Motivation and Productivity Tips

BlueYonder said:
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Feeling sleepy/groggy is a big part of my problem, and I see you struggle with it, too. Can anybody chime in with more advice on how to stay more alert during the day?

The coffee cups are filled, and I need different info. I suspect I'm too sedentary in general. Sometimes I get on the treadmill for a little run, which helps for a while.
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I had the exact same thing. Now I lift weights three times a week, and do cardio three times a week. Basically in the gym Monday through Saturday, with Sunday to rest.

I also read some studies about brain cloudiness being due to a constant state of dehydration. I increased my water intake to 1 gallon a day and noticed that the grogginess went away as well. This seems like a lot and I used to hate drinking water, but I just got some flavor enhancers like MIO.

The other part of the grogginess was sleeping too much or too little. I'd sleep 8 hours because I was told that was "healthy." One day I took melatonin because I couldn't sleep and I woke up 6 hours later feeling completely refreshed. Now I sleep only 6 hours and didn't have any sleep-induced grogginess.

I found that post-meal grogginess has to do with a high intake of fat and carbs and generally eating too much. I'm Muslim and one day during a food coma at a lecture I heard an Islamic narration that goes:

Al-Hassan Al-Basri said: "O, son of Adam, eat with one third of your stomach and drink with one third and leave one third of your stomach to breathe so that you may think."

Now I eat in moderation and found that I can eat pretty much whatever I want, whenever, as long as it's in a moderate amount with no grogginess.

Hope that helps, broseph.
 


I struggle with this a lot. I think one of my major issues is, I am super sedentary a majority of the time, but then have 10-12 hours week where I am super active (Crossfit, running, b-ball, etc). I can't imagine what this is doing to my body.

Honestly, I think the key is to keep in motion. Sitting around too much zaps productivity.

It's time for me to get one of these:

modtable-treadmill-desk-thumbnail.jpg
 
1. Lots of exercise.
2. Structure your day into "short bursts" of activity lol.

I find that if a task takes more than 5-6 hours I can't focus. So I restructured my day from working eight hours to just 5-6 hours like this:

Wake up at 6:50am.
Start work at 8am.
Finish work at 2pm, change and leave the house.
3pm-4pm gym - lift weights (three times/week).
4pm-5pm pool (usually about four times/week).
5pm-7pm groceries, meet up with friends, grab a quick snack.
7pm-8pm dinner, chill at home and I'm normally asleep by 10pm.

On days when I do not go to the gym I either go running (5-10km) or hiking.

I used to have trouble staying focused while working - not anymore. I feel like having just 5-6 hours or "work time" really helps keep me focused. Plus there's a strict deadline - I stop working every day at 2pm - no exceptions.

By 10pm I'm so tired that falling asleep is not a problem. I used to struggle with sleep a lot - go to bed past midnight, can't sleep, then wake up late and get nothing done all day.

Work 5-6 days/week. Always take at least one full day off in a week and go do something fun!
 
All these just do it and tldr posts are fucking bullshit. If you have extreme procrastination issues it will take a long time to fix. Usually desperation or passion will get you going again.
 
I mentioned earlier that I use Rainmeter, Stardock's Objectdock and some other programs to keep my desktop looking clean and to help keep myself from getting distracted from my work.

Here are three pics of my desktop clean, showing my taskbar and showing TextRoom a text editor I use for my work.

I used the SimpleDock Rainmeter skin since it gives you a really simple way of making your own toolbars for the icon set on the right which gives me quick access to Freedom, TextRoom, Firefox, Thunderbird and Notepad++.

I search Google Images for wallpapers by putting in an exact match for my resolution and searching for random keywords.

Stardock's Objectdock program is what I use to hide my taskbar. You can have your tray icons show up on it, running programs, start menu, etc., and it actually auto-hides completely off of the screen unlike the shitty Windows taskbar. You can also customize it in a lot of cool ways.
 
Motivation = Visualization
Productivity = Using apps like hitask.com for task lists
Staying focused throughout the day and making sure I don't do something stupid like play Starcraft when I feel like chillin.
 
A lot of great advice in here.

Motivation can be tricky to find some days, but that doesn't come close to trying to motivate yourself on the other side of a failed project, lost client, etc. Spare me the failure quotes, but I, like many of the other entrepreneurs in here know what I am talking about. It can be paralysing. Temporarily at least. No matter how small, it can really take the swagger out of your step and force you to really check yourself. What I find interesting, and it took my girlfriend to point it out, regardless of past disappointments, when I am working on a new project, I forget about them entirely. I am just as optimistic as if I had never once failed before. Hopelessly optimistic. Like nothing could go wrong, and this is going to be the one. Alas, 9/10 times it isn't and I feel like crap for a couple days. I wonder if it is better to check my optimism to avoid the disappointment? Or would that missing optimism potentially compromise an otherwise successful project? Or do I, regardless of how it will feel, continue to be recklessly hopeful?

Curious to hear the way you folks approach projects, and when they go south, how do you quickly bounce back?
 
BlueSteele said:
A lot of great advice in here.

Motivation can be tricky to find some days, but that doesn't come close to trying to motivate yourself on the other side of a failed project, lost client, etc. Spare me the failure quotes, but I, like many of the other entrepreneurs in here know what I am talking about. It can be paralysing. Temporarily at least. No matter how small, it can really take the swagger out of your step and force you to really check yourself. What I find interesting, and it took my girlfriend to point it out, regardless of past disappointments, when I am working on a new project, I forget about them entirely. I am just as optimistic as if I had never once failed before. Hopelessly optimistic. Like nothing could go wrong, and this is going to be the one. Alas, 9/10 times it isn't and I feel like crap for a couple days. I wonder if it is better to check my optimism to avoid the disappointment? Or would that missing optimism potentially compromise an otherwise successful project? Or do I, regardless of how it will feel, continue to be recklessly hopeful?

Curious to hear the way you folks approach projects, and when they go south, how do you quickly bounce back?
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steven pressfield covered that topic pretty damned well in "the war of art". a quick read, and well worth the price of admission for the PDF/ebook.
 
BlueSteele said:
A lot of great advice in here.

Motivation can be tricky to find some days, but that doesn't come close to trying to motivate yourself on the other side of a failed project, lost client, etc. Spare me the failure quotes, but I, like many of the other entrepreneurs in here know what I am talking about. It can be paralysing. Temporarily at least. No matter how small, it can really take the swagger out of your step and force you to really check yourself. What I find interesting, and it took my girlfriend to point it out, regardless of past disappointments, when I am working on a new project, I forget about them entirely. I am just as optimistic as if I had never once failed before. Hopelessly optimistic. Like nothing could go wrong, and this is going to be the one. Alas, 9/10 times it isn't and I feel like crap for a couple days. I wonder if it is better to check my optimism to avoid the disappointment? Or would that missing optimism potentially compromise an otherwise successful project? Or do I, regardless of how it will feel, continue to be recklessly hopeful?

Curious to hear the way you folks approach projects, and when they go south, how do you quickly bounce back?
Click to expand...

I think if a project really does go south and there's not much you can do to recover from it, Its important to cut your losses completely and move on with your current/new project to keep those guys happy. Its a wasted effort to try your very best to recover the failed project (trying to make the client not hate you as much) but by doing that your no doubt just going to delay your current/new projects causing a domino effect.

If its fucked...Full steam ahead with other shit, no point dwelling on it.

At the end of the day even if you do put time and effort into some how recovering the project to a reasonable standard, the client will still never use you again because of the initial flop.
 
Hey, I'm in Antalya, Turkey. Gunaydin!

If I can get some work done here while jet-lagged, 6,000 miles from home, surrounded by 3,000 years of Mediterranean historic ruins, it's a victory for mindfulness.
 
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