I'm very result oriented so for me it's definitely the results that matter to make me feel good.
How about you? Do you use ambient sounds or a special type of coffee to get you going super productive?
1. Getting up early - I get an extra hour early in the day. This hour is very special to me as there is no distractions during this period. I use this time mainly to plan for the day.
2. Meditate - I use calm.com to meditate for 10 mins. I would call this best 10 mins of my day.
3. Prioritize tasks - I use wunderlist for tracking my tasks. I use pomodora to keep myself focussed on my current task. It also helps me to take regular breaks.
4. Read,Walk and Play - Some days tend to be productive and some don't. No matter how productive my day was, I will not miss reading a book for an hour, I will not miss my long walks and I ll never miss my playtime with my kid.
Let me stress this again: the hardest part is getting started.
Also necessary, for me at least:
1. Caffeine
2. Music - no vocals, steady rhythm. My preferred kind of music is psytrance/techno during the day, ambient electronic during the night. The steady rhythm is to my brain like the clock to the CPU.
3. Diet - I've started being serious about understanding the cause of my lethargy and not feeling up to doing anything most of the time, and after ~30 days of a clean albeit strict diet (I'm cutting out _all_ possible allergens) I'm feeling more productive than I've been my whole adult life. Probably placebo, probably unrelated. But it's been a long time I wasn't hacking in the middle of the night like these past few days.
A month ago I started keto again, and I've started to notice that some keto-friendly foods still give me some kind of physical discomfort, like bloating and other digestive issues. I've never been diagnosed with anything, but I wanted to get rid of everything that may cause gut discomfort, since many scientists espouse the idea that mental health is directly correlated to gut health and the main purpose is to understand if I can function better.
So I got rid of:
* all FODMAPs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP), recommended against for all IBS sufferers
* all sweet stuff, especially fruit
* foods containing histamines (http://www.histamineintolerance.org.uk/about/the-food-diary/...)
This list is mostly experimental: on keto diet I feel myself shrinking down (i.e. the opposite of bloating), and it helped me to see the real effect of some kind of foods that I've always eaten but I've never been able to see the real effect they have on my body.
Anyway, this restriction doesn't leave very much, but I mostly live on unprocessed meat, eggs, butter, zucchini, bell peppers, olives (technically containing histamines but whatever), good quality cheese, some cream.
It's an interesting ride, not very scientific but I'm not trying to write a paper here, I'm just trying to eat what my body likes and avoid what my body doesn't handle well. And as an anecdote, yesterday, I ate onions again after 2 weeks of restriction, a vegetable I've probably eaten once a day for all my life, and I instantly felt like I was exploding from the inside. How haven't I noticed till now?
Some seem to joke that cutting out food groups is the reason for food intolerance: you are fine all your life, you get in the no gluten craziness and now you can actually feel sick when you reintroduce it in your diet. It's funny and it's also partly true: I could eat anything without any problem and now I feel measurably different on a lot of different nutrients.
Nutrition is rocket science.
So tldr: Practice Focus and make sure you're goofing around/having fun when you're jaded/not in the mood. With practice you'd be able to have a good control over your mood and emotional state.
- Dual monitors - Good music - Actual mouse
For the longest time, I was just never able to work on a laptop, until I realized that the problem was screen real estate and an actual mouse.
Coding doesn't happen at a kiosk.
