Tag: Productivity

Most people who come to me for advice are either working too hard or not hard enough. The latter group knows that there’s a problem and want to fix it, but the former group always come under the guise of wanting to work on something else. No one, except maybe your family, will criticize you…

For the past few days I’ve had a spring in my step. Why? Because I’m writing some tax-loss-harvesting and rebalancing software, of course. Yesterday, as I was coding, I realized how monotonous the code I was writing was, but how much I was enjoying writing it. It was a strange combination. I don’t always love…

I’ve been asked a lot recently about how I manage different priorities and how I translate those priorities into day-to-day actions. It’s always a good question, but with many of us finding ourselves less distracted with travel and entertainment, the question is more relevant than ever. Let’s go through a quick exercise to help solve…

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the things I did recently was move Sett to a new server. This is a task that I had every reason to do five years ago, but had been dreading and putting off. It was never that urgent, wasn’t moving me closer to any major goal,…

I’ve been quarantining in Las Vegas for four months now, so I thought that it would be fun to write about how I’ve used that time so far, especially because I’ve done a few projects that wouldn’t have gotten done if I weren’t here for so long. Presented in roughly chronological order: 1. Rewrote lots…

I see a lot of people struggle with motivation, especially those who are already doing well. That represents a big loss of potential, as those who have already achieved some level of success are demonstrably able to channel motivation into output. I have some ideas on why this happens and also how to combat it.…

I don’t keep very close track, but last year I went through emails and discovered that I had purchased about 100 plane tickets for that year. Many were short hops to reposition and sometimes one trip would be three different tickets, but still– that’s a lot of travel. And now, I’ve flown twice in the…

There was a time in my life when I was singularly obsessed with output. I rated my days in terms of how much output I had produced that day and tried, within reason, to limit anything that did not produce output. It felt great to do this, as I had previously not been particularly good…

When I first began quarantine I was extremely productive. I rewrote some big parts of CruiseSheet and got a lot of work done. Then after a week or so I had cleaned out my backlog of tasks and, with cruise sales down about 100%, wasn’t coming up with any pressing tasks to add to my…

In 2018 I wrote 52 blog posts on a cruise and scheduled them for the following year. They actually ended up lasting more than a month longer because of other posts I wrote in real time throughout the year. I originally did this because I wanted to find a way to eliminate the weekly pressure…