How to be productive

Personal productivity, Getting Things Done, or whatever you want to call it, became one of the biggest things on the Internet in the last few years.

Everybody seems to feel they're not achieving as much as they could. Most people feel overwhelmed by having too many things to do. They procrastinate on important things and feel guilty later. They would like to do something about it, but aren't exactly sure what can be done. Maybe they even tried something in the past and failed.

Now would be a great time to try again. The Internet contains all the producticity resources you will ever need, and so many new fun distractions that at some point you will simply have to act.

There are many productivity resources, each telling a somewhat different story. To a large extend they simply focus on different things, but some techniques recommended by some and strongly discouraged by others. This situation is not really much different from other fields. For example in software engineering pretty much everybody agrees about using revision control and test-driven development, but about things like which web framework to use or wheather to write specifications or not, there are as many opinions as people asked.

This post is not attempting to create The Grand Unified Theory of Productivity. It wouldn't really work, just like no Grand Unified Theory of Software Development is possible at this point. I think live and work of web developers, brain surgeons, and newspaper cartoonists differ too much, people's personalities differ too much, and even if a single "right" answer exists, we are likely not to know it yet.

Here's a quick walkthrough on things that people all seem to agree on.

• You can do something about it. Being productive is a skill, not a innate ability.
• Simple tricks may bring you some improvement, but if you want a major improvement, systematic approach is needed.
• Never keep anything in your head. Human brain is great at thinking but sucks as a storage place. Paper is better. Plain text files are better. Personal wikis are better. Everything is better as a storage place than your head.
• Always think on paper. Drawing mindmaps using colored pens works particularly well. Just like nobody creates software or does math in their heads, planning without some writable surface to put your plans on is just horribly ineffective. Personally I think that paper is far better than any computer-based writing system so far, but computer-based systems at least beat doing it in your head.
• When in doubt, toss it.
• Throw away reference material that you aren't sure if you will need.
• Throw away good ideas. Write about them on your blog so someone else may use them or just toss them. Throwing away good ideas creates mental space for great ideas. Throw away bad ideas too of course.
• Simple flat reference systems work better than complicated hierarchical systems. If you forget when exactly you put something in flat system there are only a few places to check. In a hierarchical system number of places is much larger.
• Measuring efficiency in percents and trying to be "100% efficient" is one of the worst ideas you could have. Even if you spend all your time doing your tasks with the maximum humanly possible efficiency, are they the best things you could do ? Is it really impossible to have more impact, do more important things, earn more money, or whatever ? For example programmers are getting twice as productive every 6 years. How can you assign percent value to their current productivity ?
• Perfectionism leads to a huge waste of time. 20% of effort generates 80% of value. So the other 80% of effort generates just 20% of value. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly, getting it done fast, and improving it with time.
• Things show in your life as amorphous "stuff". For each thing which shows up decide up front what is it, if you want to do something about it, what is your desired outcome, and what's the very next action leading there.
• After you decide it, put it on some lists which you will look at often enough to keep it out of your head. Your world and your priorities change very quickly, so review this list often, at least once a week.
• "Important" and "urgent" are not the same thing. Many things are very important but never get urgent - like learning new skills. Other things seem urgent but have very little long-term value. Spend more time doing the important, and less time doing the not so important but urgent things.
• Every single productivity expert agrees that single-tasking is far more effective than multi-tasking. I'm not really convinced here. Maybe it's a personality issue, with some peolpe having much shorter attention spans than others. Even if you're not going to single-task it's a good idea to limit number of things you're doing at the same time to only a few.
• If something can be done in less than 2 minutes, do it when it shows up or toss it, even if it's not very important. Managing such tasks takes more time more than doing them up front.
• Some things are boring, but you want to do them anyway, and they don't take that much time. You know, like packaging and documenting software. So just do them right now and be done with them.
• Detailed plans, deadlines, ABC priority coding and so on would only work well if things weren't changing fast. In other words - they don't well work for anyone these days.
• Complex tasks should be split into small steps. "Make Ruby faster than Java" is a nice goal, but how do you even start ? "Create some benchmarks measuring performance of Ruby", "Profile Ruby interpretter to identify bottlenecks", and "Replace Ruby hash table implementation by Judy" are something you can actually do.
• Whatever system you have, it will need regular review. Without it even the best systems would break and you'd be back where you started.
• Take a lot of notes, throw away 80% of them later. Making too many notes it better than not making enough. Always have some pen and paper with you.
• Don't accept too many commitments. If you don't care about something, just say no.
• Eliminate floating information. Every information should have a "home", and be easy to retrieve.
• Have a single system.
• If you have something on your list of things to do, but avoid doing it, ask yourself why is it on your list.
• Humans cannot work productively more than about 40 hours a week.
• Feedback is important. Unit testing results, money, number of people who visit your blog, any feedback.
• People give negative feedback much more often than positive feedback. It might be a good idea to change it.

The best known productivity book these days is Getting Things Done by David Allen. It's available on paper, PDF, and audio, and the GTD system is described on thousands of websites and blogs. Another popular one is First Things First by Stephen Covey.

High productivity is achievable for everyone, in every context, including contexts not usually associated with "productivity", what you can see on the following video by Melissa Gira from Sexerati (CC-NC-ND):

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