The best kind of p-hacking…

When do you feel most productive?

For the tongue in cheek title, I apologize. Generally, data fraud isn’t particularly helpful at allowing insights to be built.

I feel most productive on days when there’s something I’ve been dreading doing that I make serious progress on early on in a given day. This allows momentum to set in, providing me opportunities to accelerate and achieve.

Here’s a couple different ways I’ve gotten ‘tuned-in’ in the past. I work out early in the morning, perhaps running a 5K. After I complete it, I manage to get more exercise in, and it’s easy for me to throw a couple job applications into the wind, to blog, and to otherwise function.

When I don’t have the luxury of starting my day with strenuous physical activity, I try and take the biggest task on my list, and get it complete. If the least appealing task is able to be completed, I can take smaller tasks as a sort of reward, allowing me to keep moving forward. Knowing that I have a lot to complete can also help because I have a lot of next steps available to work on.

The final way that I set myself up for a successful day is create a checklist of everything that needs to get done today, in the next 3 days, and in the next two weeks. This can be helpful because I can break down challenging work into constituent parts, and I don’t need to spend significant time thinking about it on the spot. Instead, I can get into a flow state, where I don’t have to rely on using my brain as hard.

Some ways that you can avoid undermining progress:

1. Avoid major amounts of drinking or other recreational activities. This can throw you off your rhythm and make it harder to get into the flow of finishing things. You should avoid this when possible.
2. Maintain high sleep quality, and get enough time to complete it. This can be helpful because failing to do so can make you so much less productive that you’re unable to consistently achieve high output.
3. Keep a consistent exercise routine. Having a couple other things in place that allow you a release to day-to-day stress will result in you being able to achieve more.

Overall, the combination of momentum, clear goals, and exercise can help you achieve, whereas not getting enough sleep, failing to fuel up effectively, or partaking in major amounts of partying will undermine your ability to get shit done.