I was worried earlier about gaining too much productivity if I cut down on distractions and start to manage my time better. Luckily, there's suddenly quite a lot of work around. Actually so much, that I'll have to concentrate to get everything done in time and well.

In the beginning of Hacked Man I promised that I won't be touching productivity hacks at all. As I've broken most of the other promises made at that point, I guess I can officially start looking into productivity hacks too. Most things help with productivity at the end of the day, but now I want something that is especially aimed at increasing the amount of useful stuff I can churn out during a day.

Chris Bailey was one of the original inspirations for Hacked Man and I'm going to look through A Year of Productivity -blog later in more details, but at this point I'll just grab and run with his idea of managing three ingredients of productivity:

• time
• energy
• focus

Basically, productivity happens, when you use your time efficiently to concentrate on a thing, with gusto!

Time management and planning in general

Time management has traditionally been one of my weaker areas, that has just sort of sorted itself out. The problem with this is that it's hard to try to improve on something that just somehow sorts itself out and you don't really know that much more about it. Managing my time allows me to try to improve my working practices: shutting off distractions, single-tasking, etc.

Time planning also helps with planning in general. If I have the week planned out before hand, then I can easily see that I actually won't have any time to use on this thing after Wednesday, so I'll better wrap it up today. Normally I might not realize I have a situation until Friday noon.

Managing focus

Timely can be used also on hacking focus. Cutting down on distractions is a useful skill to have. I happen to concentrate on interesting stuff pretty intensely, but it would be exceedingly useful to be able to also just summon laser-focus up at will and use it to solve some boring task in an efficient manner.

Managing energy

I don't have much ideas about managing energy I have available on stuff. This is another thing that has also just always happened. Sleeping and eating well and exercising are the simplest ways to make sure you don't handicap yourself, but I wonder what could be done to get pull even more energy out of the ether to use on productive stuff. I'll leave this for the next blog post.