Productivity hacking

tl;dr: I’ve decided to start writing about my experience with optimizing productivity, and to share any tips other people might consider useful. If you care to know why, continue reading.

For many years now I’ve been what you would label as a busy person. There was always school combined with work which gradually transitioned into work combined with school. I’m owner of one and a maintainer of another property, both still in quite a neglected state, which demand a lot of time, energy and money. I’m lucky to have a rich social life – family and friends included. Also, I pursue several more or less obscure hobbies. And, of course, there’s always a cloud of ideas and plans in my head, a million of possibilities I’d love to explore if there was enough time.

But there will never be enough time.

My ultimate goal is to find the perfect balance between hard and productive work, other responsibilities, actively spent free time and the so much needed self-care. There’s several ways to get closer to this state of balance.

One of them is to increase one’s productivity, to do the same amount of work in less time – pause here, and read again, “to do the same amount of work in less time”, not more work – and use the saved time for the other things one likes or needs to do.

I think we (at least “we” as in “the middle class of the western civilization”) currently live in an era of practically endless opportunities and almost unlimited access to information… and it’s kind of too much of a good thing. Most people I know are more or less overwhelmed by it all. To quote a classic, the problem is choice.

More specifically, a choice:

• what to do now,
• what to do later (and when),
• what to delegate to someone else and
• what not to do at all

Making these choices in a systematic, calm and informed way also contributes to the main goal I set for myself.

This involves a lot of merciless information filtering and establishing habits and routines to recharge and avoid mind fog, willpower drain and general state of overwhelm.

If this somehow resonates with you, I believe you might find my future posts helpful. Of course, I am going to write from my personal experience as a software developer, so you can expect some of the practical tips to be more generic, while others will be specific to my job.

All the productivity hacks are going to be posted in a dedicated category. You can grab it’s RSS feed if you want to stay up-to-date.

I am going to be grateful for any kind of feedback and for your own experience or other productivity hacks you might want to share. Also, please know that I’m far from being a native english speaker, so I will be thankful for language-related suggestions as well.

Now, let’s go back to work. ;)