Build Your Own Productivity Hack
By: Rakesh Kumar
Tags: Life Hacking, Productivity, Time Management

Build Your Own Productivity Hack

Like most other developers, I am always busy attending meetings, working on projects, meeting various deadlines, fixing production issues, etc. There is always something or the other that I need to work on. I have limited time and energy that is not enough to work on everything. One way of getting most of them done is becoming productive. Like any other person, I also started this quest to build a work habit that is more productive. I started with reading blogs, & books and tried my hands on many tricks (Pomodoro, etc), but none of them quite worked for me. During this process, I realized that most of the techniques are designed to work in a specific way and not every human is able to adopt them. So it is not going to work for everyone. I also realized you need to change your natural way of working, and sometimes it is hard to change everything to adapt to a new habit. This could be disruptive and could take a long time to adapt. I devised another way to compensate for this. I focused on the basic concepts and made my productive hack that is aligned with my natural tendency or something that has worked for me in the past. It has worked for me consistently and I am sharing it here so that even you can use these techniques to build your own productivity hack.

You need to observe what motivates you and what helps you to be productive and focused. Do you remember when there was a hard deadline for a complex project? How did you organize yourself to deliver the project on time? What were the things you did to complete it before the deadline? Or how did you manage yourself when you were working on a critical production issue? You will realize that you were doing certain things repeatedly in such scenarios to get your work done in time. For example, I created to-do list to keep track of things I need to do. I also avoided unnecessary meetings and blocked any kind of distraction (pause slack notification, hiding in office corner, block social media websites, etc). I realized that I may not be able to use each of these tricks every day but I definitely can use some of them daily. For example, making a to-do list can be inherited and used every day but just making a to-do list won’t help a lot. I would still end up spending time on non-important tasks. This made me realize that I need to prioritize them based on their urgency and value. As Stephen R. Covey said in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, first thing first which means you should complete tasks that have higher importance first before other tasks. Once I started prioritizing them, I was fairly able to meet them according to their priority.

Even this was not good enough, I realized that most of the time I drifted away from my main task. Primarily because one thing led to another and so on. Generally, after 5–10 minutes, I used to realize that I have completely drifted away from my original task and I have lost my focus. I needed some way of keeping myself on track. One way to fix this was by having some deadlines to complete each task. I noticed that the moment I started setting the deadline for completing a task, it created positive pressure. I tend to be more focused to complete tasks. This also puts an incentive to remove any distractions. I think this is how developers are designed. They are most focused when they have to meet a deadline otherwise they slack.

This technique almost worked but still, there were some flaws. For example, you don’t get an entire day by yourself. There are meetings and you can’t avoid all the meetings. To improve my technique, I basically assigned the empty time block to tasks. Look at the example below:

I noticed my days were full of meetings and I was not getting enough time. I started blocking my calendar for focused work and asked the meeting organizer and team members to schedule 30 minutes meeting if they don’t require a full hour meeting. Also, if things can be resolved asynchronously (email, slack, document, etc) then we don’t need to have a meeting. This freed up some of my time that I utilized to get other things done.

I do not multiplex tasks. I have tried multiplexing tasks but I realized that I made mistakes and introduced more issues than what I solved. This decreased my overall productivity. I would rather take a longer time to finish my task than doing them parallelly. This is counterintuitive but in long run, it worked for me.

Do not forget to reward yourself after completing a task. This is mainly to reduce mental fatigue. It will relax your mind and help you regain focus for the next task. I am listing down some of the tips here for you.

Tips

To-Do List

I prefer to write down my to-do list on physical paper. It creates a psychological effect on me. our brains internalize this more as it takes longer time and provides tactile feedback when you are writing it. It also gives me a sense of accomplishment when I strike them out once I am done with the task. It just creates a feedback loop.

When I am on the go, I use google’s keep application. This is available on all the devices and they get synced quite seamlessly.

Blocking Websites

I have used Block sites Google Chome extension to block websites when I want to focus on my tasks. It has work mode that can block the websites you don’t want to visit during work hours. In case, you are not able to install such browser extension, you can always get a little bit geeky and consider updating the /etc/hosts file and block those sites.

Books

I read these books on productivity, I would recommend reading these just to get some insights and ideas.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. This book talks about the importance of checklists and how we can build clarity and consistency in any complex workflow. Most of his examples are inherited from the medical field but it does apply in our day-to-day life as well.

The Now Habit by Neil Fiore: This book talks about time management and how you can avoid procrastination. The examples given in this book are very relatable and gives you another perspective of how you can manage work more effectively.

The Effective Engineering by Edmond Lau: This is essentially focused on engineering work and processes. It talks about how we can increase the overall productivity of the engineering organization but some of its ideas can be used by an individual too. For example, prioritizing task based on their importance.

Summary

I have devised my own way to increase productivity. I just follow these simple steps: 1) create a to-do list, 2) rank them according to their priority 3) timebox them & 4) reward yourself after completing every task. This has worked for me perfectly.

Let me know in the comment section what is your productivity hack and how you build it.