General
Share and discuss tech, products, business, startups, or product recommendations
Start new thread

Which productivity hack do you think is underrated? Share.

by•

Everyone has their favourite routine to perform at their best.

Some are advocates for the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of intensive work, with a 5-minute short break), others love time-blocking, a few plan the entire week on Sunday, and there are even people who say ice-cold showers à la Wim Hof help them focus.

What’s the most underrated productivity hack in your opinion?

For me, it’s sleep + walking.

– When you sleep well, your brain "cleans house" overnight and saves everything important you learned during the day. You wake up with a clear head and real energy.

– When you go for a walk (ideally outside in fresh air), your blood starts flowing better, more oxygen reaches your brain, and suddenly great ideas or solutions just pop into your head, things you’d never think of at your screen.

266 views

Add a comment

Replies

Best

This one comes from .

He has developed a model that splits professional time across four areas:

  • Management

    • Meetings

    • Calls

    • Presentations

    • Email processing

    • Team and people management

  • Creation

    • Writing

    • Coding

    • Building

    • Preparing

  • Consumption

    • Reading or listening to articles, podcasts, and books

    • Studying

    • Attending a class, workshop, or industry conference

  • Ideation

    • Brainstorming

    • Journaling

    • Walking

    • Self-­reflecting

You can use these four areas to reclaim your day, be creative and make progress on the things that matter most.

   The thing is that sometimes those first 5 in management will take 6 hours and boom, only 2 left and your shift is over :D

   All the more reason to timebox your schedule to decide how you will spend your time before others do!

   Oh yes, how did I forget time boxing?! Thanks so much Nir for chiming in. Love reading your blog posts on being indistractable. :)

   In that case, I need to start waking up at 5 am again. 😅

(I just wanna complete as many things as possible, but I am too perfectionist, so that's paralysing and takes me so much time to get things done, because "It must be perfect" :D)

I have one productivity tip: I forget where my phone is - it helps 😄

But frankly speaking, apart from that, I make a plan for each day. Sometimes I use notes to track what I need to do and what I want to accomplish by a certain time. I like discipline, it helps me feel like I’m doing the right thing.

 So So So true. Phone and the internet / social media – keep us entertained, and we are totally pushed away from our work :D

 Agree :D

 🙏 :D

Our CTO is one of the best organized people I have ever met! Around 6 months back, we switched to kanban boards to keep track of our tasks and it made a lot of impact.

Personally, one of the quirkiest productivity hack is to remove my shoes and sit cross-legged. I know this sounds crazy but it really works because I don't get tempted to get up and roam around :D

 Let's guess what is my sitting position at the moment? :D

I know one technique that helps some people. The idea is that if you are stuck on a task and have been working on it for a long time without coming up with anything, you should step away for five to ten minutes and distract yourself. After that, your brain resets and looks at things from a different perspective. This can sometimes help because new ideas come naturally

 You look at things from a different perspective, sure, but I would give it more time than just 5 minutes. Maybe day or so :)

 Haha, unfortunately, taking such breaks at work to gather your thoughts is an extraordinary luxury)

 Yeah, I see it as a privillege :)

For me, it's definitely locking away my phone; I don't think it's talked about enough how much it affects one's productivity.

 Smartphones are an addiction.

I think scheduling emails is a super underrated hack.

Like for myself, after I attend a networking event I might be full of contacts who can provide me with opportunities for my business like pilots , mentorship or even warm introductions to people like investors, partnership companies etc. And it's best to capitalize on this connect when the steam is till intact. But due to the many gazillion things my mind has to deal with, I used to often forget to reply and delay it too long which automatically used to create more cognitive friction..

So now I practice scheduling emails as soon as an event is over so that it automatically creates that thread of communication and is less of a cognitive load on myself.

 Is scheduling better during the weekend? (like you have more time for that, I assume) :)

 Yes I think so.

A TODO list and and methodology about how to use it.

Some 20 years ago when I switched from developer to manager, my workdays suddenly went went from "just do the thing" to dozens of small items I had to address, plus a lot of mid- and long-term ones I had to handle, too.

I read and applied Getting Things Done. It absolutely changed my capacity to handle daily tasks and long term planning, both professionally and personally.

 So what is the main ingredient of using that todo list? :D How to treat those tasks? :D

Sleep was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw your headline. It's going to be really hard to beat sleep and exercise for the short and longterm impact it'll have on your life (physical health, mental health, productivity, etc).

One thing I just learned about is 's which is a physical "brick" you touch your phone to and then whatever apps you've selected won't open anymore until the next time you touch your phone to the brick again. You can leave the brick in your car while you're at work, in another room during family dinners, or whatever works for your life.

It acts as a commitment device to keep you from using your phone at times when you know you want to be productive, but also know what you'll actually do is scroll for a few more minutes. I missed it when they launched here, but a few of my friends got one this year, and they have been legitimately impressed by how much more productive they are when they brick their phone.

   Good you mentioned that thing with the phone. Did you know that just having a phone within your field of view can reduce focus capacity by ~10–20%, compared to when the phone is in another room? Imagine how kids have phones on their desks in school... They are unfocused and unable to learn new things.

I didn't know that. I very often have my phone sitting on the table next to me in kickstand mode while I work. I should probably switch to sticking it somewhere I can't see it during work hours.

It's not exactly "productivity" related, but even when just hanging out with friends at dinner, I do feel like we're all more present in the moment if our phones are not sitting on the table while we eat. Makes sense that a similar thing would be true for work.

 yeah, maybe it would help to leave your phone elsewhere. I saw an accur8 graphic design – study: Here is the original:

For me, I'll make a plan for tomorrow before I sleep so I know what's ahead and be on track of what's to achieved.

 Do you do this every day, or do you plan a bigger time frame? e.g. Sunday evenings to plan ahead the whole week?

Offloading the "what was I doing?" mental overhead for developers:

The moment you have to remember where you left off, you've already broken flow. Most productivity advice focuses on how you work — but not on reducing the cognitive tax of tracking your own work.

For me the hack is: never keep anything in my head that a tool can track for me. Task lists, open loops, agent conversations. The brain is for thinking, not bookkeeping.

That's actually why I built — a kanban board that watches your Claude Code sessions and auto-organizes them. When you're running multiple AI agents in parallel, the "where was I?" problem gets brutal fast. Having a live board that tells you which conversation needs your input vs. which is still running has done more for my focus than any time-blocking technique.

Underrated in general: the less you rely on memory to manage your workflow, the more mental energy you have for actual deep work.

 How do you want to market it? Besides Product Hunt? :)

 I'm talking about it on X and LinkedIn

 Which platform from these 3 has brought you the best outcome so far?