Productivity Is About Attention Management

There&#x27;s a general misconception between being productive and being effective.<p>One can fill their days by completing many mindless tasks and consider themselves as productive, but in the end hardly any of those tasks really matters.<p>On the other hand, another person may only complete one or two tasks in a very short time during their day but these were critical tasks that could generate much higher values. This subsequently makes the person more effective than their peers.<p>The output values must be weight in determining if one is really productive. Effectiveness triumphs mindless productivity.<p>This is quite similar to the cognitive and decision fatigue principle which indicates that each of us only has a limited pool of cognitive resources and so we must be very selective in choosing what activities we engage in.<p>To remain highly effective, not just being productive, particularly for a project manager, it&#x27;s imperative to spend time only on tasks that require critical decisions to be made, and to delegate the rest. When you take on more tasks than you can handle, like some are misunderstanding this may help them appear as productive, it will undoubtedly affect the quality of each of your decisions and the project will suffer.

My favorite anti-productivity introspections:<p>- Remember that you are going to die. Time flies, have you noticed? Is that status symbol that you are pursuing really that important? Is it ever going to make you happy?<p>- There is more wisdom in one of your cells than in all self-help and management books combined. Maybe you can&#x27;t focus for a good reason? What could that reason be?<p>- Remember the last time you felt glad to be alive? Was it related to being productive?<p>No need to thank me.

For most of technical works i do, concentration only happens AFTER i figure out what i need to do to solve the problem.<p>Else most of the time, the &quot;researching phase&quot; is the most daunting task.

What the author means by &quot;attention management&quot; is, perhaps, the ability to concentrate for a long period of time.<p>Personally, for work that i love to do, concentration is rewarding.<p>For mundane, routine work, I usually go on auto pilot, getting work done, but, doing it while my attention is somewhere else.<p>For mundane work that <i>requires</i> concentration, my output falls off the cliff. Its here that many tips and tricks ought to focus, but dont. And, frankly, its difficult too, to <i>hack</i> this type of work. Its human nature to be bored out and perhaps nothing can change it.

Interesting take on it, I certainly resonate with the &quot;Michigan weather making work the only thing to do&quot; anecdote.<p>I struggle with productivity, and feeling productive. and when I look back on times when I felt productive the attention thing does stand out.<p>It occurred to me when I thought of myself as a younger programmer that I used to love the time between midnight and 3AM, there was literally <i>nothing</i> on TV to distract me, the house was quiet, the kids and wife were in bed and asleep. I could spend the time thinking through the problem and then mindfully developing an approach to solve it. These days, not so much.<p>There is always something distracting in a web browser. Too many times I find I go to check something and poof an hour has vanished as I&#x27;ve followed a bunch of paths that I wasn&#x27;t intending to follow. As a result my current efforts focus on not leaving a bunch of tabs open on my browser and being mindful about getting done what I came to do for the task at hand and <i>going back to the task.</i> No extra checking of mail or twitter or HN or what ever ...

Busyness is not a virtue. The consequences of your actions being good... that has always been the classic definition of virtue.<p>Do good things. 1 small action can have massive consequences. Creating something good and useful to others, it does not matter if it took 20 minutes, for sufficiently good actions, if you did 1 a decade, nobody cares how busy you are or if you were &quot;productive&quot;.<p>This is called being constructive. Rather than productive or rather than optimizing busyness (a fake appearance of doing work or &quot;good&quot;) instead we just do things that are good. This takes cultures of trust and requires belief products actually benefit people create viability &amp; wealth.<p>We can define a good action as one that has good consequnces.<p>Busyness makes nobody happy... it doesn&#x27;t even make your boss happy. It&#x27;s just... something you&#x27;re meant to be, I guess. It&#x27;s stupid and dumb.<p>Do good things. &quot;make something other people want&quot;... is a good description of viability, only problem is people also want crack and being a crack dealer is pretty stessful (I imagine) so if you don&#x27;t want stress or to be to busy and still manage to do great stuff... let&#x27;s narrow this down. Make something other people want... people want good stuff, don&#x27;t they? :)<p>Do good. Don&#x27;t do not good.<p>There, simplified everything.

My most effective means of achieving a high level of work productivity is pleasure reading. It doesn&#x27;t have to be anything deep. It just needs to be something I want to immerse myself in. The mental process I use to completely tune out the real world while reading for fun is the same one I use to reach a high level of productivity for work. Reading keeps it sharp. If I go too long without pleasure reading, my ability to focus on work suffers. Conversely, some of my most significant breakthroughs have occurred within a day or two of a crazy reading binge.

I have never been able to force true concentration. I arrogantly proclaim that I have strong willpower* - I have very little trouble forcing myself to do something I entirely don&#x27;t want to do, whether it be study, workout, code, whatever.<p>However, forced concentration completely blocks off my ability to think fluidly, and I memorize very little from reading topics that aren&#x27;t of interest to me (I am looking at you GCP docs), even if I don&#x27;t allow my attention to wander at all for more than a second. (Rote memorization still works, but it&#x27;s very impractical for many topics).<p>I have lately found that if I force myself to read something I hate for 3+ hours straight, my brain involuntarily starts wanting to know more. But I rarely have 3 hours to just get in the mood.<p>* Research has shown that people who think they have strong willpower test the worst on willpower, but I am a special objective snowflake.

I&#x27;ve tried many different things and I finally have a solution that (I think) works for me:<p>It&#x27;s Emacs&#x27; Org-mode in combination with Org-pomodoro<p>- First, using org-capture I would create an org heading with a description of the problem. If there&#x27;s a Jira ticket I would attach the ticket number (I have a trivial elisp function that converts a regular number into a complete jira-ticket link)<p>- Then I would start a Pomodoro cycle. If I&#x27;m on a Mac - it would create an OSX menubar item with the title of the heading (using Hammerspoon). Org will &quot;clock&quot; me in for the task for the next 25 minutes<p>- I just realized that I can probably even programmatically switch Slack to &quot;do not disturb&quot; mode while Pomodoro is active<p>- Activated Pomodoro cycle is like a sacred ritual for me. I do not pick up my phone or check email or (if possible) even talk to anyone. After Pomodoro is done I would take a break, check email, get some water, etc. If I can get done 5-7 pomodoros during a day - I consider it a very productive day.<p>- Org records everything. At the end of the day I know: exactly how long I worked on every single story, the number of pomodoros I did, notes that I took while working on each story. Whenever I changed the status of the story from &quot;todo&quot; to &quot;in progress&quot; and back to &quot;to do&quot; or when I flipped it to &quot;done&quot; or &quot;canceled&quot;, reasons why the story was canceled, etc.<p>And this is all done with a minimal context switching.

As someone who&#x27;s often asked about my productivity (and who also often feels unproductive anyway), I think this quote from the article gets at the heart of the issue:<p>&gt;A better option is attention management: Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes.<p>Progress is persistence + time. Nonzero values of both will lead to results. If you spend 1% of your time on a project which requires a hundred hours of work, it&#x27;ll be complete in a little over a year. I don&#x27;t shy away from projects which I know will take years to complete, and as a result they eventually get completed :)

This article was a fun read as it playfully poked holes in some conventional wisdom but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;m left with coherent advice. Deep work doesn&#x27;t matter? Working in 15 minute bursts is ok? Save rewarding work for after routine? Or maybe match it to my circadian rhythms? Work on what I love? Have a maker schedule?<p>Maybe the best takeaway is that there isn&#x27;t really a single coherent ruleset for productivity...

&gt; A fascinating or funny video makes the data entry task seem even more excruciating, the same way a sweet dessert makes a sour vegetable taste yuckier.<p>For me it&#x27;s the opposite. I often play videos in the background when I&#x27;m performing monotonous tasks and it seems to help me from getting completely distracted and abandon the task altogether.

As a person with diagnosed adult ADD, this is one thing I cannot do — manage attention. Medication and meditation help a little, but I probably will never reach the productive capabilities of a regular person. Sigh.

To me, the best life hack for productivity is &quot;Sleep&quot;. If I sleep good, the day will be productive enough. If I don&#x27;t, it might not.

&gt; I’m pretty sure there’s an eighth habit of highly effective people. They don’t spend all their time reading about the seven habits of highly effective people.<p>I think this is often overlooked. What works for other people might not work for you and the time spent looking for the right way is better spend on doing the tasks.

Ironic to see this post on HN, the place where I go to procrastinate

Although interesting, I think the example is a sign of over self improvement. When your only way to do more work is going to the toilet less often you are overbooked big time and there will be no way to get more productive, no matter what angle you look at it. Quite contrary, you will be less effective (!) on the long run. It is a vicious circle.

I gave up on productivity long ago. It depends on the type of work that you do. If I am let&#x27;s say on the assembly line and everything is already thought of and I have to follow well written guides, then I could try to be productive, avoid distractions and so on.<p>On my job I have to research complex problems, that you can&#x27;t simply google them and find an answer. It takes time to design a possible solution, trial and error, a lot of thinking and observing and in the end you feel that you have hit a wall. In such cases I simply need a break and to think for something else for a while. It is also very hard to put an estimate and set a deadline for a such thing, so productivity is the least of my problems.

I really like where the writer is going with this, and I have had similar thoughts on the matter. I believe that a good user experience streamlines the flow of attention and tries to reduce &quot;attention turbulence&quot; for a given task. And I&#x27;m referring to more than just smartphone apps and web pages, though they make for great examples.<p>I wish more people realized the value of human attention. I would even go as far as to say that the reason that the tech industry is so profitable is because of it&#x27;s ability to provide shortcuts for the attention required to complete a given task.

On the idea that we need motivation, I have been practicing the concept of mini habits to overcome the barriers that the brain puts up when using motivation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tysonmaly.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;how-to-make-habits-the-easy-way&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tysonmaly.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;how-to-make-habits-the-easy-way&#x2F;</a><p>I think keeping a few key concepts like Parkinson&#x27;s law and Pareto&#x27;s law as well as thinking about what is actually going to move the needle helps.

...and then there are tools used in organisations (like ours) which track how many hours you been on PC (ON PC time) vs Off PC time (So called &quot;Productivity tracking&quot;). More the ON PC time means you are &quot;highly productive&quot;. This metric is also usually taken-up during appraisal discussions and questions are put on one&#x27;s productivity.

Busyness is not a virtue. The consequences of your actions being good... that has always been the definition of virtue.

„There is an 8th habit of highly effective people. They don’t waste time reading 7 habits of highly effective people.“<p>He got it.

I liked his book “Power Moves: Lessons from Davis”. After listening to this book I followed Adam Grant for a couple weeks on Twitter. He does have interesting advice on deciding what to focus on.<p>I am going to add a calendar reminder for a year from now to follow him again on Twitter for a while.

This article is basically about the Pareto principle (80&#x2F;20 rule) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pareto_principle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pareto_principle</a>

I’ve found a lot of benefit from taking Piracetam or Noopept in the mornings with a daily coffee. I feel hyper-focused in a way that I don’t usually feel with just coffee alone.

Context switching really takes a toll on focusing. It sucks when executives in a company keep having &#x27;new ideas&#x27; and switching the priorities.

You can learn about this by observing cats.