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Productivity hacks

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Tricks

  • A trick to getting started is just to tell yourself you’re just going to do 5 minutes and then you can stop. To help with this you can leave a typo in your last commit then your first task is to git commit --amend to fix it. Or you can leave a unit test failing with a trivial fix. Anything to just get you to open the editor and start typing. https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/13m5cxh/how_do_i_get_into_a_flow_state_at_work/
  • If you plan to do smth tomorrow - prepare the environment and infrastructure today. It is going to be easier to start the day productively, without warm up. Want to write code - keep IDE open, need to cook - take meat out of freezer or leave a pan with water on the table. This trick utilizes Zeigarnik effect (people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks) and Ovsiankina effect (the innate human urge to finish tasks previously initiated).
  • vigorously delete from your feed any content creators, who post bullshit, AI-generated slope, anything that thrives on people FOMO
  • learn to distinguish news and events. Events do have consequences. News become irrelevant right after they are announced.
  • pen and paper are still great for achieving more TODOs. Write down what needs to be done and separate Andrejs-planner from Andrejs-executor. The former writes task in a notebook, the latter picks up TODOs from that notebook and does them.

Tools

RULE #0

None of the hacks work when you are tired or bored. Before switching off notifications on your smartphone (which is a great step btw), solve the real problem. Some even say that “eliminate the distractions” is the worst productivity advice I’ve ever seen

  • add any worthy Youtube videos into the Watch Later list. Only watch videos from that list and never from the algorithmic stream. That helps reducing impulsive binge watching.
  • Collect your favorite digital sources into one rss feed (yes, RSS is still alive in 2025!). Most of the websites, blogs and news outlets have a rss feed, even Telegram chats, public Facebook pages and Twitter accounts (with certain hacks) can be followed in one place. Set update frequency to twice a day.
  • Minimalistic launcher for your smartphone. I use Olauncher. No fancy icons designed so that users click on them more often.
  • Various app blockers and usage monitors. E.g. Stay Focused or one sec for Android or Cold Turkey - Features for PC, but I don’t find them particularly effective, especially see [[#^66e582|Rule #0]]. If you have to fight yourself playing a dumb arcade game or updating the same website for the 100th time - you are already doing it in a wrong way.
  • Journaling works very well for me. obsidian is a great tool for personal knowledge management. One can keep the desired level of organization, but even with that set to None and also None extra time spent - it is still relatively easy to go back and find something you didn’t even know was written down by you.
  • Do not type. Talk. Voice-to-text models like Whisper made tremendous advances in recent years and are easily wrapped into applications allowing you to type less. Everywhere. UX-wise there are decent tools out there (e.g. https://whispertyping.com/), but if privacy concern is important for you, luckily, there are self-hosted alternatives - pluja\whishper, aschmelyun\subvert
  • The Optimal iPhone Settings and Best Apps for Productivity, Focus, and Health
  • switch smartphone screen into B&W mode

Resources

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