That's all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you're ever going to get. You can direct your attention to a million optimizations— email, meetings, notes, calendar, time tracking, goals, todo lists, time estimates, prioritization frameworks, quantified self sensors, analytics, apps, documents, journaling. But don't. Ignore all this, and do the work. When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself.
- No location available
-

An important ingredient for doing the work is boredom. That's how I got into programming. School was boring. We had three channels of television, and they were almost always boring. I had computer games, but I sucked at gaming and games quickly got frustrating. I read all the books that we had laying around. The only thing left was BASIC. So I started there and never stopped. The simple reason is that programming computers was the most interesting activity around.If boredom is a necessary ingredient, then portable internet is a disaster for doing the work. How are you supposed to get excited about anything if you're never bored? I don't know if I ever would have learned to program if I had modern internet. Why would I, if something more interesting was always a click away? This is true to this day. I can't get anything done when I'm online. There is always something on the internet that's locally more interesting or more important than writing the next paragraph, or threading a flag through a series of function calls, or reading a book. The only way I can get anything done is to turn the internet off.So I do. I have a work computer, and a router with parental controls that blocks every possible internet distraction on it. No Twitter, no Hacker News, no YouTube. Router administration is set up so I can't make changes over WiFi. If I want to unblock something, I have to physically get to the router and plug in a cable to change the settings. I power off every other device. No silent mode, no do not disturb, no hibernation. Power off. Recently a reader suggested putting my phone in a kSafe (thanks Robert!) It works great, and now I’m doing that too. All this constructs enough physical barriers between me and temptation that the internet loses and my laziness wins.Then I get properly bored. And then I do the work.
- No location available
-