Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities.
Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it’s much more satisfying to do something productive with that time.
I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.
A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to bed, so it's off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an offline feature, to look up standard library stuff.
I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect.
This is the most productive I've been in my life, by quite a wide margin.
For offline documentation, I use these in order of preference:
• Info¹ documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.)
• Gnome Devhelp².
• Zeal³, using up-to-date documentation dumps provided by Dash⁴.
• RFC archive⁵ dumps provided by the Debian “doc-rfc“ package⁶.
If you really work hard at your day job you just don’t have enough energy at the end of the day if you have also a family to care about.
It’s a great advice for when you are young, it’s pretty much useless when you value the time that you spend with the people that you love much more than any amount of money.
If you have no energy at the end of the day, the answer is to find time in the morning. Get up earlier, go to bed earlier.
If you find your time in the afternoon isn't productive but you find it fulfilling to be around the people you love and that's enough for you, then you don't need productivity advice and this kind of reading isn't for you.
You're basically saying that somehow by waking up earlier you create energy out of nothing. Waking up earlier only does 1 thing: shifts everything earlier. I could also advise the exact opposite: wake up later. That way the time when the lack of energy is felt also comes later. But neither one solves the problem which is either:
1- lack of energy
2- spending too much energy on things we'd rather not spend.
I don’t say that waking up early ‘’creates energy out of nothing’’, I’m saying you wake up with a certain amount of energy to spend and it depletes over the day, so it makes sense that the earlier hours (or at least not the LATE hours) would be better for you.
If you are tired from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed again, you’re suffering from depression or an incredibly bad diet, go see a nutritionist.
And I said the opposite of ‘’[we] spend too much energy on things we’d rather not spend’’ - if you’re already spending time on things you love to do like being with your family and you just want to do more in the limited time you have, either carve the time out of one of those things you love to focus on something else, or learn to accept there’s only so many hours in the day.
The things they point out can be useful even if you have kids. Especially if you have kids, an extra 30-60 minutes every day is damn precious. Could easily double the spare time you have. Or you could spend that extra time with your family if you prefer.
Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it’s much more satisfying to do something productive with that time.
I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.