Productivity and tracking progress

evilrenee

Hey everyone!

As someone who's currently studying alone and struggles with burnout, I've been trying to set aside just a couple of hours a day for just pure, unadulterated work to improve my skills, without overdoing it. However, it's hard at times to know just how efficiently I spend those hours. Especially if I don't take into account for every time I tab away to check an email, troubleshoot a problem, take a coffee break... write a forum post, etc etc.

I was curious, are there any specific programs available people use to track themselves and their work?

I'd be also interested to hear your opinions and tips on working more efficiently in general.

Taylor Brown

Clockify is a decent time tracking app and trello helps with keeping an eye on overall project progress. You could create trello tasks for each step of your project and then add in your total time spent from clockify to each task on completion. It would give you a nice overview of your speed, keeps you organized and prepares you for planning out more complex projects

Alex_J

Trello is everything you need. Even just jotting notes in notepad is fine.

The important thing IMO is to block out your time. When working from home, the main struggle is keeping structure. So you need to create structure. What I do is split my personality into two parts: The boss and the worker. So the boss figures out what the schedule is going to be. He has to have the big picture in mind. Then when you switch to being the worker you will enjoy the same productivity as if you were at a regular job. You don't need to hold the entire project in your head because you took care of that while you were in boss mode.

Before you begin a block of work, you should have a short meeting between your two personalities. During this meeting, the boss wants to know that the worker understands a few things: Where are we going? And why? What is the goal for this block of work? What is a backstop, so we can know if we went too far or got off on a tangent?

With digital work it's pretty easy to work too many hours. I suggest that if you find yourself sitting there and the work is really slow and painful, that might be a good time to go out and walk for an hour or something. Four hours of high productivity is usually better than ten hours of grinding slowly. Especially when you are going for months and years, you got to consider how you want to work on a day to day.

That's how I think about it anyway. I've been working from home for a few years and struggled a lot at first. But now I'm pretty efficient.