Productivity One Liners

The rule of thumb is that it takes approximately 25 minutes of focus without distraction to reach a state of flow. If you’re checking your Twitter notifications every 20 minutes, which seems harmless, you prevent your brain from reaching that state and therefore prolong the time required to complete your task.
No more “good intentions” - we need habit and ritual.
Practice != deliberate practice - the engagement factor is very important.
Dangerous trap: feeling you’re getting better but actually just reinforcing current habits
Aim to have your brain in a period of Flow for at least 3-4 hours every day. One of those hours should be on the upper end of what makes your brain comfortable. You’ll know it’s uncomfortable if you’re feeling frustrated.

Pick nodes on the knowledge graph which are highly-connected to things you do routinely.
Identify the common mistakes - too much social media time? What’s taking too long?

Our brains model the future value of the task and how we feel about it. If you think about starting a task you don’t do, the brain will make it even harder next time to do it.
Make the task incredibly small and simple. Only focus on doing that tiny portion of the task. Catch yourself having negative thoughts and relabel it.
Visualization of the task at hand similar to athletes when they perform.
Willpower boosters such as caffeine or a music playlist.

To stay motivated, focus on Decrease Impulsiveness, Increase Expectancy, Increase Value.
Expectancy refers to the perceived odds of getting a reward and whether we expect success or failure.
Value refers to the pleasantness of doing a task, and the size of its reward.
Impulsiveness refers to the tendency to get distracted or lose focus on a task.
Delay refers to the time between the present and a task’s reward or completion.

Distributed Cognition: Collect your thoughts and then organize them later.
If we do not write down the ideas when we have them we tend to discard the ones that require reflection
For productivity, all thoughts should be written down and organized later

Make as few decisions as possible. Whenever possible, automate. Use scheduling and reminders.
Colocate: remove the barrier to doing the task. (ie. setting out your gym clothes the night before)
Triage: every new task must go through a triage loop that you define - typically people will react to all inputs with the same response which doubles stress levels.
Get out of your own head: exercise compassion. Actively put your focus on someone else.

Process goals had the largest effect on performance (d = 1.36) compared to performance goals (d = 0.44) and outcome goals (d = 0.09).

Focus on process goals over outcome goals. In other words, inputs over outputs which are totally in your control.

Start working on a feature at the beginning of the day. If you don’t finish by the end of the day, write down the groundwork, infrastructure, or refactoring would need to be done to enable it. Use this method to implement that, then come back to the feature.
Implement Gun To Your Head: If a process takes 4 weeks, ask the question, how would you finish it in 24 hours if you were held at gunpoint? (Basically this)

August 22, 2024