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Productivity hacks

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Tools

RULE #0

None of the hacks work when you are tired or bored. Before switching off notifications on your smartphone (which is a great step btw), solve the real problem. Some even say that β€œeliminate the distractions” is the worst productivity advice I’ve ever seen

  • add any worthy Youtube videos into the Watch Later list. Only watch videos from that list and never from the algorithmic stream. That helps reducing impulsive binge watching.
  • Collect your favorite digital sources into one rss feed (yes, RSS is still alive in 2025!). Most of the websites, blogs and news outlets have a rss feed, even Telegram chats, public Facebook pages and Twitter accounts (with certain hacks) can be followed in one place. Set update frequency to twice a day.
  • Minimalistic launcher for your smartphone. I use Olauncher. No fancy icons designed so that users click on them more often.
  • Various app blockers and usage monitors. E.g. Stay Focused or one sec for Android or Cold Turkey - Features for PC, but I don’t find them particularly effective, especially see [[#^66e582|Rule #0]]. If you have to fight yourself playing a dumb arcade game or updating the same website for the 100th time - you are already doing it in a wrong way.
  • Journaling works very well for me. obsidian is a great tool for personal knowledge management. One can keep the desired level of organization, but even with that set to None and also None extra time spent - it is still relatively easy to go back and find something you didn’t even know was written down by you.
  • Do not type. Talk. Voice-to-text models like Whisper made tremendous advances in recent years and are easily wrapped into applications allowing you to type less. Everywhere. UX-wise there are decent tools out there (e.g. https://whispertyping.com/), but if privacy concern is important for you, luckily, there are self-hosted alternatives - pluja\whishper, aschmelyun\subvert
  • The Optimal iPhone Settings and Best Apps for Productivity, Focus, andΒ Health

Tricks

  • A trick to getting started is just to tell yourself you’re just going to do 5 minutes and then you can stop. To help with this you can leave a typo in your last commit then your first task is to git commit --amend to fix it. Or you can leave a unit test failing with a trivial fix. Anything to just get you to open the editor and start typing. https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/13m5cxh/how_do_i_get_into_a_flow_state_at_work/
  • vigorously delete from your feed any content creators, who post bullshit, AI-generated slope, anything that thrives on people FOMO
  • learn to distinguish news and events. Events do have consequences. News are irrelevant.

Resources

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