Productivity Tier List

Inspired by The Best Productivity Hacks of All Time by Ali Abdaal

Strongly biased towards Remote work

How these are graded: literally magic and feels

S

Things that opened up amazing possibilities and continue delivering rich results

• Big Hairy Audacious Goal
  • Literal reason why I'm in America now - a goal so big and noble all friends and family support it massively improves its success
  • Without it I would likely still be at Birdsnest or even Andatech
• Zettelkasten and Linked note system with Quick search
  • Durable, cumulative, retrievable knowledge
• No notifications.
  • Internet off, and local-first apps.
  • Working early morning or late at night
  • Dopamine fast
• Self teaching and deliberate practice
  • the vast majority of your teaching will be self, not from others. The ability to see that you are off target AND calibrate is the key to being best
• Marrying the right one
  • Wouldn't have this house, puppers and many other things without her
  • How do you know you found the right one?
• Systems thinking

A

Pretty good stuff

• Writing as listening
  • Project managers and other team members will enjoy having your writing avaiable
• Writing as thinking, Outliners, and First principles thinking
  • If you do all your thinking in your head, you risk getting interrupted and forgetting everything. Programmers complain constantly about interruptions, should consider putting more of their thoughts on paper to be more robust.
• Quick search/open
  • Any time I must crawl through folder trees to find a thing I cringe. For Folder trees to scale into the 1000s of documents, dedicated librarians are needed. Until then we have
• Isolation
  • I live in a house full of distractions. Physically removing myself from distractions is very important
• Opinion notes and thing notes
• Mob document writing and Mob Whiteboarding
• Start with Why - Simon Sinek
• GTD: Widget list/Divide and conquer and Next action
• Terrible first draft, from Ira Glass
• Document first meetings
  • I can skim documents faster than I can listen to a meeting
• Fastforward Videos (2x speed) - Youtube and netflix. Not plex
• Cloud and network storage
  • I still see people hoarding things on their phones, laptops, and USB drives
• Version control
• Screensharing and screen capture (with hotkeys)

B

• Kanban
  • powerful way to visualise huge volume of work
  • can see working status without interrupting workers
• RSS Feeds and Things worth following
  • Vast majority of the most important things I've learned have been through my own reading, rather than what other people have taught me
  • Also source of misery and time wasting
• Home networking
  • Engineers can tolerate around 98% internet uptime
  • Leaders and presenters need 99.9% or more
  • Constantly see other people lose connection during video call while they talk - don't be that guy
• Single strong Windows laptop
  • Enables me to do things my Mac peers cannot - test on IE and Edge without a VM

C

Some limited, targeted use

• Pomodoro technique
• A high quality microphone - people enjoy my voice
• Noise cancelling earphones
• Power naps
• Automated testing
• Pairing or swarming

D

Useful in very limited specific situations

• Mechanical keyboards, particularly DIY keyboards
  • Sticky keys, double keys, "ghosting" are all unacceptable
• Monitor arm - is mostly aesthetic rather than productive
• Habit streak, or Don't Break the chain
• Additional monitors
  • I can only look at one thing at a time. Multiple monitors seems to encourage the worst kind of multitasking
• Inbox Zero
• Batching
• Coffee and caffeine
• Moba games
  • Taught me the value of morale and conversation in team performance
  • Showed me a glimpse of what elite high performance teams look like, and what it feels like to be in one
  • MASSIVE time sink

?

Untested things that I have not extensively tried

• Coaches and mentors
  • It's extremely easy to see what other people are doing wrong, but extremely hard to spot what we are doing wrong from our own perspective because we are not smart enough to see our own mistakes - see Dunning Kruger effect
  • Good coach/mentor is more about them caring about you and your problems than it is about them being wise
• Animedoro

Ideas that didn't stick

F

Bad. If you're doing these, stop.

• Reading ad-supported news and social media
  • Some people think it important to stay "in the know". It is not. Particularly ad-supported news/media which is high emotion low value.