Share your mental hacks that help you stay productive!
We all know how hard it is to climb the proverbial Everest of building up your idea from nothing all the way to working product. My philosophy for staying productive and focused is to use whatever I can think of to never lose momentum. It doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it keeps me on track.
So here's my personal list of motivation hacks for those days when I'm not feeling 100% motivated:
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I love building stuff, so in order to regain a sense of accomplishment I know I can always work on enhancing some tangential aspect of my product, even if it's not part of the roadmap. I can always pull some task out of my wish list to keep the momentum going (e.g.: enhancing some design, code-refactoring, integrating some useful bit of tech, etc).
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Instead of thinking of the road ahead, I think of how much I ALREADY accomplished (e.g. if you decided to climb mount Everest and are half-way there, would you turn back? Or keep going? I choose to keep going).
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I think of all the lives my product will enhance, I OWE it to my future customers to get my product out the door.
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I think of all the dummies I used to have for bosses who derive their pathetic sense of status from holding a useless corporate position and use the dread of having to go back as motivation to keep going.
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Re-re-read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.
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I re-re-re-read the Tao Te Ching.
Care to share your productivity hacks?
Have a great weekend y'all!
I try to take my attention out of all the pending tasks that I need to have asap and focus more on enjoying the process itself. Keeping my mind just on what I'm doing in the moment and what I'm getting out of it usually does the trick.
For most days, this [boring] framework works for me:
If I'm just having a crap day I just try to accept it early and take it slow. Nothing good will come of forcing myself to code on such days anyway, so I do stuff like reading, emails, calls, paperwork, etc.
My two cents :)
Good stuff, this resonates.
I also have days where I can tell beforehand I won't probably be able to write any line of code. Before, I was really angry with myself on those days, but lately I have been able to accept them and realize that by having some of those days I am a lot more productive on the others. I am still searching for a way to somehow eliminate those "dead" days.
That's great! It's also a very personal learning path, you'll find something that works!
I totally have this too, but not coding doesn't have to mean it's a dead day. Who knows, maybe it's the brain asking for a break :D
I think about how many times me and my family got denied in the society because of money and i code like hell.
My list (not so mental, but it works for my inspiration):
But I would like to mention that nothing helps if the project (web/mobile) doesn't grow for years.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
This usually works when starting a new project, but the novelty of working on something that you like quickly wears out as you start to get new ideas or thing of some better things you could work on. How do you motivate yourself to keep working on the current project, even if you have already spent months working on it?
This comment was deleted 6 years ago