16
5 Comments

Stop wasting time - start doing things that matter!

I was on one of everyday meditative walks in nature, when I realisied how much time I've actually wasted in the past couple months.

Now, I'm not talking about procrastinating with social media, house cleaning or anything keeping you from doing what you think is productive work.

"Define productive work?".

And this is where the problem lies.

While working on the Jamfony MVP , I was already reading up on marketing, growth hacking, figuratively chugging Indie Hackers threads, blog posts and newsletters. Basically anything but actually doing productive work.

Overall I've probably spent no more than half of the day actually grinding on code and getting sh* done.

Side note: Yes, marketing and building an audience matters. But does it matter when you've literally got nothing to show to that audience?

Meanwhile in the past few weeks, after handing in my thesis, I decided to take a break from the project and build my portfolio (+personal site) to keep me afloat with freelance work . I already know React, so making the site in Gatsby should be a breeze.

Except, I didn't.

Instead, I spent my time dipping my toes in new programming languages, reading 16,000 word articles and generally filling my brain with information that is not time critical.

I love this community, but it is also a great time waster. You can get lost learning stuff that you don't actually need, at least not right now. By time you may need it, you probably have already forgotten about it (or you filled a 200+ subpage notion folder, most of which you'll never look at again).

My point is: before you lose track of time diving through the internet, reflect if you need that information right now.

Ask yourself

  • "Do I need to be doing something more important right now".
  • "Is my project improving with me learning from this?

Time is a finite resource, you can always make more money, but you can't make more time. Use it wisely.

  1. 1

    staring at this post as i just added a series of linked articles to my notion board ;(

  2. 1

    I can definitely relate to this. At some point I tried asking myself "what is the most productive thing to do?" too much and that kept me from doing something. I'm trying to find the balance now - question what I do sometimes, but not overthink and sometimes do what I'm up to.

    1. 1

      At some point I tried asking myself "what is the most productive thing to do?" too much and that kept me from doing something.

      Don't overthink it. Reading docs may not be uber-productive, but it brings you closer to the goal of finishing that product

  3. 1

    Agree with a lot of this. That said, you can't work at 100% efficiency all the time. Reflecting on how time is spent is important and something everyone can probably be more conscious about :)

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments