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My Top 5 Best Ways to Improve Your Productivity
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My Top 5 Best Ways to Improve Your Productivity

This is an old post and doesn't necessarily reflect my current thinking on a topic, and some links or images may not work. The text is preserved here for posterity.

I'm working from home now, so staying productive is something I'm thinking about a lot. Because I am generous, I shall share my top five productivity improvement tips.

  1. Subscribe to every productivity blog you can find, and spend at least three hours a day reading top-X blog posts on improving productivity. Since the best tips come first, a lower value for X is better. Don't waste your time reading anything that can't be summarized in at most ten bullet points.
  2. Commit yourself to reading at least three books a week on productivity. Look for large books that only really have one new central idea, which is usually made clear in the title, work best. Only buy books from well-known authors that make a living from running conferences on productivity improvement.
  3. Start every day by committing two hours to making a list of goals for the day. Start with the biggest and hardest items, to increase the chances of never having a 'win' in a single day.
  4. End every day by taking an hour to berate yourself for not achieving anything on your list. Remember: even if you achieved 90% of your goals for the day, you are a failure. The guilt will make you work harder tomorrow (you loser).
  5. Leave comments on other people's posts about productivity, to explain to them why they are wrong. Tell them how some simplistic system you learnt from a book is working wonders for you and they should give it a try. Ensure each comment contains at least 500 words. After all, you're so productive you have time to spare.

Gratuitous Dilbert comic

I hope this post has helped :)

Paul Stovell's Blog

Hello, I'm Paul Stovell

I'm a Brisbane-based software developer, and founder of Octopus Deploy, a DevOps automation software company. This is my personal blog where I write about my journey with Octopus and software development.

I write new blog posts about once a month. Subscribe and I'll send you an email when I publish something new.

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