Productivity Mastery: Achieve More With Speed And Quality

There are two types of people:

1. Those who complete a task and move on.
2. Those who reflect on the task and think about how to improve next time.

This distinction is important because true productivity comes from evaluating your daily work habits. By analyzing how you work, you can spot time-wasters, identify what’s working well, and find areas to improve.
I’ve wasted a lot of time in the past. A few years ago, balancing a full-time client project with creating content, building apps, learning, and more stretched my days to 10-14 hours of work. I burned out, fell into depression, and even considered quitting programming altogether.

My brain was fried…

I didn’t realize then how important it is to work “smart” instead of just “hard”. I thought working hard would automatically lead to success, skills, and money. It’s partly true – I’m a pretty good developer now (I hope) – but hard work (especially too much of it) always comes with health problems.

In this article, I’ll share the approach I’ve developed over years of experience and mistakes. My goal is to help you avoid the same pitfalls and make smarter investments in your future. Simply put, with this article, I’m saving you money for doctors and psychologists.

What you’ll learn?

1. Methods for tracking your progress.
2. The difference between tactical and strategical planning.
3. Techniques that foster continuous self-improvement.
4. The power of feedback and improvement loops.
5. Tools and techniques to automate your tasks.
6. Why no universal method exists – and how to develop your own.
7. Insights into the Eisenhower Matrix and its applications.
8. Real-world results I’ve achieved in just one year.
9. A comprehensive view of productivity, including short- and long-term goal organization.
10. Practical application of these concepts through a real example at the end of the article.

You Need To Understand Yourself

As humans, we learn mostly by observation. So, imagine if you had the chance to step outside your body, like having an invisible sibling, and watch yourself from a cloned version. If you could speed up time, you’d quickly see how much of it was spent productively and how much was lost in the limbo of distractions and unproductive activities.

Now, imagine if you could add a visual representation of emotions along that timeline. Each minute could have a bar or marker indicating how many emotions you experienced – stress, excitement, frustration, joy, etc. This would make it even clearer how those emotions affected your productivity.

And if you could add more layers, like tracking distractions or your blood sugar levels, you would have a more detailed view of your time, broken down by the factors influencing your performance. It would be a quick way to analyze your day, identifying patterns and giving you a better understanding of where you can improve.

Amusing part: still, it’s just part of factors that we may take into consideration. For simplicity, let’s consider humans are really simple (like game characters), and we’ve only 4 metrics:

Now, the tricky part is: how the heck can I understand myself in that way? Is there any software? Yes! It’s your phone, camera, and a notepad. But how? And what the heck?

After burnout, I was desperately searching for a way to get back to my previous performance level – before all that happened. It was a huge problem for me. I felt insanely exhausted. My psychologist proposed something that I’ve called “iterative approach to be a better version of yourself on a daily basis” – I know the name sucks, but you’ll see for a second it makes sense.

So, I tried to work normally – 8 hours on the client’s project. I gave the camera technique a shot, but it didn’t work for me, so I stuck with the notepad. Every time something distracted me, I wrote down a message with the exact time. On the right side, I added details about the “emotions associated with that” and rated my stress/energy level on a scale from 1 to 10.

I mentioned the camera part to highlight that universal rules don’t exist – LOL. You need to adapt everything to your own brain.

It was really enjoyable. After a whole day of work, I had a unique history of what happened during the day. I took my notes to bed, browsed through them sometimes just for fun, and then tried to remember what happened during each time period.

The weeks passed, and I had a lot of notes to analyze. I stopped doing this daily, but it became more casual. Still, every time I wrote a comment on the paper, I was automatically gaining focus back.

I skipped taking into account breaks – it’s obvious, at least to me, that they should happen, especially if you’re using your brain and sitting a lot. Consider taking breaks like 30 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break.

The Conscious Day Technique

The thing we’ve been describing is the first part of the Conscious Day technique. Understand your day structure and visualize it. The really important part here is having faith that, in the long term, it will work.

So, let’s say we’ve gathered a lot of data, and we’ve tracked information about ourselves. Now, we have some data to analyze. To keep it simple, let’s refer to the previous chart again, but this time, let’s display it as a whole week’s graph.

With a red marker, I tracked accidents – because you can’t predict life, and sometimes even something small like a dispute with your spouse can completely derail your day. The solution? Divorce :X. Of course, I’m kidding.

Now, with a list of situations that happened, emotions, and all the data gathered, we can pinpoint which metric has the biggest impact on productivity. For me, it’s energy.

So, the next step is to address low energy. We need to understand what’s causing that energy dip and how we can either prevent it or keep it stable throughout the workday. In my case, it was poor sleep habits, drinking too much coffee late in the day, and eating sugar before going to sleep…

When changes in life are applied, you still need to measure, note, and track them. After implementing changes, such as improving sleep habits, look at the graph – now you can see real progress, and it becomes a self-motivation machine.

Every time progress appears, you see your improvement, and this encourages you to repeat the process. This is called a self-motivation feedback loop, something similar to what has been described in the Atomic Habits book by James Clear, which I can fully recommend – it’s a life changer.

You see the idea, right? Now it’s time to reduce other metrics like stress and distractions, then find ways to address them, measure, and once again – feedback. It’s a never-ending cycle. Does it seem robotic? Maybe, but meaningful change requires self-awareness, and without tracking your behavior, the chances of success are quite low.

Before we go further, it’s not just about sticking to the metrics I mentioned – productivity is important, but you can add many more and tackle several in a single iteration.

I preferred to approach it one by one to see how each change affected me. Rushing through it can blur the clarity of your data and your understanding of behaviors.

Here are more metrics you can track:

1. Hunger levels.
2. Sugar levels.
3. Physical pain.
4. …n others, whatever you come up with or whatever frustrates you.

Just don’t be too strict with it – find a balance, choose metrics that suit your personality, monitor, and improve.

Question

So, do I need to track, monitor, and improve all the time until my life ends? Man! It’s ultra time-consuming!

Answer

What’s funny is that I had the same feeling. But I guarantee the time spent noting it and the time you’ll gain back from reducing procrastination is worth it. Over time, you’ll minimize the metrics that distract you, allowing you to stop tracking until issues arise again. However, it’s important to understand that becoming good at something requires hard work.

Creating Strategic And Tactical Goals

What is a tactic? Not everyone understands that. It’s a small, actionable plan designed to achieve one specific goal, guiding us toward something bigger – especially in the context of self-improvement.

Many people get lost in their plans: “I will be rich”, “I will have kids”, “I will land a great job”, or “I will create the best SaaS”. Damn, those are massive goals! If you don’t break them into smaller chunks, I guarantee 99% of you will lose focus or forget about the desired outcome.

A tactical approach requires breaking things down. Fight these smaller problems one by one and close each of them. Then, move on to the next – similar to the Divide and Conquer strategy in programming.
For example, if you split your road to becoming a millionaire into 40 smaller chunks and tackle one each week, your chances of reaching that millionaire level are much higher – and that’s a strategy.

Tactical thinking is about creating the best plan to tackle pre-split everyday problems, while strategic thinking is about creating a plan to achieve the overarching big goal, composed of those smaller steps.

Thus, strategy is the superset of tactics. With this mindset, we can create something like a roadmap that illustrates our plan to become a professional React developer, for instance:

1. Learn the basics: JSX, state, props, mapping, conditional rendering.
2. Understand the key property.
3. Master the Context API, …etc.

Tactically, we’ve broken the long-term goal into small chunks. Now, each of them should be approached productively – as we discussed in the self-motivation feedback chapter, fighting through each shouldn’t be a problem.

For example, I set a goal: within 3 months, I want to have 4markdown.com ready for AI support. Then, I put effort into splitting this goal into small, daily tasks. I write down each task to solve per day. Automatically, without much effort or wasted time, I achieve it.

Do Not Start Until You Can Close

The amount of time each day is limited – just like our lives. Every minute wasted is frustration and burned time. Let’s say, using the previous approaches, you figured out that you usually complete 3-4 tasks per day. Let’s also assume you’ve mastered the strategic/tactical division. Now comes the first dilemma: I’m wasting time on tasks I started one day, and the next day I waste tons of time getting back into context.

Yeah, context switching is a massive issue. According to many scientific studies, it can take up to 15 minutes to get back on track. We need to avoid that. Context switching can be caused by ourselves or external factors. While external factors are sometimes out of our control, for self-caused ones, we have a solution: the previously discussed tracking approach combined with a well-structured, split-to-be-done list.

The plan is simple: pick tasks for your daily plan that you can realistically finish – only those! If something is too big, like a 12-hour task but your workday is only 10 hours, split it into manageable chunks like 2h, 4h, and 4h blocks. Allocate these blocks to fill your workday completely – and don’t forget to leave room for breaks and meals. This balance is essential and implicitly included in the plan.

BTW: I’ve included my 10h daily work plan that I’m currently using, but I’m considering reducing it – it’s all about testing and adapting.

Don’t tell me now – It’s impossible to split these chunks. That’s a lie! Everything can be split. You just need creativity to achieve that. So, if someone says to you, This Excel must be finished today!, be aware of the workload and respond: I can do it, but I need help from others.

Of course, there will always be exceptions… But you get my point, right? For tasks that can be split, just do it. Estimate them (and do it right), and aim to always make your day’s task box empty. This gives a huge dopamine boost and motivation – trust me, just try it!

Prioritizing Daily Tasks – Using Eisenhower Matrix

One crucial thing to consider is priority. The worst situation is when you didn’t have enough time, were too tired, or for some reason, couldn’t finish your daily plan. Working overtime in such cases sabotages your next day, potentially creating an endless cycle of unfinished tasks and stress.

To protect yourself, focus on finishing the tasks that truly matter – the ones that help you sleep well at night. These are the most important ones.

The 34th U.S. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was also a general, introduced a method that helps assign priority to tasks by categorizing them into one of four quadrants. Each quadrant reflects a different level of urgency and importance.

In my daily workflow, I assign a value from 1 to 4 to each task. This simple numbering system is supported by most To-do List Apps for easy sorting. When working on collaborative projects – like 4markdown – I try to delegate tasks marked as yellow rectangle.

Often, while reviewing my daily to-do list, I identify tasks in the purple quadrant and eliminate them right away – they aren’t needed at all. You can tweak this system to suit your needs, but the key is to focus first on red tasks (urgent and important) and then on green tasks (important but not urgent).

Fighting With Context Switching

The biggest productivity killer is context switching. To tackle it, we can track it as an additional metric on our Weekly Performance Metric chart. This will likely be one of the first problems you address when improving your productivity.

Let’s include it in the chart:

As you can see, every time we switch contexts, productivity drops straight to the floor.

One notable study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task.

Think about that – if you switch contexts 4 times a day, you lose almost 1 hour in limbo. Monitoring yourself weekly will reveal how often this happens. For me, this week, it occurred only 2 times, but in the past, it was as high as 4-6 times daily.

The best way to fight this is through strategic planning. Let’s say you know you switch contexts frequently, like I did in the past (4-6 times daily). Using the tactical division approach combined with the Eisenhower Matrix, here’s an example of my daily plan:

The red category highlights tasks that must be completed by the end of the day, no matter what. For example, the “coding” task related to the “sign-in feature” and writing tests is my primary focus. I’ll tackle this first and dedicate my attention solely to it.

Once done, I’ll move on to “article review,” which is still coding-related, keeping my brain in the same context. Finally, I’ll address “sending emails to clients.”

During my commute to the gym, I’ll read about “ETF investments.” After the gym, I’ll schedule calls using my computer (doing this on mobile is counterproductive). If I only have 40 minutes left, I might decide to eliminate writing posts for the day and move them to the next day.

You get the idea? Do the work, but plan how to do it in a way that saves as much time as possible!

Apps And Tools For Achieving The Best Result

To be honest, none of the apps I’ve tried fully align with the methods I’ve presented. That’s why I’m seriously considering creating my own app tailored to this method.

But I know what you’re thinking – what do I use today? I stick to the mobile version of Google Calendar, and here’s why:

1. Free
   – No cost involved.
2. Desktop/mobile integration
   – Allows me to plan on my computer, saving time when crafting my next day’s plan or tackling strategic goals (for the next 3 months).
3. Circular events/tasks
   – Incredibly useful for scheduling recurring tasks and saving brainpower on remembering them.
4. Nice UI
   – Simple and clean interface.
5. Category indicators
   – I use letters to represent task categories: “red, green, yellow, purple.”
6. Time indicators
   – Tasks are labeled with the expected time needed.
7. Automatic sorting
   – I organize tasks the day before, ensuring I can focus on them sequentially without wasting time deciding the order during the day.

I can’t recommend anything better that fits this method. I’ve tried tons of apps, but there’s always something missing. Google Calendar may feel a bit “text-heavy,” but it gets the job done.

Hang tight for a few months – I’ll update you on the progress of the app I’m creating to solve this problem.

Here is an example of how I’m describing it:

In addition, I have a collection of power prompts crafted for specific tasks across various AI providers. For instance:

1. Reviewing articles
   – Power prompts help refine sections to improve clarity and structure.
2. Designing meta tags for technical SEO
   – Crafted prompts ensure better visibility and alignment with best practices.
3. Technical reviews
   – Prompts help catch mistakes or inconsistencies in technical topics.
4. Other areas
   – Everything that may be automated.

All of these prompts are tailored to my writing style, based on the countless articles I’ve already crafted. Of course, everything requires manual review, but that’s where delegation comes in – according to the fourth column of the Eisenhower Matrix (Delegate), tasks like these can be handed off to someone else.

Here’s an example of a power prompt:

The great news is that you can craft as many of these as you want, and simply store and paste them before starting a conversation with Chat GPT or other tools.

Fighting With Distractions

One of the biggest problems I faced was distractions. A mobile phone lying on my desk during work was like a summoning portal – it constantly called me to use it. The same happened whenever I picked up the phone – the flood of colorful, enjoyable app icons successfully pulled me away from my daily work. It sucked.

As mentioned earlier, there’s no universal way to deal with distractions. However, my doctor suggested a method during one visit:

1. After 4:30 PM, post-work, put your phone in “black/white” mode and schedule this every day.
2. Lock the phone in a drawer with a key and give the key to your wife.
3. Spend the rest of the day enjoying time with your family.

This simple method works like magic. It’s super frustrating to hear my wife say, OMG, again? whenever I try to grab the phone. That pain is enough to keep me away and instead spend quality time with my family, go for a walk, or just relax.

Ok, but what about during work hours? How do you avoid using your phone and procrastinating? The method can be similar, but some of you might need to use your phone for work. In that case, I recommend changing your environment (a concept from the Atomic Habits book I mentioned earlier).

Here’s what worked for me:

– Use a small gadget or marker on your desk to signal “work mode”.
– Keep your phone out of sight – out of sight, out of mind.
– During work, I use a 45-minute hourglass. This helps me focus for a full session. When the time’s up, I walk away from my desk, grab food, or do something relaxing during the break.

Repeat, combine, test, and play with these methods as much as you want. The key is finding something that works for you. It needs to become a routine because every positive habit requires consistency – just like negative ones.

Learning By Fun

Humans can do things much faster and better if they’re passionate about what they’re doing. Try to enjoy what you need to learn. I know it sounds odd – going from zero knowledge in a topic to falling in love with it. But every time I start learning something new, I try to convince myself that I like it, and after some time, it actually happens. Maybe it’s just me, but here’s how it works:

1. I find something new to learn.
2. I try to discover the best use cases for it. If it’s programming, I dive into fancy areas and focus on the most interesting parts.
3.  If something is hard or boring, I use AI to understand it in a “more enjoyable” way. With the AI era, learning new concepts has become extremely easy.

Another thing I do is write an application for what I’ve just learned. This is my unique way of reinforcing new knowledge. For example:

– When I wanted to understand music theory while learning guitar, I crafted jamjambeings.com.
– When I wanted to learn how to write articles, I created greenonsoftware.com.
– When I realized writing in “MarkdownToJSX” format was boring and hard-coded in an IDE, I built 4markdown.com.

You see the pattern? It’s like taking an exam, but it also improves my main skill – programming. This approach might not work for everyone, but it works great for me because it aligns with my long-term (strategic) goals.

Currently, I’m building other applications to deepen my knowledge in different areas:

1. Investment.
2. Diet and Health.
3. Time management and productivity.

I could list even more – I have at least 160 repositories on my GitHub, and many of them aren’t even deployed.

The Exercise: Using All That We’ve Learned

It’s time to put it all together. Let me take you through how it works in real life by stepping into my shoes. Imagine it’s one year ago – the beginning of 2024. I’m sitting at my desk, thinking about the goals I want to achieve in the next 3 months.

Here’s what I crafted:

1. Finish the 4markdown.com app.
2. Learn advanced Figma tricks/concepts to improve design skills.
3. Read 2 books about investments.
4. Write 12 articles.
5. Post on my LinkedIn profile every day.
6. Resolve skin issues (I have problems with atopia).
7. Learn the basics of car maintenance (read 1 book).
8. Write the first 3 chapters of my personal course.
9. Create a monorepo and migrate all personal projects to reduce maintenance.

These are the goals I set to complete by March 31. On the same day, I’ll create a plan for the next quarter.

With the strategic plan (long-term goals) in place, I begin tactical planning by breaking everything into small, manageable chunks. For example:

– Day 1: Read 20 pages from a book about investments, add a PR for the comments section widget, …others.
– Day 2: Write one chapter of an article, answer an email from a lawyer, pay taxes.
– Day 3: Watch a tutorial on advanced Figma tricks, learn the masking technique, learn 1 design pattern.
– …and so on.

These small steps guide me toward achieving my strategic goals. While working, I constantly measure my focus, attention, emotions, and other metrics mentioned earlier. If something unusual happens, I write it down and analyze what consumed the most time.

The strategic goals aren’t the only things I work on – I also have my job to manage. Every day, I prioritize tasks, ensuring that by the end of the day, I won’t feel guilty for leaving something unfinished.

If there’s something I can’t complete, I move it to the next day and continue the cycle. By repeating this process consistently, I maximize the use of my time while staying productive and focused on long-term objectives.

This approach ensures that my time is optimized and every effort contributes toward meaningful progress. Here is a quick showcase of the algorithm in its entirety:

Walk Through Of My 2024 Achievements

I’ve been using this approach for at least 1.5 years since the burnout/depression episode I mentioned earlier. The method has evolved, been refined, and changed so many times that it’s now nearly perfect for me, and I use it daily. To reflect on what I’ve achieved in the past year, here’s the list:

1. 412 handcrafted, code-related posts on my LinkedIn profile.
2. Nearly 3,000,000 post views – a 1000% increase compared to the previous year.
3. 49 articles created for 4markdown, GreenOn Software, and guest posts on other sites.
4. Consistent monday-friday, full FTE 8-hour workdays for clients at Billennium.
5. Gained 18,000 LinkedIn followers.
6. Created a new app – the one you’re currently using to create content and articles faster.
7. Conducted 61 one-to-one consultations, ranging from 1 to 3+ hours, with an average score of 4.74.
8. Helped 5 people successfully land jobs in IT.
9. Built a huge web development knowledge base (currently crafting a course from it).
10. Passed my driving license exam after a 10-year break and 11 attempts.
11. Delivered 14 unique presentations and 31 talks in total.
12. Met an enormous number of new, amazing people.
13. Drastically reduced my work hours from 12+ to 8-10 hours per day, depending on the day. I’ve stopped working weekends, sticking to monday-friday only – a golden rule.
14. Learned new skills in Google Cloud, Deno, AWS (additional services), Svelte, NX concepts, and many smaller technologies.
15. Began creating a new site for booking consultations (30% ready).
16. Created a Discord community and actively help people there (currently 252 members).
17. Started posting on other platforms weekly.
18. Started collaborating with others to build something bigger – a new app for diet management to help people lose weight with AI.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not claiming to have invented the holy grail. Rather, this is a showcase of how much we can achieve when we use our time effectively. And what’s even better – when everything is done productively, there’s still plenty of time left for real life, not boring work.

Summary

Holy moly, that was an insanely long article, but I hope you get my point. Don’t be too robotic, and don’t be too relaxed either. Find the right balance of pressure that works for you. I’ve reinvented, reconfigured, and basically overhauled my way of working more times than the number of apps I’ve never finished. But having solid work habits makes life easier, simplifies your tasks, and significantly reduces wasted time.

When I compare my old chaotic workflow to now, the difference is massive. The changes I made – task categorization, prioritization, long-term planning, and focusing on reducing burned time – have freed up so many extra minutes.

For example, instead of crafting one LinkedIn post each day and wasting 5 minutes context switching, I batch them all on Sunday for the entire week. That gives me 5 minutes back every morning, which adds up to 35 minutes per week. Yes, I know, I’m a bit obsessive.

See you and good luck!