5 Productivity Tips You Can Learn From John Carmack
Focus, learning trips, keep a to-do list, and more
It was 96 when Quake came out and I first heard about John Carmack. It was impressive to discover that he did all the game engine by himself. And the game looked and played just great. Around 2012, I found and read for the first time the Masters of Doom book.
I was intrigued to see Carmack’s work ethic because no matter how smart you are, you need to put in a huge amount of work to build an engine as he did. His game engines were an incredible technology at the time, something never achieved before.
1. Put more working hours
I was surprised to find out that Carmack worked 12-hour days during the Quake 1 development. According to Masters of Doom, at his peak, he put 100-hours a week, which means around 14h each day. He worked on the weekends of course. On average he worked like 80-hours a week. In a recent interview, John Carmack agrees that putting more than 13-hours a day is ineffective. More recently he tries to work 60-hours a week or at least keep it over 50-hours.
If we compare that with a full-time working week in France, which is a 35 hours work-week, Carmack was putting in more than twice working hours.
