What are your best productivity hacks that worked for you?
I like working (a lot of working), but sometimes I struggle with my time.
Understand that I am not able to manage/fit everything that I wanted to do in my schedule.
So I had to "re-organise" some activities and was able to learn something or make myself productive.
It includes:
Exercising right after waking up (the first round of exercising, because I train 3 times)
Reading a book afterwards (a chapter/or learning new things from a text book/ work book)
Having the things I want to complete within my sight – if I want to exercise, I have my dumbbells nearby me
Not having a phone in sight when I read or try to do work (because I would be tempted)
Using Toggl to track my activities, so I know which items I spend the most time on
Trying to learn things from the easiest to the most difficult
What are your special tricks for productivity?
Replies
Honestly, the hack that changed everything for me was shrinking my unit of progress. I used to plan in milestones, "ship the feature," "grow to 100 users" and would go weeks without feeling like I'd moved. Started logging just one small, concrete thing I did each day, even if it was embarrassing in scope. Didn't matter if it was 20 minutes of research or fixing a bug. The compounding effect of seeing those tiny moves stack up over months was way more motivating than any goal-setting framework I'd tried. The act of logging made the action feel real.
The one that changed everything for me: separating decision time from execution time.
I spend 10 minutes the night before writing down the three things that actually move the needle the next day. Not a full task list. Just three. When I sit down in the morning I am not deciding what to do, I am just doing it.
The second one is brutal but effective: no context switching for the first two hours. Email, Slack, Reddit all closed. The quality of work in that window is incomparably better than anything produced while half-monitoring notifications.
As a solo founder the biggest productivity killer is the feeling that everything is urgent. Almost nothing actually is.
The one that actually stuck for me after trying everything: don't start the day with email or Slack. I give myself the first 90 minutes to do the one thing I would regret not doing by end of day, before anything reactive comes in. Sounds obvious but it took me an embarrassingly long time to actually protect that block instead of just intending to.
Phone in another room during focused work also made a bigger difference than I expected. I thought I had decent self-control but turns out even having it visible was enough to drain a bit of mental overhead. Out of sight genuinely changed how long I could stay in a task.