How to be ultra productive

I am very productive at times, and I often wondered what triggers this. I have thought about this and I have even monitored myself to see what really triggers ultra productiveness. I think I have found the secret.

Knowing the goal

The probably most important aspect is to know the goal. What are you trying to accomplish? If you run a marathon your goal would be to finish the marathon in fastest possible time. Goals can be anything, but it's pretty important that they are well defined. Imagine if you start running a marathon without knowing when it's going to end...

When I am ultra productive I know what my goal is.

Having subgoals

The goal can sometimes take a lot of time to accomplish. One can easily go dead in the middle of accomplishing something. This happens to a lot of people, myself included. I start on something, I work and I never finish it. The probably reason for this is that the goal is far ahead and takes a lot of work.

To solve this, have subgoals that will bring you closer to the goal. That way you can get some small victory kicks along the way.

When I am ultra productive I know my subgoals.

Following the path to the goal

A marathon takes a lot of running and to complete it you must run. The main objective is also to finish in the fastest possible time. Same can be said about all other goals. Imagine if a marathon runner stopped and took a break at a cinema. Sure it would be relaxing, but it wont bring him closer to his goal.

A lot of people get distracted away from the path to their goal, myself included. For example, would this post be completed faster if I visited Slashdot and began to read the comments? Hell no. Don't fool yourself, stay on the path to your goal.

When I am ultra productive I don't get distracted away. I am in my own world where there is me and the goal. Everything else doesn't matter. That's the true spirit of accomplishing something.

An example

At work I had a task to write a web based mailing list manager. That was my goal.

I started out by adding following items to my BiRC Todoist project:

• Brainstorm over interface
• Analyze current data-structure
• Think a new data-structure (use shelve?)
• Implement
• Backup current data
• SVN update and test out
• Show Enette the new interface

The implement item is the most complicated and in the beginning it's hard to guess what needs to be done. But after I completed the first couple of steps I got some insight in what needs to be implemented. I then split implement up to small sub goals.

I was very successful with this approach, and I used around 4 hours to complete an Ajax based mailing list manager with a beautiful interface. It's probably around 500 lines of code (125 lines pr. hour). The finished product looks like this: