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16 Simple Tips to Boost Your Productivity x10

Maxi Contieri on December 29, 2020

These easy-to-follow tips will improve your output dramatically. 1. Remove Notifications 🔔 Check your phone after a couple of hours. ...
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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

For me personally, I've found that environment changes everything. Just changing from weekend clothes to what I normally wear at work can completely change my mindset from watch youtube to I should probably write some code. This is also one of the reasons why I prefer working in an office than remote from home.

Applying this to the digital world, I do most of my "lazy" hobbies in the browser and most of the creative/productive stuff in the terminal. Tools like vim or task warrior are a huge help with this. I even have a separate browser (luakit) for when I need to open a website in my terminal context.

How much this can apply to others, I don't know, but for me, the change of UI and having my hands on the keyboard instead of the mouse most of the time helps me switch context between productive and unproductive activities.

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Dominik Brüchler

Great article! Sums up a lot of advises that are actually pretty easy to implement and will help being and staying productive. Bookmarked it right away to save it for later... oh, wait. What?

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mcsee profile image
Maxi Contieri

Hahaha!

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Andrej Rypo

This post has more bookmarks than other reactions 😆

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Maxi Contieri

haha ! Hopefully these people will get to point 16!

I should add a clickbait like "don't bookmark this post before reading 16" :)

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Oliver Stevenson • Edited

A suggestion for those who can get inbox build-up/hoarding like me:

At a suitable interval such as the start of the month, just delete everything older than a certain date. Obviously this isn't okay for everyone to do, but for me at least, if something is older than a couple of weeks and no one has screamed, there's a good chance it no longer matters or isn't high enough priority to be worth the build up. If it is important and when it becomes a priority, I'm sure people will let you know with more than an email.

This may also be part of my secret plan to encourage people to contact me via a more conversational, transparent means (slack, teams) or an actual work ticket on the kanban. Email is often a terrible way of communicating I find - should be limited to one-to-many announcements or medium sized chunks of information that may be hard to represent in a chat client. Curious what others think.

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Maxi Contieri

Great tip

I’d change delete to archive

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Oliver Stevenson • Edited

Ah yes, I should've been clearer. The way I have it set in my email program (because my work uses outlook) is that only unread messages appear in my main inbox, and I have to explicitly mark them as read - so a little like archiving in modern web email clients. Except it eliminates this idea that the read state matters if you haven't dealt with it and it's still kicking around your inbox.

If space is a problem you can always delete big attachments before you start deleting emails.

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Maxi Contieri

We are in 2020. If space is a problem get another provider :)

I used to send mails in the early 90s and then space WAS indeed a problem on local servers with 10 MB HD. Not anymore!

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Oliver Stevenson

Haha, I'll make sure to forward your comment to our IT department ;).

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Oisín

"Don't automate infrequent things."

I still like to automate even infrequent things for a few reasons:

  1. The program won't get tired of the task and make mistakes like I will.
  2. I'll learn from the process of automating the task.
  3. Even if I don't need to do the task again soon, I can share my program with others who may benefit from it.
  4. It's fun. :)
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Matt Curcio • Edited

Hi Maxi,
Bravo! Love the lists. I feel these are all things we intuitively know but don't enact or we tend to forget their importance.

Myself, I have not found a good software tool for task management. So, I tend to revert to paper calendars. Something about using my hand & arm links it more tightly to my brain. ;))

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Andrew MacNeill • Edited

LOVE this list - I would bookmark it but I read #16.

This may sound dumb but what do you mean by "gold plating your articles"? I read that to mean "don't wait to publish" but I wanted to clarification first.

I went to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_plating... - but this makes "publish daily" task pretty much take your entire day.

Thanks

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Boris Nekezov

Thank you very much for that great and usefull article!

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अभिषेक कुमार🇮🇳

this is awesome.

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Marian

These are actually great tips. Thanks for sharing 😃

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Omas Ajiri

A very practical piece! Many thanks for sharing.

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Cesar Aguirre

Totally agree on "Don't save for later". I prefer to write a short note with what I like from what I read and my reactions.

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Mahmudul Hasan

Love your post, will be help me a lot 💙

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webjoyable

Raindrop is the only tool you'll ever need for bookmarking

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Luis Pinheiro

Nice ;)

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muralidharan

great!