If you’re unproductive right now
Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day:
- Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself
- Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today
- No, really. Do it. It will take 20 seconds
- Procrastinate for the rest of the day
- When the alarm rings, put your laptop and everything you need for work in your backpack
- When you wake up, try to not check social media, email or anything else. Do not take anything out of your backpack
- Get dressed, take your stuff, and go to a library, cafe, whatever else where you either
- never been to
- have been to but never procrastinated within the last 6 months
- While getting to that place, figure out what you want to be doing today
- Do it
- Return home in the evening. Don’t take anything (especially your laptop) out of your backpack. Repeat steps 6-10
It seems that every productivity trick / system stops working in exactly the same way I described above. Most productivity tricks develop aversion around them. All of them lose salience. The only way to avoid encountering problems with productivity is to make the stuff you want to be doing in the long-term to be the most exciting stuff you can do at any moment in time, which is perhaps possible if you, e.g. work at a startup, but is untenable in almost every situation.
Context intentionality as the key difference between home and every other place on planet earth
“eliminate the distractions” is the worst productivity advice I’ve ever seen
on pomo
- work for 25 minutes from :05 to :30
- take a 5 minute break from :30 to :35
- work for 25 minutes from :35 to :00
- take a 5 minute break from :00 to :05
- every three hours (at 12-3-6-9) the :05-:30 work cycle is substituted for a break, which lasts 35 minutes.
I don’t care about doing only full pomodoros: suppose, I got home at 20:15. Do I dick around and wait till 20:35 to start a pomo? No. 20:15 is time during which I’m working, so I get to work, and then round this pomo up or down , depending on the circumstances.
The fact that I never have to think “do I work right now or do I take a break right now?” removes most of the friction of the pomodoro technique and means I no longer have to actively think about starting pomodoros.
if I have an ongoing conversation with someone, then during the next short break I’m allowed to check if the person wrote anything and reply to them
if I need to open a webpage for something, I’m only allowed to get one page away from what is immediately needed for the task, e.g. I’m writing this post and I want to see what Wikipedia writes about GTD, so I’m allowed to go to GTD, then from GTD to David Allen (and to any other page linked at GTD) but I’m not allowed to open any pages from David Allen. This is the exploration / exploitation tradeoff I enjoy
if I’m researching something, I’m only allowed to open one page at a time, e.g. when I’m doing a literature review, I open the page, read it, close it, and then open the next one. This prevents me from accumulating a unread tabs too fast
Rules are about exceptions
Note that spending a day procrastinating / playing video games is equivalent to reading a book for an hour every day for two weeks.