Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

pnathan 13 years ago |

I approximately "invented" this after reading tons of productivity blogs and stuff.

I keep an org-mode file with 3 headings:

    * week range

    ** day-in-week

    *** major topic

And then I log what I did in the day. It is unbelievable how much you actually do some days when you feel like you did nothing but yammer and poke small problems.

edit: I've done this for about 47 weeks now. I keep a single file, synced out to a backedup location periodically. Anything worth writing about goes in here. My hope is that any professional conversation and act is captured here, ready for later searching and review.

I also keep a high-level TODO list at the top of the file when I'm pondering priorities and direction.

minimax 13 years ago | |

Do you use much of the other org-mode bells and whistles when you do this?

pnathan 13 years ago | | |

Nah, not really. I really hit a comfort zone with this tracking system, so I haven't felt the drive to improve it.

The only thing that niggles a bit is that I'd like to check in/out on tasks sometimes. I know it's possible, but I don't have the urge to figure that out.

I use more of org-mode in other arenas: agenda preparation, PDF creation, and the occasional spreadsheet.

minimax 13 years ago | | |

I have tried several times to get into org-mode and for whatever reason it just hasn't stuck. I'm going to give it another crack for daily logs.

pnathan 13 years ago | | |

Honestly, you don't need org mode to do this. You just need a way to have a hierarchical folding tree (an outline) that takes text for both the headers and contents. I implemented a half-baked similar system in C# years and years ago - that worked really nice. I just use org-mode because I'm an emacs user and hey, it works well for me.

npsimons 13 years ago | | |

The nice thing about org-mode is it's as involved as you would like it to be. Sure, the beginning is a bit steep, but if you're already using Emacs, it will be a breeze, and you can keep it light (as pnathan is doing). I've been slowly inching my way into using it over a long period of time; I have to admit, it's quite involved for me, but it never felt forced, it was always "cool, that works nice; but I wonder if I can X?" and with org-mode, you can almost always do X. Or not, if you don't want to. Unlike a lot of other "productivity tools" it's very flexible.

beambot 13 years ago |

Anti-Todo List... otherwise known as "Lab Notebook"? This process is commonplace (and often required!) in academic settings. I love looking through mine and reliving the discovery process!

barbs 13 years ago | |

I get a similar feeling when looking over my git commits. So satisfying!

CodeCube 13 years ago | | |

This is actually why I tend to be pretty granular with my commits ... I just like looking at the list and saying, well, I done that!

tomkinstinch 13 years ago | |

Exactly! Plus it's helpful for remembering the decisions that led you down a particular path, and for coming up with documentation.

I used Yammer for this in the past--just posted quick blurbs about that I did as I did it so that the team stay informed and I could remember what I had done.

javajosh 13 years ago |

I've started writing myself "work receipts" - slips of paper that are dated and recount what I did for whom. I stick them in my backpack and then transfer them to FreshBooks. I find it very satisfying to have a pile of small squares of paper that represent real progress and are worth real money at the end of the day.

I've considered using a logbook, something bound so that it's neater, but I have to say I just love having a single small slip of paper sitting there beside my computer as I work. It is a testament to focus - it is a physical talisman representative of singular focus.

It works really, really well.

b_emery 13 years ago |

Funny, I sort of did this yesterday and it worked. In the act of planning my current week, I took a look at my log of time spent last week. The log was much more detailed than usual because I was auditing my time pretty carefully. After adding it all up and listing how I spent my time and what I got done, I had quite a list, much to my surprise - and just the neurochemical reward suggested in the post.

pbreit 13 years ago |

I liked Marc's "Structured Procrastination" a lot better.

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...

JohnsonB 13 years ago |

>The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.”

Wow, that sounds like an incredibly unjustified relationship, with only the superficial support of its counter-intuitive nature. In my experience, the opposite happens, the more you do in a day, the more you recognize and remember that you accomplished that day, and consequentially, feel that you accomplished. Which by the way, is exactly what the anti-todo list is, except with a mental list of remembered accomplishments, rather than manually recorded ones. The latter act should only be necessary if an individual has a particular problem recognizing what they've accomplished in a day; I don't think this is some deep insight or universal principle.

NathanCollins 13 years ago | |

In the context of the article, I think the justification was: assuming you're more productive in quality and not quantity, because you're working towards ambitious goals, then on most days you will not complete a recognized goal. The suggestion is to go out of your way to recognize your smaller day-to-day accomplishments which help you reach the big goal.

colomon 13 years ago | |

For me there are definitely days when I do a lot and find myself wondering why I was unproductive at the end of the day. Generally it happens when I do things that aren't directly programming. I will find myself feeling blue at the end of the day because I haven't accomplished any useful programming. Then I stop and think, and realized I spent hours e-mailing customers and potential customers, and all afternoon working on my taxes. Not a bad day's work, but because I'm biased to think of programming as my real work, it feels like I haven't accomplished anything.

Of course, there are also days when it feels like I haven't accomplished anything because I haven't actually accomplished anything.

nostromo 13 years ago |

We use iDoneThis and really like it. We tend to use it when the team is distributed. When we're all located in the same place, usage wanes (but it's cheap enough not to worry about). But during times that people are working remotely, it's the best way to keep everyone on the same page.

jasonwilk 13 years ago |

Nice product! Just started using it and realized it's far different than my Yammer and/or Wunderlist. This is especially good for writing simple daily recaps which I can then compress into weekly update to my investors.

It would be awesome if you could notice trends in things I write such as People, Companies, etc so I can search by popular tags.

smalter 13 years ago | |

Thanks, Jason! Much appreciated. We do have word clouds that show you your frequency of word use. It's basic now, but we plan on sprucing it up. Tagging is something that's in the plans.

hboon 13 years ago |

Here's something I've been doing for the past 3 years ago since I've gone indie.

I have a text file which I keep open in vim, called "wip" which I have loose sections of content. Let's call them section 1, section 2 and section 3.

I list TODOs which I want to accomplish recently in section 3. When I start working on an item, I might expand on it and add additional sub-items, indented. I mark items I'm working on with a "@" and when they are finished, with a "". Sometimes I'm on several items at the same time (too many is not a good sign), I will add a few @@@@ to the start of a line I'm really* on, no biggie.

I mentally group my items into projects/types of activities like Project1, Project2. Each time I start working on Project1, I add a new line which says Project1 and the start time to section 2. When I stop working with Project1, I add the end time to that line.

Every morning, I run a little script which scans through section 2 in "wip" and extract out the time I spent on each project and inserts that at the bottom of section 2. I then copy section 2 and section 3 of "wip" into a new file giving yesterday's date as the filename. Then I go into "wip" and remove all the items marked with "" as well as section 2 and then copy section 1 into section 3 as well. Section 3 contains things that I want to do daily, such as stretch myself in the morning or to manually check if a specific service is up (enough till I automate them or build a habit out of it).

A great side-effect — the files that are created everyday becomes my work log. I can run scripts to generate how much time I've spent on a specific project or how much time I've work in a given year.

My wip file looks like:

section 1 - template TODOs

section 2 - projects and their start-end time

section 3 - TODOs (each like might start with a @ or and might be indented to various levels, seldom more than 2-3 levels). I don't keep the entire project here.

jkeel 13 years ago |

This idea is similar to a pet project I did a looong time ago while learning C#. It's still up at http://getmicromanager.com/ but honestly I'm not sure if it still works with the current version of .NET (it was written on .NET 1.1).

rdsubhas 13 years ago |

Productivity Level measured when going to sleep:

Overworked - "I still haven't done XYZ..." (fall asleep and work in the dreams as well)

Great - "I did so much today!"

Rhythmic - "Everything went as per schedule"

Bored - "Today was probably same as yesterday"

Lazy - "What did I do today?"

Loafer - " What is today?"

niels_olson 13 years ago |

Happy user of idonethis here. Love it. My only complaint is that gmail now guesses my idonethis email instead of my gmail when I try to send myself a reminder to do something. Which might represent some weird pseudo-AI insight...

mmahemoff 13 years ago |

I do something like that in Trello, which is to retrospectively create spontaneous tasks and drag them straight to Done. (It's more satisfying to drag them across than just create them in the Done pile.)

DasIch 13 years ago |

You can be even more productive by not making any (Anti-)ToDo lists, thereby reducing management overhead and the time spent figuring out how to use, using and reviewing todo list techniques.

scotty79 13 years ago | |

Lack of productivity is rarely due to lack of time. Almost always due to lack of motivation. If you can trade excess time for some motivation by playing with lists then why not?

LiveTheDream 13 years ago | |

Don't become a slave to your lists, sure, but some basic organization can go a long way to increasing your productivity as well as giving you the ability to look back and review what you did.

tathagatadg 13 years ago |

Started doing something similar on a private twitter account which follows no one, and no one follows it. Once I do something, I tweet. Benefits: Using twitter as a platform, keep description in 140 chars, search, timestamp etc.

However, I violated the first rule of using the organization tool i.e. Trust your tool. Yet another post on hackernews and I got distracted into trying Trello, and what not for a promise of increased productivity.

antrix 13 years ago | |

The trouble with Twitter is that you can't go back and find tweets from the past to figure out, say, what did I do in the 2nd week of November last year or when did I send that notice out.

nicksergeant 13 years ago |

Shameless plug for a stupid little web-app I wrote for exactly this purpose... years ago. It was my first foray into Django, and it's open-source:

http://finisht.com http://github.com/nicksergeant/finisht

adastra 13 years ago | |

This is great. Is the app pronounced "finished", "finish it", or "finish shit!" ? I kind of like the last one, haha. Seriously though I'm curious which one.

nicksergeant 13 years ago | | |

haha, it's pronounced "Finished". I also built https://snipt.net so I stuck with a similar theme. "Snipped, Finished", etc.

asimjalis 13 years ago |

I find Mark Forster's FV (Final Version) to be a great synthesis of structured procrastination as well as a way of creating the feeling that I got stuff done. Plus it's so minimalistic.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/

Apocryphon 13 years ago |

Can't you just have a regular todo list where you check off or cross out items when you're done with them? Doesn't every single todo list app/program/notepad already do this?

yresnob 13 years ago |

waits for flurry of Anti-todo list mobile apps to appear...

gprasanth 13 years ago |

A friend of mine actually does this. He's an MS hire. No wonder he figured it out long ago :)

http://coderuns.co.cc/

ryanwaggoner 13 years ago |

This is what excellent content marketing looks like.

FreshCode 13 years ago |

Like a commit log.

mediocregopher 13 years ago |

wutdo: http://sprunge.us/OhOS donewut: http://sprunge.us/OiAL

Two little scripts I just whipped up that'll help you record the things you do throughout the day. I'm definitely going to try to use these as much as possible, it's kind of like a personal micro-blog.

1602 13 years ago |

`git log` command works too. or, if you need activity across projects - github.

brianmcdonough 13 years ago |

Sounds more like a ta-da list to me. As in, TA-DA!