Productivity 101
Being productive is to regulary produce something desired or expected in a timely manner.
Acceptable results and satisfaction can be considered a way to measure success.
Resources and priorities
First of all, size and measure mentally what you will do and how you will do it:
::: columns :::: column
Resources
- Costs
- Time
- Quality ::::
:::: column
Priority
- Urgent
- Important :::: :::
We can’t always have high quality, cheap and fast, we have to trade off resources.
Proactivity
Being proactive is really important nowadays, we are either part of the ones that think on the details or the ones that are too distracted.
Traits?
- Anticipate to problems
- Communicate on-time
- Ask for help
- Be organized
Archiving a result
In order to archive a result we have to basically consider the following aspects:
- Estimate
- Be sure to know what you know and what you don’t, do we need to research anything?
- Make sure to understand what is the current scenario
- Identify limitations and/or dependencies
- Before to start make sure we have cleared all the dependencies/blockers
- Test your result yoursefel
- Deliver
- Get a feedback
Safe-fail when archiving the result
To fail is Ok
- Ask for help (colleages, forums, stackoverflow, etc)
- Think on alternatives (so you look like a hero)
- Communicate on-time
- You can fail to archive the result but you can’t give up
About habits
Being productive doesn’t mean being generating products/results 24/7, you need to recharge yourself.
- Take care of your self:
- Sleep
- Eat
- Exercise
- Meditate?
- Have indoors/outdoors activities to distract or relax yourself
- Learn to play a musical instrument
- Read non-tech books, fictionals maybe?
- Listen new music
- Try something new, play video games
- Go for a walk
- Hangout with friends or family
About habits
- Read online articles (aws blog, hackernews, hackingarticles)
- Share knowledge:
- Write articles in a blog or PDF
- Record a video
- Present a talk on something you have learnt
- Night owls VS Early birds
Frameworks and tooling
Tools should save you time, hence make your life easier
- A computer, a cellphone
- Software: insync/dropbox, spotify, xmind, vmware, aws, etc
- Books, E-books, Audiobooks: (amazon, packt)
- Online courses: Udemy, Acloudguru, Platzi, etc
Time management
Time cannot always be managed as we want, we have to adapt to changes and iterate again to make sure we are in the right track as we are supposed to be.
Some techniques that might help anyways:
- Pomodoro technique
- 5 minute rule
- Pareto principle
Heros
- Bruce Lee
- Albert Einstein
- Charles Chaplin
- Walt Disney
Some other resources
- Book: Designing your life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans: Health, Work, Play, Love
- Book: 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design by Tim Ferriss: Delegation, Freedom of time
- The Feynman techinique
- The Elon Musk’s 5-minute work
Summary
- Size, plan and estimate
- Find alternatives if you fail
- Take care of yourself with regular habits
- Invest on what makes your life easier
- Time is gold!
Questions & Answers
Let me know you any questions or write it down at: darvein@gmail.com
Thank you!