Productivity in 2017: analyzing 225 million hours of work time
Let me try to save you all a year of therapy sessions:You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem. We. Have an energy problem.The reason you only get three hours of stuff done on Saturday and then you ‘waste’ the rest of the day is because you had three hours of energy. The rest of the day you’re just filling time. Not because you’re bad, or lazy, or selfish. Because you’re spent.The difference between productive people and you is not time management. Their skill is in dealing with taxing experiences. They avoid it, delegate it, or confront it on their own terms at the time of their choosing. Some shift their perspective to make it less taxing (not everyone hates weeding). And when they run out of energy they engage in activities that recharge them instead of filling time or merely drain them slower (see also: me and video games or TV)If you know where to look, we already know this subconsciously.  A bunch of industry Best Practices are more time consuming but less energy intensive than the alternative. We balk at scheduling two difficult tasks in the same time interval even though they both “only” take less than half of your time.  A task that takes four hours might leave you exhausted, and all you can do for the rest of the day is read email and code reviews and browse Hacker News.  Nobody can rearrange your schedule or demean youbinto anything productive during that time. If you try you’ll just make mistakes. Which is why you’re trying to Do No Harm by “goofing off”. You already know this you just don’t have the words like “self-care” to express it.