3 ms·

Ask HN: what do you do, when you are not productive?

1 points by gedrap 12y ago

I am freelancing from home so productivity is a big thing for me. Today, I was thinking what's the best way to deal with the days when you are simply not productive, easily distracted, etc. In the past, I used to feel bad about unproductive days, I'd try to make it up by staying up till late and trying to get something done. The next day I would get up late, it would propagate, one more 'make up' night. Few months later I just felt like an exhausted zombie. After taking a break for a month, I am trying to cope with it in a different way. If I am just feeling unproductive, I do something that charges me with positive emotions (e.g. video game) or take a few hours walk. And if the day wasn't productive, I just go to sleep early, no more late nights. I was wondering, how other people are dealing with that?

ArtDev 12y ago
Have you tried RescueTime? There is a free tier and the paid version has more fine-grained reports: http://rescuetime.com/ http://rescuetime.com/ Using Rescuetime I am able to see how long I at the computer vs what I am actually getting done. When I working on a client project, I track productive time as billable time (hint: create a goal for all productive time and use the calculated number). I also have an alert for when I go over 30 minutes of "distracting" time. This applies to weekends too! Flaking out then staying up late to finish your work.. join the the club! I noticed that I am like 3x as fast though, so it might be a good thing. I think the answer is to just enjoy the day and work at night. That is my next experiment.
- gedrap 12y ago
  Yes, discovered it last weekend! Interesting tool, it puts little pressure to work more because it sucks to see bad stats :) And yes, I noticed the same about the night. Most of my work gets done between 8pm-1am. Sometimes this is a problem because I am still doing degree at the uni and missed many morning lectures... But I guess it's the nature (plus the clients in the States, while I am in Europe). Although it feels pretty great to finish everything at 8pm and just playing around for the rest of the day.
- welder 12y ago
  On a similar vein, you can use https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com for detailed stats about your programming.