Every person on this earth desires productivity, essence of any growing business. If you are working on any solo project you can relate to this. We strive to be productive all the time. This is our weapon against big competitors as we ship features fast.

In his book MAKE, Pieter Levels says:

While working alone in my underwear on the side of my hotel bed with my MacBook and my coffee, I was able to outcompete million-dollar VC-funded teams of 30+ people.

In short, he was being more productive as compared to a company with many employees.

My everyday struggle

As a developer and maker myself I strive to finish more tasks everyday. I usually work on my side-project Curatemails after work hours, ( I have a full-time job) and on weekends. I always end up wishing for more time to work on Curatemails. I guess everyone with a side project has this wish. I don’t want to quit my job, I love my job. I just want more time or may be increase my productivity.

Aytekin Tank (founder of Jotforms ) in his article writes:

The key to better long-term productivity is the same as it was 100 years ago. It’s so simple: building good habits.

I started inspecting my daily activities and realised I can increase my productivity by adjusting few of my habits.

I decided to make small tweaks and not ground breaking changes. The first thing I decided to do was to minimize decision fatigue.

What is decision fatigue? It is basically the deterioration of our abilities to make wise decisions. This usually happens after a long session of continuous decision making. Our brain decides to take shortcuts instead of taking a rational one.

It turned out that just by reducing the decision making on un-important tasks I was able to conserve brain power and therefore increase productivity. Here’s how:

Codify your least important tasks

The first task was to figure out things that are not important and repeat them everyday. Create a routine for them.

I started waking up at the same time everyday.

Consumed same breakfast everyday.

Wore the same set of clothes to work everyday.

Basically I was set to codify my least important tasks, so that I don’t have to think much about them. Preserve my brain power for important tasks. I created a script and followed it everyday without giving it a thought.

The next logical step in this direction was to shift all my non-creative and robotic tasks to the end of the day. Non-creative tasks like answering emails, data-entry works or may be washing dishes.

And it works, having a routined codified life helps you achieve goals, big or small. Basically you remove the decision making fatigue that comes with randomness.

This article was originally published on my Medium

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash