How to be More Productive

This question will be the death of me. Every year, every month, every week, I am trying to find a new system to maximize productivity. I bought a Brick (highly recommend). I have tried scheduling every part of my day, scheduling none of my day, waking up early, and staying up late. I have tried switching from coffee to a mushroom drink, then back to coffee, then three more coffees because the caffeine may help.

I have tried them all.

I am sad to say it is hard to position yourself to be more productive. But I hope to have found the (very unsatisfying) answer: you have to love what you are doing and ensure you do not get bored.

I am now convinced that the only way to stay super productive is to stay constantly engaged. You can force engagement for a bit, but to reach super-star-level productivity, you need to love what you are doing. This is an annoying answer; I have spent years looking for processes because I didn’t want this to be the answer. If you need to be doing something you love, the problem shifts from how to be productive to how to find things you love. And while the latter sounds more pleasant, it can be much harder. The other reason this answer is annoying is because sometimes learning sucks, as Andrej Karpathy explains very well here. So, how do you avoid getting bogged down in the shitty pieces?

You need to find some things that are all “productive” and that you enjoy. That way, when you feel frustrated or bored in one area, you can shift attention to find fulfillment while still being productive. Elon is productive because he is a freak of nature. Still, I bet it helps that when he is feeling frustrated in one of his day jobs he can shift focus to one of his three other day jobs (somehow, he still finds time to scroll Twitter, but maybe he can count that as productivity now that it is also a day job). Casey Handmer also cites this as a trick when discussing his productivity. While Casey is not (yet) running three multi-billion dollar companies, he has had a pretty impressive track record. He credits parts of his productivity to having multiple things going on at once.

I am not Casey and not Elon, and while I can get some shit done, I wouldn’t consider myself ultra-productive. So, how am I going to force myself into productivity? I am writing this blog to publicly commit to a couple of side projects in addition to my day job at Footprint. The goal is to keep trying side projects to find some things I really fall in love with. Once I have discovered those, I can allocate my resources appropriately.

Here are my first irons in the fire:

1. Blogging: I wrote a blog semi-regularly while back at ALAO and between ALAO and Footprint. I am going to recommit to it. Blogs are a great way to keep yourself honest, practice writing, clear your thinking, and, in the best case, help spread what you are working on to interesting people. Twice a month is nothing crazy. The blog will likely cover a bit about my side projects and anything else that interests me in those two weeks.
2. Underwater Drone: Like many of you, I have been wrapped up in the El Segundo movement and have become interested in the manufacturing space. I want to get more involved, but my engineering experience involves building a few furniture sets from IKEA. I like drones, and I like the ocean. My girlfriend has a DJI drone that we take out on Long Island to look at the sea life, and it would be awesome to have an underwater one. I will be following this CPS course to build it, and hope to get my hands dirty and learn some things.
3. Chrome Plugin: I am an avid user of Instapaper, meaning I save many articles and then fail to read them. I am building a Chrome plugin that works similarly but also sends you an email at the end of the week with one-paragraph summaries of the articles you have saved. I will use GPT for that and save everything to my GitHub. My software engineering experience only slightly outweighs my real-world engineering experience, so be patient with me. I am always down to hear any tips!

So here we go. I hope you follow along. I hope you reach out and tell me when I am doing anything stupid or if you want to jam on side projects together! You can DM me on Twitter @peter_sweeney0.