Thanks for this.. a lot of good reminders and some good new information.. We should almost have a IH starter guide for key posts like this..
Glad it still helps more than a year later! :)
This article resembles me a lot to “a day in the life” articles people at Imgur post. It would be interesting to have Indie Hacker articles that cover the lifestyle of the people creating an startup.
https://m.imgur.com/gallery/LfrH2
This comment was deleted 9 years ago
This comment was deleted 9 years ago