I meant that it's counterintuitive to think about scheduling breaks, but it's actually very helpful thing to do. Thanks for the feedback. I will see if I can make it clearer in the article.
That's a good point. I was thinking about it during writing. Really it is binary – doing and then not doing for a while. There is no ascending part of the graph – even though spiky line would be closer to depict this it is also incorrect. I chose to use the simplest wave form just to highlight the nature of most to-dos – they repeating over and over again like waves on the ocean.
One of the hardest parts of being a freelancer is not having a boss. Having a rigid external structure can be both a curse and a blessing. Daily deadlines, defined commitments and face to face meetings can be very effective for one’s productivity.
One of my biggest productivity hacks is using financial incentives to make myself more accountable. If I’m running late and don’t leave home until after my 9:30 a.m. goal, I pay a $5 “penalty” to a friend who acts as a referee. I have a goal of doing at least seven pomodoros (25 min timers) of focused work a day. If I do less than seven I pay $3 for each one unfinished. It’s quite surprising how risking even small amounts of money can motivate me to be more productive. Reaching my goal of focused work for the day has a much higher value than the few dollars I sometimes lose from my penalty. I think that using small monetary stakes works so well because of loss aversion — we are proportionally more afraid of losing something than we are excited about gaining something. I trick my brain into being scared of losing a few bucks and in return I get much more valuable gains in my productivity.
Because I’m a freelancer, at any moment I can delve into the mysteries of the cosmos on Wikipedia, daydream about the exotic trip on my friend’s Instagram, or jump into a statistics tutorial on a YouTube channel. Each one of these things feels important at the moment. And with every coming year technology will only become more distracting. Algorithms are getting better at figuring out what makes us uncontrollably want to engage in technology. I struggled with being distracted by Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and other apps. I managed to find a couple of effective tools to block distracting websites on Mac (check out Freedom or SelfControl). However due to system limitations, these tools mostly don’t work on iPhone and iPad. That’s why I created Brutu Timer.
Brutu is an iOS timer that helps you stay focused. Select an amount of money and start a timer. Put your phone down and stay on task. If you leave the app Brutu will charge you. You can still receive phone calls or swipe to the notification center. You can also add a break — leave the app and Brutu will notify you when to come back.
How you can use Brutu Timer:
Start 8 h timer with 30 min break to make sure to only use your phone for 30 min before bed
Start a 25 min Pomodoro timer and quickly repeat it using timer templates
*Start 4 h focus timer with 10 min break when you can use your phone as much as you’d like
I heard that MixPanel is super complicated to set up. Couple of days worth of coding. I am looking for something more straight forward. Are there any that comes to mind?
Every time I clean a yogurt container I feel torn. What is a better environmental trade-off: not running water for 90 seconds or recycling the plastic? I think it would be really helpful if there was some kind of universal unit that would describe the real environmental impact of producing, trashing, recycling of goods and materials.
The unit would appear on packagings of goods, specs of materials, landfill/recycling bins etc. I created a pdf to visualize the idea (all values in the pdf are made up): https://www.dropbox.com/s/rdi51serx6hwn8e/EarthHarm.pdf?dl=0 I realize how complex such a project would be. Inherently, the choice of how the unit works would be a political one. How to compare and calculate the different environmental challenges and wrap them up in one unit? What institution would have enough authority and expertise to deploy it? Setting this all aside, I think unit like this would be a really helpful tool letting people have some baseline they can refer to. It could inform people what is the impact of their actions and where to seek for a real change. (a simpler version of this project would be a well-researched website that compares these environmental factors with each other)