What are your productivity hacks for getting stuff done?

Find your focus.

I know that sounds a little guru-ish, but you basically just gotta find what sort of environment is personally conducive to deep focus and minimal distraction. For me, it's a comfortable coffeeshop with some white noise and chatter in the background.

Most importantly, grow a backbone and control your work. There really isn't any excuse to get distracted if you really want to get something done. It's difficult, but it's possible. Knuckle down and carve out some time to work for two hard, focused hours.

That's all you need to get a lot of stuff done.

The idea of finding "the ONE THING you can do right now that will make everything else easier or unnecessary". It comes from the book The One Thing by Gary Keller.

The only setback is that you can end up spending too much time creating a list of tasks or thinking too hard to find that one thing to do first. It should be simple and quick.

As you get more familiar with the idea, you'll get better at quickly recognizing the small, immediate steps you can take.

After a while you'll realize your brain is automatically looking for the one thing for everything you do. It takes practice but it's worth it.

Something I like to do is just thinking about one thing and then getting that one thing done. Soon after doing one thing you will just fall into the mindset of getting things done.

• Recognize 3 the most priority tasks to do daily. Do them in your more productive time (2nd point below).
• Recognize your most productive period of the day: is it 8:00 - 11:00 or 17:00 - 23:00?
• To do aversive tasks, you need to ease the process: do complex tasks for, let's say, 30 mins, then reward yourself for 10 mins (e.g. by playing a game, procrastinate, surfing on the Internet purposelessly).

Surround myself with people and things that inspire me. I find that my motivation is often both very delicate and extremely critical towards my productivity. When I am working on my own projects, almost all my motivation must come from within - unlike at my full-time job where I have a lot of external motivators. But doing things like listing to the Indie Hackers Podcast on my drive home from work helps keep me focused on my long-term goals.

Another thing that has really helped me is waking up early a few times a week and working on my projects before I head to work. I know a lot of others recommend this as well, but it really helped me have some of my most productive work sessions for my side project.

I've started trying out and slowly adopting the Make Time system. I start out with picking a Highlight and then I try to schedule my day. I haven't read the Laser chapters yet so I hope it gets even more awesome!

Before it became fun to work on this stuff...... Ahem..... when I actually stopped learning indefinitely and actually started building something. I found pomodoros invaluable especially this pomodoro tracker

https://pomodoro-tracker.com/

This combined with the Seinfeld method was instrumental in me learning for way longer than I should have but actually kinda becoming a somewhat ok (not great) full stack web developer. In less than a year. ..?

My toes curl when I say that from sheer cringe at myself. Full stack web developer..... I am using the easiest framework and the easiest language and somehow I am able to hack things together. Hack stack web developer more like.

I like to write down things that need to be accomplished that day/week. If I don't, I find myself all over the place. That way, I only focus on what needs to be done.

I did a long writeup in Productivity: Working towards a summary of what we know. Here's the outline:

Uncrowd your mind:

• Capture your tasks
• Get small tasks out of the way
• Break tasks into small actions
• Underschedule
• Deal with psychological issues
• Develop your "focus muscles":

Embrace boredom:

• Deliberately train
• Prevent procrastination:

Remove temptations:

• Use schedules/planning
• Use social pressure and precommitment
• Record yourself
• Expect work to be effective
• Actually care about the task you're doing
• "Pregame" before deep work:

Use routines/rituals:

• Utilize location
• Think hard:

Think hard:

• Utilize active recall
• Utilize spaced repetition
• Use a coach
• Focus on the wildly important

Rest:

• Take time to decompress
• Get enough sleep
• Take naps
• Take breaks when appropriate
• Experience solitude
• Exercise

Think easy:

• Perform "productive meditation"
• Follow through:

Reflect:

• Use a productivity cheat sheet
• Reward yourself
• Punish yourself

I track my time. Set goals each week of how much work you want to accomplish. This really helps me prioritize and discipline me to accomplish what I need to. Guess who is staying in on Friday night if I'm not at X hours? This simple change has really accelerated my biz.

have a good sleep and no more than 8 working h in the previous day. The better I rest, the better I work next day

Stop making excuses. That's my hack. We all have 24 hours in a day. After sleep, work, family, use the time left wisely. Get up earlier. Stay up later. Consume less. Make a task list the night before of your main things to finish the next day.

Just focus on the meat of the project. Not the tagline. Not the logo. Or the prettiness of the thing. Get the thing to work. It'll be ugly, but it'll work. Once the basics are done, go back and start tweaking things.

While it's important to get stuff done, I think it's more important to follow time tested principles towards the pursuit of worthy goals. Under the auspices of someone who's already done it.

I'm at the stage where's it not about getting stuff done, it's about getting the right things done. The right things I see are;
serving customers.
solving problems.
making life easier and adding value.

And discerning how this matters to you.

1. Avoid every site with an algorithmic timeline / newsfeed!

If i think a project item is "big" I'll split it into multiple backlog items to work on. Means if i have less time at one point, I can check off some of the "smaller" items which in turn will result in a big chunk of a backlog item being done.

seems to be working for https://trackmylift.app anyway - and I use Asana for my project and Kanban board.

It helps to make a list of the most important things that you think can have the most impact.

Then, sort by how hard it is to do these things.

Then, take the hardest thing and spend at least an hour on that.

Repeat.