I have a similar routine and it makes me really productive - stacking different habits is powerful.
However, in my experience this approach has one big problem: certain events (changing continents, moving, sickness, finished milestones) completely unravel my productivity for weeks or months. Once I lose the streak it's very hard to get back on track.
I either have to rebuild a new routine step by step or just procrastinate long enough until I've found a new project I can build my work day around. These periods can last several months.
Has anyone come up with strategies to cope with such breaks?
Makes sense. This might sound counterintuitive, but my solution is to make sure that I'm always working on multiple projects, which I call a "project stack." It's a mix of professional, social, and personal projects, so the proverbial well never runs dry and I always have something to do with my hands.
For example, in my system, "travel to X continent" is itself a project, existing alongside multiple other projects. I find this pretty helpful not just for staying in motion, but also for avoiding that sense of guilt that I haven't been productive on days when I'm dealing with these kinds of environmental change. It's a reframing: "It's not that I've been unproductive while moving. It's that I have been productive on my moving project."
By default I'm actually very low energy. Always have been. I recall my dad admonishing me many times in adolescence that he'd take me to the doctor and they'd prick me with needles if I didn't stop napping during the day.
Somewhat circularly, it's the system itself that gives me the energy to keep using the system. I know, because I've engineered it to work that way. (At first this wasn't intentional, but when I noticed the positive effects in an earlier version I systematically began to tease out those effects.)
Numerous readers have already responded saying it's worked for them so far, but the devil's in the details I suppose. I really only shared the tip of the iceberg of how it works, and a lot of the magic [1] happens down at the level of the active work sessions.
[1] Things like website blocking, task timers, interstitial journaling, pattern interrupts, etc. (Of course, there's a certain logic to it all that I'll spell out in a future article.)
I operate similarly to thread OP, and manage multiple : work, personal, social, etc projects ongoing. I'm naturally high energy..... I can't sit down for long.
Thank you, this is very encouraging. I've felt guilty about a new part-time project not going well, but it's my first one in my current pattern. So to consider "start a new part-time project" to be itself a project makes a lot of sense.
I can come at this from either direction, since both of the following statements are true: a) this system reduces the frequency with which unexpected events happen in the first place, and b) the unexpected events that do take place become a lot easier to handle with the system.
a) The fact that I work in conscious 90-minute chunks allows me to take steps to prevent myself from getting distracted. For example, at the planning phase of a 90-minute session, I'll usually activate a 90-minute website block using an app called Freedom [1] and turn on DND mode across all my devices. Then when the session is over, I can lower all these defenses guilt-free.
b) Say I have a friend or relative staying over, which is pretty distracting. I communicate with them upfront: "Hey, I have this routine where, first thing every morning, I do a couple hours of focused work and don't do any socializing. I even wear headphones to block distracting noise. It's not you, it's me. So would you mind just doing your thing for like an hour or two when you wake up tomorrow morning? Then we can chill and go for brunch." etc.
As far as being sick? I guess it depends on what kind of sickness we're talking about lol. I've gotten COVID, been a little hungover, and other aberrations, and usually had no problem carrying myself through just a single work session. (Notably, my first 90-minute session of the day is a routine I've deeply internalized through repetition, so it requires very little mental effort.)
When this happens to me it's always because of an all or nothing mentality. Even if it's not explicitly in your thought process you get that feeling that you screwed up and things aren't worth doing anymore. I think you need to become comfortable with the idea of not executing on your routine perfectly every day (for good reasons such as moving or illness).
When I'm about to travel or no I'm about to go through some experience that is likely to break my habit loops, are usually set a monetary bed with a friend. I call this the bet switch mechanism: By setting up bet and being held accountable, I'm able to change the way my brain thinks about the habit and always stick through over the critical period of environment change.
I wrote about it a long time ago on my old blog when I first started using it, and dug up the link. Sorry for broken images, etc:
> certain events (changing continents, moving, sickness, finished milestones) completely unravel my productivity for weeks or months. Once I lose the streak it's very hard to get back on track.
I’ve noticed this my entire life and tried to fight it and have been mostly unsuccessful. Now I see it as an opportunity to build a new, more resilient structure in my life.
Some habits and routines seem to stick around even after big events. Some don’t. Thinking about why this is the case has been a bit illuminating for me . Also, I find those big events also help get rid of bad habits as well.
It can help to think in terms of rest and duty cycles. If you can monitor and measure those periods, they'll more easily become part of your system in an integrative way. That is, they enhance the overall outcome.
I have ADHD and while I'm happy for the author that they've found something that works for them I do not consider my ADHD a superpower. I write this for anyone else that finds that their struggle is greater than any potential boons that they might experience.
Lots and lots of material out there about this type of process in industrial process design circles, a lot of which is suitable for soft production processes like software development.
If you were curious like me what PDCA is, this is the procedure in the article.
Plan: Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
Do: Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
Check: Review the test, analyze the results, and identify what you’ve learned.
Act: Take action based on what you learned in the study step. If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.
Also known as “PDSA” in some school districts that tried to implement it some years ago. It was one of the fad management techniques school districts make their faculty do, and predictably, wasn’t very effective.
Presumably the original PDCA has some good if applied correctly - I haven’t studied it, but have heard good things.
Yeah, it's only applicable to processes that are repeatable and have some amount of measurability - hence the natural application to manufacturing.
I'm not surprised that managers in non-manufacturing/technical areas picked up on it, since it's easy to understand at a glance. However, it's difficult to implement well.
If you know of any person that doesn't deal with repeatable processes all the day, I would really like to hear an example. Specifically on computing (most people here are software developers, aren't they?) the entire attention is focused on creating repeatable processes, that then we use computers to repeat for us.
PDCA means basically that you test a change before completely committing to it. That concept is the same as our canary releases, for example, but more clearly, it's the same idea as running one or two iterations of your algorithm on paper before you go and write the program.
It's not some niche thing that is rarely useful, it's just that people try to push it into exactly the work that can't use it.
> any person that doesn't deal with repeatable processes all the day
Anyone that deals with people, no matter what all the training/literature/latest pop-industrial-psychology fad espews.
>PDCA:
Plan (see: "analyze data," i.e. read tea leaves (metrics)): impossible to do with people. Some try to get a "quick glance" via quantitative data, but that doesn't provide you anything practical, except ammo for political moves. People aren't processes. And any attempt to analyze them as a system is the peak of arrogance.
Do: i.e. either go with your gut, allowing your intuition to navigate you, or go with policy/procedure/a process to cover your ass, and check off the "I'm adding value" box, so you can spend your mental energy on other schemes.
Check: see: "Do." Either you know how a certain action/policy affected someone or you have to read "data" to figure it out. Average case, you redefine your metrics and massage the data to get the result you wanted, so...
Act: you can use your results as ammo for political moves. Pat yourself on the back, have your assistant make a spreadsheet, and then hold a 30 minute jerk-off session/meeting with your superiors and fellow sycophants.
Now that I'm really looking at it, this is already implemented by those who deal with people.
In these cases you could use Boyd's OODA loop. It can be positioned as more able to deal with less certainty, epecially those that need to understand external context. I see echoes of it in Agile.
Ultimately they're both expressions of the scientific method.
But the "innovation" (if that's not too strong of a word) in the nested plan-do-learn loop is that it's explicitly engineered for someone's personal life routine, rather than, say, the development of an external product or service.
Do you use a task app for nesting? I like Workflowy because every node is a nested and parent document at the same time. My structure is (example of one branch): Me > Yearly goal > Superseed time-for-value with value-for-value > Recurring income > Specific project > Specific tasks. Basically life goals down to execution.
Yep, I use Notion for nesting, since that's where I do all of my other work.
Workflowy is great though — years back, I used it for everything. These days I supplement my Notion workflow with Dynalist, which is basically a Workflowy clone with additional features.
As somebody really really struggling with ADD (diagnosed) and burnout due to no productivity wins, I found this article helpful. It may have saved my job.
Glad to hear it. And yeah, your comment cuts right to the core of what makes it work: productivity wins, i.e. little elevations in dopamine.
Another thing I've found is that externalizing my plans takes a little stress off my working memory, which is also somewhat diminished in people with ADHD.
I still do the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycle, also known as a Shewhart cycle or the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, from contemporary project management. I apply it at a personal level, a team level, and a company level. The adjust phase comes in handy when improving developer experience on codebases. A powerful routine but also very tiring :)
This is insanely helpful. Since my ADHD diagnosis, I've been trying to find ways to transform my brain's particular liabilities into assets. The strategies here are a good place to start. I'm intrigued by the idea of interstitial journaling - and I would very much like to see the author's teased post about the process. I've been keeping a paper journal for years now and this looks like a way to get more out of it...
I'm impressed by the simplicity of the idea too, and going to try it.
Can't really choose what app to use, though. My go to choice for now is a vim and plain text file. But I'd love to have iCloud sync + smart features (like grepping over todos) out of the box. I use Obsidian for the second brain, and it looks like a great choice for interstitial journalling, but their app is an Electron :( Apple Notes seems like a great choice for iOS/Mac, but close source and I can't even find an easy way to automatically insert time. Notion is a great thing too for this, but, again, too web based.
For what it’s worth, I like Obsidian at the moment. I try not to think about it being Electron! It doesn’t feel slow or bloated.
I’ve also been using Drafts quite a lot for more temporary notes - an excellent Mac/iOS (native) app.
But most recently I’ve been trying paper notes again. I’ve been trying dated journal entries where I’m kind of documenting my state of mind, thought processes, and todos all in one place. Not too far off the concept of interstitial journaling, just missing the timestamps! So I’m going to adapt my paper journaling to incorporate this more granular time stamped approach and see how it goes.
No doubt I’ll shortly be back to doing this electronically… I rarely seem to stick with one way of doing things for too long.
However, in my experience this approach has one big problem: certain events (changing continents, moving, sickness, finished milestones) completely unravel my productivity for weeks or months. Once I lose the streak it's very hard to get back on track.
I either have to rebuild a new routine step by step or just procrastinate long enough until I've found a new project I can build my work day around. These periods can last several months.
Has anyone come up with strategies to cope with such breaks?