Hacker Bits, April 2016

There is no one who orders
me to work, and I can rest anytime,
so I made a quota first. For
example, my first quota was 40
hours a week.
I calculated my work time
using a stopwatch, and I noted
things like “Ah, I worked for
hours today”, and “I went out
yesterday, so I couldn’t work, so
let’s work more today”.
However, even if I work for
the same amount of hours, the
productivity depends on the
conditions for each day. When
I am tired or in a bad environment,
I can’t focus. The work
quality was not consistent at all.
Often, even if I could focus
for the first few hours, the more
time would go on, the less I
could focus.
Work short hours
every day
Then, I made a rule to work only
3 hours every day without holidays.
This is a bit extreme, but
in this short hour limit, you are
more motivated to work harder
to make your working time
meaningful.
First, the most productive
time for me is after I wake up,
so I need to sleep well, and start
working right after I wake up.
I don’t read any news or SNS
because even if I only read them
a little bit, it could affect my
productivity because it distracts
my mind.
I even disable all notifications
on my iPhone before I go
to bed, so I don’t see them before
I start working next day.
I prepare for each day
seriously like an athlete who
prepares for their games in the
morning. There was a huge difference
of productivity between
a 9-hour work day and a 3-hour
day.
You really think about
what to do
This was a good discovery. When
you have only a short amount of
time, you care about what you
do more than ever.
When I develop features on
my apps, I think more seriously
if I should do it. Is it really worth
my time for today? Is this project
worth doing?
I cared about it before, but
the seriousness increases when
you have only a few hours to
work a day.
Less stuck for coding
When you are coding, you get
stuck quite often, and it can
take a lot of hours to solve it
sometimes. However, with my
3 hour work day, I find that this
happens less since you can’t
keep digging into the issue
when you don’t have enough
time anyway.
This way, you will be able
to find the solution or come up
with something the next day
with a different viewpoint.
My challenge is that it is
sometimes hard to go bed
without solving some unknown
issues, and you don’t want to
stop coding in the middle of it.
Nevertheless, when you take
a break from the issues, you
can think like “Well, it was not
worth taking so much my time
anyway…” in a calm mind the
next day.
What if when you are
in the zone?
Another pain for this method is
that you should stop working
anyway even when you are in the
zone.
I often feel like I want to
continue working when I am in
the zone for some work. But, if
you extend your work time rule
once, you will do it again, then
the more you extend, the more
your productivity will drop.
It’s a hard trade-off.
When you have only a short amount
of time, you care about what you do
more than ever.
58 hacker bits