How I got to 200 productive hours a month

Original Article: How I got to 200 productive hours a month

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Two years ago I could spend a week not working because I was avoiding some task. One year ago it was 100 to 120 hours of work monthly. Nowadays I do around 200 productive hours each month, which is over six hours of productive time daily. All this time I have been working from home, mostly on the same project.

This guide describes how I achieved these results. As a former game designer, I organized my daily routines by applying the same behavioral psychology principles that are used to create video game experiences. Some of my advice is trivial, and you have definitely heard it before, but when used in a right way, it will create a robust framework to change ineffective habits.

The framework is built from three tiers: the environment, the body and the mind. It goes exactly in this order because a well-maintained body can't do much in a distraction-polluted environment, and a trained mind won't help an exhausted body. You don't need to perfect each element before starting to work on the next one, but consider them foundations for each other and direct your efforts accordingly.

While it's my personal technique, I believe it will work for you too. There's a high chance that I have undiagnosed ADHD: I have been expelled from two schools as a result of behavioral problems coming from inattention, and I still match most of the symptoms. So if you have a better natural attention span, this approach should be even more effective for increasing your concentration power.

Caution: The mentioned amount of hours is not advisable for people working on someone else's business for illusory stock options, with no payment for overtime. There's also no point in going beyond this number because working over 50 hours a week actually decreases productivity. Life should come first in the "work-life balance."

Environment

A properly organized environment shapes a path to your goals while preventing accidental turns that lead to procrastination. Because our levels of willpower, motivation and self-awareness are not constant, setting a safeguard in advance is essential to overcome the low points.

The core principle of a productive environment is increasing the friction required to slip into distracting activities, so that it takes a significant effort to get distracted. A basic example would be erasing leisure sites from your internet history and start using them in a separate browser — it will both prevent the autocomplete from doing you a disservice and increase the number of actions you need to get to distractions. Or if you have problems with gaming, uninstall everything after each session so you will need to wait for a game to download when you want to play the next time.

But in my experience, this is not effective compared to eliminating everything distracting from your workstation and using a separate device for leisure in another room. This is where behavioral psychology shows up: you anchor different types of behaviors to locations with classical conditioning. They do not overlap, and it's clear for your brain where you do what. It's also much easier to feel that something is wrong when you sit in a "leisure place" all day. Even George R.R. Martin has a similar setup for writing his books.

You can also optimize your leisure device by unsubscribing from excessive emails, u...