I was recently furloughed, the startup I was at ran out of money. They may very well turn it all around, but I’m still looking for a job. During this search, I was interviewing with a defense company, they gave me a 48-hour data engineering takehome project. Naturally, I planned not to do anything else in that period. I got almost all of it done on the first day, and just futzed with it on the second. Turned it in and got a request for a follow up interview a couple of hours later, so that was neat.
I really enjoyed dedicating an entire day to a project, so I’ve been keeping the habit. a rag man and this Streamlit cost input tool were both one-day MVPs. This is a much better system than trying to chip away at three projects at a time.
Otherwise, I keep myself productive with a big Google Tasks list where the tasks are attached to some date. I am consistently too aggressive with what I assign every day. I put on around 10 tasks fully expecting to have to push off many of them. I’m getting up earlier and earlier to try and get more done. On days where I plan to do more than work on one project, I’ve taken to aggressively timeboxing everything using a funny little study timer I bought on a trip to Japan. I’ll set an hour for leetcode, or an hour for misc. tasks (making calls, cleaning, etc.) and won’t task switch until the timer is over. Previous productivity systems I’ve tried have been too rigid or too ambiguous. I think this strikes a really good balance. I can easily introduce tasks like “# hours of {task}” and break it up over the course of the day or just do it all in one go. It’s basically just a modified Pomodoro system.
This has been generally pretty good, before I took to timeboxing this way, I found that the pressure of so many tasks made focus work hard. I also felt it unfairly penalizes repeated study work in favor of little one-off tasks.I recommend trying something like this yourself if you feel you lack a stopping point for some tasks or you’re finding yourself pulled in too many directions. It feels good to know that for some period of time, you only have one thing to worry about.
Why Not Use {Other Tool}?
When choosing some productivity system you have to pay attention to the tradeoff between the work required to set it up / get used to it / maintain it and how much the system gives you. Google Tasks integrates natively with Google Calendar, which as far as I can tell has become the default calendar option, and it has a nice little widget I can put on my phone to jot down tasks. The cost is basically nothing and “it just works”.
I know about Syncthing and Obsidian, I agree using them would be better in the abstract. Yes, I do feel the call of the void-wherein-I-spend-all-my-time-configuring-open-source-alternatives but on the other hand, I would like to get a job.