52 Actionable Ways to Hack Your Productivity

Techniques I used when starting a startup and keeping my job as a day trader

1. Follow a biphasic sleep schedule

I like to sleep in two shifts. Each shift is 3.5 hours long, and combined, gives me an optimal 7 hours of sleep every 24 hours.

First, I take one 3.5 hour-long nap from 5pm to 8:30pm, and then I go about my night, doing super productive stuff, like reading term sheets and doing startup CEO-stuff. That’s the night life.

Then, I crash again at 3:30am and sleep until 7am. Then my day begins, where I work as a day trader on the stock exchange, managing huge amounts of money and stress.

This biphasic sleep schedule allows me to basically “recharge my batteries” twice, leaving me half as tired and allowing me to get twice as much work done, because I’m essentially having two days, crammed into one.

2. Say no to caffeine and alcohol.

Caffeine and alcohol will mess up your biphasic sleep schedule, not to mention that they’re super addictive.

They’ll mess up everything. Don’t do it. Never, ever ever.

Because it messes up your productivity.

If someone offers you a shot, whether it be a shot of whiskey or a shot of espresso, be sure to respond with these simple words to make them understand how productive you are:

No, thank you

I’m super productive

Ya Zoo-hoo

That drink is obstructive.

3. Track how your time is spent every week, then analyze and compare it to previous weeks.

I analyze and track everything, from my weight, time spent meditating, body temperature (via rectal thermometer), and even my brain waves.

However, a really important metric I enjoy tracking is how much time I spend doing work. Work can be things like writing this article, filling out paperwork, or coding. For you kiddos out there, it could also be studying/homework.

If you don’t measure how much time you spend working on things per week, how will you know what number you need to beat next week?

4. Start your day with a 30 minute meditation, then follow with a cold shower.

Every morning, when I wake up, I start my day with a deeply philosophical, kindness meditation, where I extend my kindness out to the universe and open my heart and mind to receive any reciprocated waves of kindness energy.

Usually, I don’t receive any kindness back from the universe, but I keep trying because it makes me feel like I’m a super-calm, loving guru of wisdom.

After that 30-minute session of calm focus, I immediately jump under a freezing shower. Sometimes, it’s not freezing, and only about 1 °C (33.8 °F for you Americans), so I installed a custom built water cooler that uses dry ice to make sure that my showers are always literally freezing.

After that perfect start to my day, I’ll have the energy I need to take on the world.

5. Write smug, self-congratulatory listicles like this one

Wait, what?

6. Reference that in a weirdly meta way

7. Run out of ideas

8. Keep writing some filler stuff

Read 20 books per day. That’s what Elon Musk and Bill Gates did.

9. Realize that you never really planned this article out very well and you only started writing it because you wanted the attention

And that you also took a lot of the “techniques” from the millions of other productivity erotica writers on Medium, because everyone writes about the same thing.

10. Understand that you’re probably wasting the time of the people reading this

Sorry, you’re free to go.

11. Keep writing anyway because you still have 41 more items to go

Okay, here’s the thing, though.

How can someone actually come up with 52 things that are guaranteed to increase your productivity, creativity, and overall well-being? With that much “advice”, some of it must be bullshit, or at least contradictory, right?

12. Wow this is terrible

And so is the entire productivity erotica genre.

Yeah, that’s what I’m calling it. Productivity erotica. It’s not full-out pornography, no, it’s more subtle than that.

It’s written for a mass-market audience to be emotionally satisfying and optimistic. Call it escapist nonfiction.

13. Do people actually do this stuff for the sake of “productivity”?

And if so, are you actually more productive, or does it just make everything else seem like a waste of time in comparison so you stop doing normal things?

14. Knock Knock

Who’s there?

15. Stopwasting

Stopwasting who?

16. Stopwasting your time reading this

Seriously. Why are you still here? If you’re as productive as the title of the article makes you feel, you should have stopped reading a long time ago. But you’re still here. Reading my shit.

17. Realize that at the end of the day, none of this really matters

Everyone dies (as of 2019). Let’s say, about 99% of the people in the world and throughout history are forgotten (a fairly conservative estimate). That leaves one percent of people that make a lasting impact on society for centuries.

And that one percent probably isn’t you.

That one percent probably never really read articles like this one (or at least what this one pretended to be).

Extreme societal impact is only a side-effect of their regular lives. They weren’t necessarily optimizing for impact, per se. They were just trying to optimize their lives around what they did best.

So don’t worry about it. Just keep doing your thing, and do whatever you’re trying to do on your own terms and do it correctly.

18. Intermittent fasting

Don’t eat. Go to bed hungry. It makes you more motivated to earn more money, because your brain is tricked into “poverty mode”.

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