Ask HN: What was your most productive (day|week|month|year) ever?

The funny thing is that I knew the answer immediately upon reading the title. I got the flu (the actual flu) about 10 years ago, and was out of work for over a week. It was my very first staycation, and I didn't have any contact with anyone. During that time, even though as sick as I've ever been, I completed and released my first iOS game (a very zippy direct-to-OpenGL implementation) and added a substantial number of features to my desktop game engine.

It was amazing. I felt so alive. However, at this point, I could (somewhat tongue in cheek) credit this week with ultimately ruining my life and career. I became obsessed with recapturing that feeling, and with finding a way to support myself with my own work (as opposed to the company's work). I quit my job one year later and happily worked on my own stuff for the next 2 years. This began a pattern of living on the ramen budget, being a single hermit, only going to work when I'm broke, and quitting after a year or less. Disastrous. Why, as I write this, I haven't gone to work in over 2 years, and I'm broke again and looking for a job. I have unprofitable side-projects and repos out the wazoo though.

What makes me most productive is when I truly love what I'm working on.

I had slacked off for a semester in university and got 0 study credits, where nominal study performance should have yielded 30 credits (EC). This worried me because some of those points were part of my freshmen year and the university had just instated a rule that students entering their third year without having completed their first year would be expelled (the p-in-2 rule) designed to get rid of slackers prevalent in the otherwise lenient European style university.

My best friend was also faced with a harsh deadline at the time, having to finish his bachelor degree before a certain date so we made a covenant to study at the library together this entire day, every day, for that quarter.

I made a crazy ambitious plan to complete exams for 9 courses, worth 45 EC in total. There was some low hanging fruit that I just had to read the course material for, but also some (for me) hard courses. I think 2 calculus courses, Algorithms Data structures and Complexity and a Discrete Mathematics I. Especially that last one was giving me a hard time, having failed the exam three times already even though most of my friends felt it was a fairly easy maths course.

I look back at those few months fondly. Although I was socially isolated, not going to parties not seeing any friends besides just that one, I grew closer to him and I felt good because we just were so productive.

Of those 9 courses I failed two, yielding 35 EC in just one quarter. I know there's geniuses out there that do that sort of thing on the regular, but for me just passing a single maths test was an achievement, let alone passing 6 more in the same week.

During college I had a semester with 5 engineering classes and was the president of an engineering club. I didn't realize when signing up for classes, but all 5 courses had engineering projects worth 25-60% and still had final exams. I had no choice but to suck it up.

I started something I called "12 hours of productivity". It didn't matter what time I got started in the morning, but from then until 12 hours later I was being productive.

* I wouldn't get on reddit, Facebook, or similar sites.

* I could be doing class work, be in class, do club stuff, or study. I would eventually run out of club stuff. Even if I procrastinated with that, eventually I'd have to move on to school work.

* a few short breaks were included

My productivity soared, though I couldn't have done it for long term (years). It got me through the semester from hell though.

I started planing my days around a 4 hour period where I am fully concentrated with no mail, meetings etc. I set myself goals for this period and do not care about the rest of the work day. Just get this 4 hours in and you're good. I work more than 4 hours a day, but most of the work is getting done in those 4 hours.

Consistency is key in life! With everything, working out, eating healthy, raising children.

Well, there's the day I knew I was a real programmer.

In a 24 period, I saved a customer's hundred thousand dollar sale by redoing a hand written assembly function synchronized between three cores. I ended up with something single core and 10,000x faster.

Before that day, I'd never touched assembly language, the customer's hardware, the processor family, the problem space, an oscilloscope, nor anything embedded outside an Arduino.

Story here, forgive the writing style: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637859#14639134

> "We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type.

> The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

> The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."

> - Guy Steele on a hacking session with RMS in the 1970s.

I always like this story. And I wish I had an experience like it.

I grew up disliking coffee - and as such I never got to drink it

One day I decided to order a coffee while eating at McDonalds because I didn't feel like drinking soda and I wanted something different. I drank it, didn't sleep for 24 hours but got a massive amount of things done with a new found focus

Since then, I like coffee

My recipe for constentration is to eliminate sources of distraction. Simple? Not so much. Anything can be a distraction today. This is what I do:

- Delete Snapchat, Instagram, Messenger from phone

- Disable notifications for all messaging apps (including badge count)

- Keep Do Not Disturb (iOS) on a schedule during work hours

- Disable all notifications on MacOS

- Use software that distract less. For me this means removing every single button I don't need. Hide all the things!

- Eliminate clutter on desks. I don't keep anything on my desk that is not related to the current task

Here is my favourite thing at the moment: set /ONE/ to do. To do lists are productivity killers for me, because I'm constantly looking and thinking ahead, instead of focusing the problem I am solving now.

In Visual Studio Code, for instance, I use the plugin `title`. This is very simple, it lets me set the title of the window. In the title of the window I write what I'm doing. For instance: "Clean up user model".

Edit: one more thing. Give your setup some love. If you're working on your computer all day, keep making your environment more friendly and relaxing. This can be software; customizing the colors to your liking, customizing keyboard-shortcuts; or it can be hardware such as a better chair or a stand for your monitors. I recently bought Ergotron HX Desk Dual Monitor Arm for my monitors, and it increases my happiness and thus my productivity.

If you asked me this a decade ago I would have said 2003, when I was working 80 hour weeks. But looking back now, in terms of what I accomplished and produced, it was a lot less than I do now in terms of rate-of-production.

I’m writing this on an iPad Pro, which is my computing device for recreational things. I don’t have social media. The niche sites/forums I belong to I can only access from this iPad or my phone. My workstations are for work only and Hacker News and other sites that I frequent are blocked. I disable notifications—no messages, no popups, no email—just work!

In terms of time spent during a week, I spend more time as a single father than I do as a software consultant. My time working is focused and productive but short. On days that I don’t feel productive I tackle the low hanging fruit. On days that I am productive, I go for it.

Sounds like you’re taking the right steps.

Chemotherapy was accompanied with steroids (to help with sickness) which made me stay awake almost all day. Instead of taking more meds to help with sleep, I had many productive nights working on an iOS hobby project.

I use https://kanbanflow.com to manage my week.

Instead of classic Todo - Doing - Done, my board is divided into Todo - Monday - Tuesday - ... - Sunday - Done. The board contains both work-related and private tasks. If a new task comes up randomly during the day, I just add it to the board and immediately resume whatever I was doing. Since I've scheduled the new task for later, it's not occupying my mind anymore.

The app has a built-in pomodoro timer. I don't necessarily use it in a strict sense (100% deep work) but I don't do any non-work-related tasks when the timer is on, so it helps me fight procrastination and schedule my breaks.

I've blocked most sites that I identified as time-wasters. My phone is in my drawer on "silent" and I usually don't pick up the phone at all during my working hours.

I've noticed that one of the most important things for me is gaining momentum. If I work 2-3 pomodoros first thing in the morning, it's usually going to be a productive day overall, but if I start with procrastinating, the whole day often ends up not very productive. So I pay much attention to how I start the day.

On a not strictly work-related note, going to bed and waking up at the same time significantly improved my overall life satisfaction. During my last holidays, I took measurements how much sleep I naturally need (~7.5h) when there's no pressure to wake up early. Then I started taking care to always be in bed at a set time (11 p.m.) and get the right amount of sleep.

I once walked among London's canals and parks for 8 hours in a day and wrote a script I'd been meaning to write for years that visualised in ascii the degradation of server threads from log files.

Every time I got stuck, I stopped and walked again. I think I only did about 2 hours of 'work' that day, but it would have taken me weeks to do under normal circumstances and distractions. I slept like a log that night.

When I was in college I did a startup. It petered our but my schedule was excellent: Friday’s were for girlfriend and social life; Saturday’s were nonstop startup work, and Sundays were for me. I was also taking an obscene amount of credit hours, but I made sure to only deal with that during the week.

The key wasn’t focusing on productivity, it’s balance. When you feel like you’re spending the right amount of time on the people you care about, the work you need to do, the work you want to do, and most importantly, yourself, the productivity will happen. Otherwise, your body is trying to tell you that something is off balance.

2012 when I started a business with a friend. We moved out of the city and into a small town in the mountains an hour away and lived off of our savings. I wrote more code that year than ever before and I wrote almost all of it from scratch, making my own crappy but perfectly suited framework. Because I wrote it all, I understood it all and productivity was phenomenal. We self organized without sprints, or stand ups, or any other processes, and we made some great stuff. Many a day was spent writing code and then mountain biking in the afternoon, some of it was bliss, some of it was horrible but overall a valuable experience.

A semester during my undergraduate degree, my registrar account was allowed to sign up for a class after I made a case they should waive the pre-requisite for me. During my sign-up window, I was unable to enroll in the class before it was filled, but noticed I could sign up for any class without being flagged. I ended up taking the most difficult classes in my program all at once, forcing myself to work near 24/7, riding the wave of volatility with heavy consumption of substances. The final result was a firey explosion, but at least it happened the next semester and I was able to graduate early while mostly taking electives for my last semester.

This period of "productivity" taught me a lot. As a lot of folks here are already aware, it is a slow and difficult process to increase the workload one can handle. Temporary support from things like caffeine, sugar, alcohol or drugs can extend these periods making it easy, but over time the effect weakens as you become more familiar with the mental state, making the initial support a crutch. Years later when completing my masters, I found the urge to fall back on some of the habits incredibly appealing during the weeks when I felt stressed and wanted to go on "autopilot". If I look at the future productivity earned from the compound interest of staying up, angry and upset, but still working through the discomfort, then I have had nights that were 10x what that semester in college was, because those nights will yield 100s of hours in the future that I would otherwise not be able to work through.

Spring of 2012. I ate a ketogenic diet and went to the gym (cardio) for half an hour daily. Lost weight, felt great and was able to breeze through studies.

Haven't been able to recreate it, as it was only possible due to being at university with a fairly light timetable and a very close gym.

Contrary I think to most of the rest of the audience here, my most productive came when I was directly (in the same room) working with people on a specific project.

I find being surrounded by people working on different elements to bring something together much more motivating and productive than banishing all outside disturbances. This might be because marketing is less in need of "the zone" than programming, but frankly, having that direct accountability of working with other people on pulling a campaign together really gets me focused and firing at 100%.

When I'm doing that, I don't seem to get distracted by notifications, bloated software, my phone, Facebook, HN etc...

My most productive period where I was managing a campaign launch, but working with my peers. It skews a bit if you're either managing from atop or below, because when you're at the same level there's camaraderie that makes it just click (great colleagues being a requisite, of course).

[This isn't an extrovert/introvert point either, I'm the latter, and whilst this way of working is draining from that perspective, it seems to be highly productive for me.]

In 2003 I worked on the same project and nothing else for about 70 hours a week for 3 months. In absolute terms, I'm a lot more productive now, but given the tools I was using at the time, it was by far the most productive period of my life so far.

Here's what I did:

* I went to a vacation rental * I had someone with me to handle non-code things who would leave me alone to work even though we were in the same 1BR apt * I had a tiny office with one entire wall being a window looking out over city, which was a wonderful combination of low local distraction combined with a broad distance full of things to occupy my surface attention while thinking * I ate only after work, by planning, so that I didn't think about meals or snacks for most of the working day

I did not turn off social media. Well, in those days it was a combo of slashdot and about 10 messaging systems; the problem with actually not checking messages is that I worry about what I'm missing, but if they're on (or I think they are...) and I'm not getting anything, then I don't think about them for hours on end.

A 45-day off-the-grid vacation after several years of burnout. The result was Filter Forge 2.0, which included a lot of new systems (Lua scripting, HDR colors, ambient occlusion, non-seamless filters etc.)

The key was to get off the grid, shed all responsibilities, take long walks in the woods, avoid dopamine loops, and let my mind wander without purpose.

I was riding my bicycle a lot at the time trying to figure out a availability solution with Postgres. I'd ride my bicycle (40km) 24 miles one-way to work -- each leg took a little less than 1.5 hours. I really only coded and prototyped about 3 hours / day. The 3 hours I spent at a keyboard were incredibly productive. The time on my bicycle allowed me to digest information and let my brain relax. By the time I sat down at a computer each day, I knew exactly what I was going to code or test. I'd test and have information. Then, the bike ride home would be thinking about the results. I was proud of the outcome: https://github.com/compose/governor

It better be today or I'm not going to survive. It's 6:47am, I better get some coffee for what is about to happen.

Tomorrow is going to be my most productive day ever!

The week before exam and the days in between. I was trying to work on a side project but could not get a lot of work done. But a week before my semester exams I was very productive and full of new ideas. I completed most of the work on side project before the last paper. I was highly productive and creative before exams. This has happened twice.

Right after they released the HN api. I made an app called feedhint, that took me three days non-stop. Not only that, I had a bunch of exams aligned that very week, but that didn't matter. All I wanted was to create that app, personalized HN RSS feeds based on keywords. Had some good feedback also! Felt really great.

I recommend blocking all social media on your desktop browser. I use StayFocused [0] to help me do that.

On mobile, turn off all non-human notifications and alerts.

Sundays are the most productive for me. I use a weekly checklist on Taskade [1] to help me track my progress throughout the week, and on Sundays I would archive the list and start a new one from the templates.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

[1]: https://www.taskade.com

My most productive days were when I was a math undergraduate. I would work pretty much all the time for weeks. This was before internet invaded our lives. I was also very productive the last few weeks before I had to submit my PhD thesis. No particular technique, just the stress of deadlines or studying in a competitive environnement.

Occasionally, I work non-stop for a few days on some programming projects, but I wouldn't consider myself productive. I get very excited and obsessed by the coding but I'm not very efficient, in the sense I tend to code more than I think and it's counter productive.

During a major hurricane I was without power for a week. In that time I wrote more songs, more poems, and finished more paintings than ever before. The takeaway: creativity requires occasional periods of boredom.

For my final semester of university, I read tons of books, wrote lots of essays (both for school and personal), worked a paying side-contract, and went 110% on a project for school.

My schedule made this possible. All my classes started in the afternoon and ended at 10 at the latest. This matched with my natural levels of productivity perfectly. Reading and podcasts in the morning, homework/class in the afternoon, and pure output at night. It was perfect and I know I'll be spending the next while trying create the conditions to live like that again.

There was a week last year where I did a huge amount of work on a mobile game. I was in a state of "flow" the whole time, and it felt like the time was just flying past. RescueTime tracked over 100 hours. Many other weeks were around 60-80 hours, but I was having a lot of fun and learning tons of new things. It's not too healthy though, and I took a long break after launching the game.

I can sometimes get into that state when working as a contractor, but it's very rare.

I would say it was yesterday. Though I worked may be 2 hours yesterday, I felt like the result was good. I think its mostly the clarity of what I need to do that helped, (I had the idea the previous night and couldn't really sleep at all the for the entire night). https://github.com/yellowflash/godel . That's what I have been working on.

First I acknowledge that is not really useful to single out a day as productive or not. The finest-grain level I check is days streak. And in that case, I usually say that I had a good week or good weeks, or once I had a whole good quarter.

When I average the year, I have been having more productive years more or less consistent. Like the global warming, the year that wasn't really productive was still higher than the least productive year before the last peak.

Well, with all that said, some patterns seemed clear to me:

1 - Societal overload: that place and country you live directly affect your productivity. I lived for many years in the biggest city of a 3rd World country, where the government works daily to make your life miserable and hard. The moment I moved to Europe, I had a surge of productivity because those "little" things that rob you of your energy were gone: the violence, the crappy infrastructure, and a technology market generations behind than the 1st World.

2 - Peers Level: being the ugliest among the pretty is better than being the prettiest among the ugly. When you are the least good among very competent engineers you have a lot of opportunities to learn from people that know more and better than you. You become a sponge of methods that can help you to work better and faster.

3 - Reused experience: The best world scenario is to be a generalist and be able to work on whatever is thrown at your hands because you are clever and skilled. However, it doesn't mean that you can't get really skilled and experienced in some aspect of your craft. For instance, through the years I become an expert on bootstrapping greenfield projects and prepare to hand them over to a team that will look after them. This has been invaluable and my longest days streak happened in this situation.

4 - Keep reassessing your toolset all the time: we tend to feel comfortable and confident with the tools we know how to use. That's fine. But keep an eye open to new technologies. There might be one new technology that solves (or attempts to solve) some fundamental problem that you daily face - that if it didn't exist, you would be even more productive.

5 - Manage your attention: nowadays we live in a world perfected to steal your attention. Learn how to manage it effectively. You can't be productive if you are distracted or constantly interrupted.

I hope it helped you. (PS: HN is a huge attention stealer.)

I quit my job and started travelling. After finding out that I was much smarter than most of the people who travel around all their life and who got rich by investing, I started to read upon it. I decided that I put split all my net worth between an apartment, gold and Bitcoin. It was incomparably by far the most productive day of my life.

I've given a bit of thought to these periods and the theme in them has a few factors that indicate one general one.

First factor was reading a book that changed my perspective. When I was a consultant, simply spending 5hrs reading a book on negotiation returned an additional 200k over the next 36mos.

Second is the time I took all my vacation at once and spent three weeks with a teacher learning a physical skill. It gave me the confidence to level up massively in my career.

Third was after taking a month long motorcycle trip across the US. I developed multiple decks and wireframes for startups I would return to and make the focus of my life today.

The theme in them was interrupting the nagging chatter of my ego and its anxieties and the need for external approval, which came from unstable relationships and social media (same thing).

The result was periods of pure performance where stuff comes out like you are singing it. The way I get into the zone today is to do something that pushes me past a limit of ego/anxiety resistance. Either by getting coaching and instruction, becoming absorbed in the complex ideas of a book or new area of knowledge, or physical accomplishment.

There was a comment here the other day about junior and intermediate programmers completing the fist %80 of a project, then leaving the remaining %20 to the next person - who recommends chucking it and refactoring, only to complete that initial %80 again.That %80 productivity that comes from learning something new is massive, but it's not sufficient to deliver the polished %20 that makes a product.

The zone for me today is bursts of staccato productivity against that last %20, with a view forward against where it will yield diminishing returns.

As a manager, the very best way to wreck flow is to put choices on staff and then criticize them for the results. There is this anti-pattern (I call it a false-Socratic dialogue) where ostensibly intelligent people present their staff with choices, thinking it's educating them to "choose right," when the overall effect is to just punish them randomly for making independent decisions.

The constant theme in 10x developers I have observed is that they don't internalize interruptions from others. Often this is because they miss or ignore the social cues of concern and approval that derail others flow, either because of a spectrum thing, confidence from better options, or the narcissism that helps some people succeed.

The flow I develop through these other factors is related to that state in that the anxiety from uncertainty in how I relate is silenced, and I can create freely. As a result, the last 4 months on my demo have been immensely productive.

I don't believe that repetition of an action will make you productive on the long-term basis. It's all about being aware of the cycles, of which makes you unhappy hence unproductive. I've been most productive when I have some headspace and now all it takes is a cup of tea.

My most productive time is when I am thoughtful of what I want to accomplish and write it down before I start. It’s really helped me using a script wrapped around Tmux sessions to achieve this. Two simple questions:

What are you working on? What did you work on?

The day I deleted my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Social Nonsense accounts.

The last day before bachelor thesis deadline. I peaked that day!

The last work day before I took a management role.

I usually feel like it's yesterday :)

pomodoro