How to Improve Efficiency

The term "procrastination" has been very popular in recent years. It seems that everyone feels that their efficiency is not high and it is difficult to focus on what is at hand. How can we improve our work efficiency, let me tell you.
Aaron Swartz wrote a famous article called "HOWTO: be more productive". This article is really good. I have read it many times and I agree with the author's point of view. I have learned some of the methods mentioned by the author and applied them to my own life. I found that they are indeed effective, so I am willing to let more people see this article. Aaron Swartz is definitely a cool man. He was involved in rss1.0 when he was 14 years old. He took the initiative to drop out of Stanford after a year of study and became a member of YC, his company was later merged with Reddit, and he was still web. founder of the py framework.
Below is the translation:
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Someone must have told you that "you have been watching TV for so long that you can use it to write a book." It is undeniable that writing a book is definitely better time than watching TV, however, the conclusion requires the assumption that "time is interchangeable", that is, the time for watching TV can be easily used to write books. But unfortunately, this is not the case.
Different times have different quality levels. If I find my notebook forgot to bring on the way to the subway station, it is hard for me to concentrate on writing articles. Similarly, it is hard for you to concentrate when you are constantly interrupted. There are also some psychological and emotional factors, sometimes I am in a good mood, willing to take the initiative to do something, but sometimes I feel very depressed and tired, I can only watch TV.
If you want to become more efficient, you must be aware of this fact and handle it well. First, you must make good use of different types of time. Second, you must make your time more efficient.
More effective use of your time
Select an appropriate question
Life is so short. Why do you waste time doing meaningless things? It is easy to do something that makes you feel comfortable, but you should ask yourself why you want to do it? Are there any more important things waiting for you to do? Why don't you do that? These questions are difficult to answer, but each solution will make you more efficient.
This does not mean that all your time should be used for the most important tasks. This is definitely not my time (otherwise, I will not write this article now ). However, this is an important measure of my life.
Collect many problems
Another secret that many people know is that if you identify a problem and devote all your energy to solving it, you will be the most efficient. I find this is very difficult to implement. Taking the present as an example, I am exercising, drinking orange juice, organizing my desktop, chatting with my brother, and writing this article. Today, I wrote this article, read a book, eat something, reply to several emails, chat with some friends, and buy something, I modified several other articles, backed up the hard disk, and sorted out a list of books.
There are many different projects that allow me to do different jobs at different quality times. More importantly, there are other things you can do when you get stuck or bored.
This will also make you more creative. Creativity means that you can use what you have learned from other places to your work. If you do a lot of work in different directions at the same time, you will get more ideas and ideas.
List
It is not difficult to find different things at the same time. Most people have many To-Do items. But if you want to keep them all in your head, they will gradually disappear. Remember that the mental pressure that these events bring to you will crush you. The solution is still simple: write them down.
Once you put the tasks into a list, you can better classify and organize them. For example, my list includes programming, thinking, errands, reading, and entertainment.
Most projects contain many different tasks. Taking this article as an example, in addition to the real writing process, we also read other articles about procrastination, consider all the parts of the article, sort out statements, and ask questions to others. Each task belongs to different parts of the list, so you can make a part at the right time.
Combine the task list with your life
Once you have such a task list, what you need to do is always remember it, and the best way to remember it is to put it where you can see it. For example, I always put a pile of books on my desk, and the top one is what I recently read. When I want to read a book, I will read it directly from the book above.
I also do this for watching TV/movies. When I am interested in a movie, I will put it in a special folder on my computer. Whenever I want to take a break and watch a movie, I will open that folder.
I have also thought about some more in-depth methods. For example, I mark some articles I want to read as "to read ), when I want to access the Internet, I will look at the accumulated unread articles.
Improve the quality of your time
It is far from enough to maximize the use of time as above, and more importantly, to improve the quality of your own time. So what exactly do you do?
Reduce physical constraints
Carrying paper and pen
Many people I know have workbooks and other things in their pockets. Paper and pen are often very useful. You can record your thoughts at any time. I even wrote a whole article on the subway using this method.
Avoid disturbing
For tasks that require attention, try to avoid interruptions. One simple way is to go to a place where no one can disturb you, and the other is to tell people around you not to disturb you in the future.
Not too late. When you are wasting time, you should be disturbed. It is better to help others solve the problem than to sit there and watch the news to take advantage of the time.
Reduce psychological constraints
Eat, sleep, exercise
When you feel very hungry, tired, and anxious, your time quality will be very low. It is easy to solve this problem: eat, sleep, and exercise. "Although I am tired, I can't rest, because I have to work." It will make you feel very hard, but in fact, you will be more efficient after rest. Since you have to go to bed sooner or later, it is better to have a good rest to improve the efficiency of the remaining time.
Get along with happy people
Getting along with happy people will also make you happy and relax. Maybe many people are willing to hide in the room, don't engage with others, and work hard. They feel that such time is not "wasted", but in fact this will make them depressed, work efficiency will also be greatly reduced.
Share your stress with your friends
Even if your friends are not the ones who can infect others and bring you happiness, solving complicated problems with others will make the problem easy. On the one hand, mental stress can be shared by everyone. On the other hand, being with others can help you focus on your work rather than being distracted from time to time.
Drag
Those mentioned above are not the focus of the problem. The biggest problem about efficiency is "dragging ". Although many people do not admit it, almost all of them will drag on. So how can we avoid it?
What is procrastination? From the perspective of onlookers, you are doing fun things (such as playing games and watching news) rather than doing real work. But the key to the problem is: Why are you doing this? What is in your mind?
I 've spent a lot of time studying this. The best explanation I can give is to give your brain a mental field to each task. Have you ever interacted with two magnets? If you make them very different, they will reject each other and you will feel the magnetic force between them. The more you want to bring them together, the more you will feel the rejection between them.
The same is true for mind and spirit. It is invisible, but you can feel its existence. And the more you want to approach it, the farther it will be from you.
It is impossible for you to overcome the exclusion between two fields through brute force. On the contrary, what you should do is to adjust the direction.
What is the "mental force field? There seems to be two main reasons: whether the task is difficult and whether the task is assigned.
Arduous Task
Subdivide tasks
One of the reasons why a task is very difficult is that it is very ambitious. For example, if you want to create a recipe construction program, no one can complete it at once. This is a goal rather than a task. A task is a concrete concept that enables you to move further toward the goal. A good task can be implemented immediately, for example, "drawing a sketch showing a recipe ".
After you complete the previous task, the next step becomes clearer. You will consider the composition of a recipe, the search mechanism you need, and how to build a recipe database. In this way, you build an engine, and each task will go to the next task.
For every large project, I will consider what kind of tasks I need to complete and add these tasks to my to-do list. Similarly, after I finish some tasks, I will add the tasks that need to be completed to the task list.
Simplify tasks
Another reason for making the task difficult is that it is too complicated. The task of "writing a book" won't help you, so let's start with writing an article. If you think there are too many articles, write a summary of the paragraph first. The most important thing is that you have actually done some work and made real progress.
Once you have defined your task, you can clearly judge it and understand it more easily. It is easier to improve some existing things than to create things from scratch. If you have written a paragraph, it will become an article and eventually become a book.
Consider it carefully
Generally, it takes some inspiration to solve a difficult problem. If you are not familiar with that field, you should start from studying this field, learn from others' experiences, and gradually study and understand this field, and make some small attempts to see if you can deal with this field.
Assigned task
The assigned task is the task you are requested to complete. Many psychology experiments show that when you "stimulate" other people to do something, they are not easy to do that thing. Rewards, punishments, and other external stimuli will kill the "inner motivation"-you are interested in a problem. Human brains are inherently resistant to what needs to be done.
This phenomenon is not limited to what others require you to do, but still occurs when you assign tasks to yourself. If you say "I should do X Well, this is my most important thing now" to yourself, then you will feel that X has suddenly become the most difficult thing in the world. However, once y becomes the "Most important thing", the original X becomes simpler.
Create a task
If you want to complete X, tell yourself to do y. Unfortunately, it is difficult to cheat yourself because you know exactly what you want to do.
Do not assign tasks to yourself
Assigning tasks to yourself seems attractive. For example, you can say to yourself, "I have to write this article to eat." What's worse, you can pretend to have some tasks for you. However, both of these methods will make you less efficient. In fact, you are still assigning tasks to yourself, and your brain will only escape it.
Make things interesting
Difficult work does not sound pleasant, but in fact this is probably the thing that makes me most happy. A difficult question not only enables you to focus all your attention, but you will feel very good and fulfilled when you finish it.
Therefore, the secret to help yourself accomplish one thing is not to convince yourself that you must complete it, but to persuade yourself that it is indeed very interesting. What you need to do is make it interesting.
Summary
The real secret of efficiency lies in "listening to yourself". When you are hungry, eat, go to bed when you are tired, take a break when you are bored, and do interesting and interesting projects.
This seems easy, but some ideas in society are guiding us in the opposite direction. To become more efficient, we need to turn our heads to "Listen to ourselves"

How to Improve Efficiency