Tag: Productivity

When Impulsiveness and Persistence Collide

I’ve noticed that my productivity tends to be bimodal: I have more energy in the morning, more persistence at night, and neither in the afternoon.

Given these things, a good schedule for me is usually structured thus:

  1. Wake up, immediately go to computer and do rote/uncomfortable work (checking emails, admin stuff, filing).

  2. After lunch: I get more tired, so this is a good time for reading (which energizes me at a low energy cost), as well as thing I’ve already pre-committed to do with/for other people (odd jobs, getting out of the house).

  3. A bit before/after dinner, I go into creative mode. I use my current creativity (brought on by the brain’s “please-sleep-now” chemicals) to solve roadblock problems and generate solution ideas (often more elegant than totally-alert ideas). Plus, I am much more persistent on problems at night, able to chase them down slowly but surely.

However, that same persistence that makes, CSS debugging doable can be a problem.

Because I tend to persist at an activity at night regardless of its utility to me, I end up accidentally doing something unproductive (e.g., watching YouTube videos) and persisting in that.

This problem is compounded by my habit of opening lots of tabs (some of which have useful or interesting information in them), and reading/watching partway through them (sunk-cost). So even when I remember that I was supposed to work on something else, I still feel the subconscious obligation to already-opened tabs, tugging at my already-tired brain. Result: taking breaks, walking away, and remembering to sleep do not help me much at all.

I know this problem has been partly laid out in Cached Procrastination. So… what might be the solution to using my night-time persistence on things I actually care about? Any advice on how to beat this? I have Leechblock, but I’m not sure I would stick to it well. I am aware there are tools that save reading for later, but are there any that save my place in what I was reading, too?

Also, a quick Personal Update: I’m using Beeminder now! To get me to write and communicate more often, I have set a goal of 20 blog posts during this summer (the “21” was due to a testing issue I first had.). You can hold me accountable by checking my progress here.

(Parts of this article were written in response to a friend sending me this article.)