The Quest for Ultimate Productivity
I have a long history of maximizing productive hours in my week.
And now, after at least ten years of one productivity system after the other, I may have finally found one that works for me. And it involves scheduling meetings with people and then silently staring at eachother in 50 minute sessions.
Let me explain how I got here.
Dreaming away 😴
I’ve always struggled with attention.
My parents often remarked that there was a five-second delay in any communication with me, usually because my mind was preoccupied with other thoughts.
In high school, I noticed that my mind’s tendency to wander caused me to miss significant portions of classes. It felt as though several minutes had passed without me being aware of what had transpired in the interim or where the time had gone.
Although I was tested for ADHD, I was not diagnosed with it. I can pay attention when I need to, but it’s very easy for me to dream away when I don’t.
A minor gaming addiction 🎮
It was on a Christmas morning, I think around the age of eleven or twelve, when I woke up to find a bunch of presents under the Christmas tree. In one of the packages I found a Gameboy Advance with the game Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone.
What ensued was a five hour non-stop gaming session.
After that, I gradually got more obsessed by video games. It helped me find a passion in Software Engineering, which was good, but gaming kept claiming large portions of my time. Till I realized something:
“Every second I pour into these video games comes with no benefit to my life whatsoever. The stats I gain, the achievements I get, they are just worthless bytes on a memory disk that signify nothing more than the motions that millions before me have already gone through. Being a ‘good gamer’ is a worthless skill in life.”
That may sound obvious, but it was a big realization for me. Games do really trick your mind into having the feeling that you’re doing something important/productive. Games are designed to be as addictive as possible by making us feel like we’re getting better.
And this lesson extends to many other things as well: social media, digital entertainment, capitalism, etc.
Now, it was up to me to get to the root of this problem, and fix it once and for all.
Infinite digital tasks 👨💻
The real problem is a lack of boredom.
That’s a strange problem, right?
It’s normal to be bored sometimes. Sometimes there’s just… nothing to do. Friends don’t want to come over, you’ve read all the books you rented from the library, and you don’t really feel like playing the piano right now either.
Boredom ended for me around the age of fourteen.
I found out how I could extend Minecraft through code, which opened up a realm of infinite possibilities. It led me to spent countless hours coding. But with spending so much time in a digital world, also came the discovery of another side of the internet: an infinity of digital entertainment.
This made me realize the need for minimizing distraction. And that started a whole new fight.
Me vs The Monkey 🐒
By trying to force myself to be productive, I came head to head with the Instant Gratification Monkey:
The more I forced myself to get as many productivity hours out of my day as possible, the more the monkey struck back. This escalated quite rapidly into several hour long sessions where I would be barely conscious, going through YouTube autoplay or scrolling Reddit.
The misalignment between my goals and actions led me to get very angry at myself. As a result of this anger, I tried one productivity system after another. Each rendered me more productive, but I would still have occasional episodes of severe distraction.
Blocking distractions 🚧
All of my devices block a lot of websites.
Doing that was necessary for getting rid of the muscle memory of typing ‘youtube.com’ into the navigation bar and losing the next hour of my life to mindless entertainment.
It worked… to some degree.
The worst time sinks were dealt with by blocking them. But I would still seek out distractions. If it wasn’t YouTube, I might just obsessively scour through Wikipedia. Or I’d just search for “memes” on Google Images.
I noticed that the more I tried to force myself away from distraction, the more vicious the monkey became. Where before I’d lose an hour on a distraction, now I could pull an all-nighter and not knowing where time went afterward.
I thought the problem was related to productive work not being enough rewarding. So I coded a system called Incentivizer.
Incentivizer 🍔
I made Incentivizer three years ago, since when I’ve been using it quite consistently. It’s a website, optimized for mobile use, which looks like this:
The idea is: I define categories in my life that are important to me: personal development, sports, work, etc. By completing goals in those categories, I get points. There’s also a list of “anti-goals”, which subtract points. Points left over at the end of the month convert to rewards: snacks, gaming, youtube-use, etc.
The reason I liked to build my own system for this is because it allows me to collect a lot of data about how I use it and analyze that.
Over the three years, I’ve used it quite a lot. In total, I completed 1990 goals, wrote 495 diary entries, and completed 1721 of what I call “counters” (they are basically personal metrics that I track).
And although the system was occasionally of some value, it never quite worked.
The main problem with the “point system” was that it didn’t really prevent me from distraction, it would just harm me for it. Like you see in the above screenshot, my points are far in the negative. Even while I reset my points every now and then, and even decided to tone down the penalty given for distraction, I would always end up in the negative, which would just discourage me.
Nowadays, I continue using the system to track personal metrics and write diary entries. I don’t use the “goals” part of it anymore.
Focusmate 👥
I’ve been involved in a startup. The system is now live, but every weekend the CEO and I come together to discuss and implement fixes/improvements to the system.
He will tell me about ways the system can be improved, and we discuss it while I code a solution on the spot. During those sessions, I‘m insanely productive. Something about working on-the-spot on screenshare and having the main stakeholder readily available to bounce ideas off appeared to be a golden grail to achieve consistent productivity.
In a call with a friend, I was telling them about this. How I struggle with productivity, except when I’m on a call with someone.
They suggested Focusmate.
I’m generally quite skeptical of online tools. There are many tools out there, but using them often increases overhead at only minor advantage.
The pitch of Focusmate felt initially weird to me. You sit silently in a call with someone for 50min, with minor interaction surrounding it.
But boi did it work.
The social interaction surrounding Focusmate sessions, and generally just being on camera with someone who is working as well, appears to work great.
Through Focusmate, I’ve met other ambitious people, which are exciting for me to meet. I’ve realized it might even lead to lasting friends, which is amazing.
Initially, I only scheduled Focusmate sessions on the spot, whenever I felt a need to boost my productivity. Lately, I’ve been scheduling my week in advance:
The week with the above schedule is incredibly high intensity. But boi do I achieve a lot. Which makes it worth it.
Conclusion 🫠
A part of me feels sad for being locked up in my room behind my laptop so much.
But if I use my time efficiently, at least I can make it count!
Throughout the last ten-ish years, I’ve tried many different strategies. Usually, their effectiveness doesn’t last forever. But throughout it all, I’ve achieved a great bunch.
If you haven’t tried it, I can recommend to give Focusmate a shot!
Who knows, we’ll see each other there :)
