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productivity
How can you increase your
productivity on your side projects at
the end of the day when you’re tired
from work/college?
Kah Keng Tay, Quora Engineer
I try to minimize startup and switching costs, in other words,
the time it takes to get started working on the side project.
This way, even if I only have a few minutes to work on it before
I turn in for the night, I can still do something useful.
Also, I try to make each opportunity count. These are hard
to come by, and so it is good not to waste any single minute.
This boils down to me doing some or all of the following:
• Keeping as much state persistent across sessions as possible.
I leave all my editors, browser windows, etc exactly
the way they are so I can pick up and resume where I left
off. This means I usually never shut down my computer,
preferring to put it to sleep or standby where possible.
• Having a quick and painless to-do list. I used to do this in
a text file but I've recently started to use evernote for this.
Then, when secondary tasks crop up that are not central
to what I'm doing right now, I'll put them on the list and
work on them later.
• Biting off only what can be chewed. Related to above, I
make sure I tackle only what seems reasonably possible
within the time I have. If I took on too big a task and
didn't manage to finish, and only got back to it a few days
later, I would have forgotten by then some of the reasons
why I did things in a certain way. This would cost me time
that is spent rethinking and refactoring my design unnecessarily.
• Prioritizing tasks according to what is important (or
interesting if I'm not feeling particularly inspired). This
goes in line with making each opportunity count. In down-
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