Struggling with burnout? Procrastination? Reaching your goals? Let me share a few methods that help me actually get things done in the long run. And yes, at first glance, some of them might make you think I've completely lost it 😄 But I swear they work, and these really are “productivity tips,” not “Sylwia's zen tips.”
I've been writing quite a lot of “philosophical” posts lately. Well, it's summer, I'm enjoying the last warm weeks, and somehow I'm just in the mood for this kind of content. Don't worry, though, September will be packed with hardcore tech!
And trust me, a lot is going to happen, because in September I'll be speaking at AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe!!! Well, I always knew my place was among the greatest engineers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the maintainers of MCP… Hahaha, obviously I'm joking. I have no idea what I'm doing there, but if you happen to come to my talk, I promise you won't regret it 😄
This post is partly a continuation of Stop Calling Everything “Impostor Syndrome”: The Myth of “Just Push Harder” and contains some thoughts that simply didn't fit there. And yes, we only have one life — at least as far as we know 😄 — and I don't think it's worth wasting it constantly working your ass off just to become an amazing programmer or someone else in IT.
But that's not even the main point here. These tips, despite going against the “work more” advice we hear all the time, can actually help you achieve much more, because the key to success is something we all know very well: CONSISTENCY.
Of course, I'm not going to claim this will always work for everyone. So you're very welcome to disagree with me in the comments 😄 It works for me, though, so I'll describe these methods along with plenty of personal digressions. Maybe it's worth a try?
1. Do Less Than You Could
This is actually an old Scrum principle — or at least that's how a Scrum Master friend of mine once explained it to me 😉 The point isn't to cram as many tasks as possible into a sprint. The point is to find a pace of work that would feel comfortable even if there were no vacations at all. Obviously, this doesn't mean you should actually give up your vacations xDDD But you get the idea.
I understand this strategy perfectly well at work, but sometimes I forget about it in my personal life. If you read me regularly, you know I blog a lot here (and sometimes those are heavily technical posts, unlike this one 😅), and I also speak at conferences. So I often have tons of things to do, but the moment my calendar gets even slightly less crowded, I immediately start wondering what else I could squeeze in. Maybe I should finally write a book?
It's a trap. Instead of using that quieter period to rest and finally watch a TV show other than Silicon Valley, I fill that time with more stuff. Then the commitments I already knew were coming eventually arrive, and suddenly I'm frustrated and exhausted. As a result, I do less, I do it worse, and… I give up on writing the book anyway 🥺 Maybe I'll get back to it when I retire or something. 🤯
2. Don't Work on Weekends
My buddy @the_nortern_dev once wrote about this in Unpopular Opinion: I Stopped Coding on Weekends and My Career Got Better. I even commented that I not only don't code on weekends, but I don't do anything after hours at all unless I genuinely feel like it.
Well, those days are long gone. When it comes to blogging and conferences, I've achieved a certain level of success. What I didn't expect was that… success comes with admin work 😅. Suddenly there are ten emails to answer, an abstract to prepare, benchmarks to run, something else to check… Sometimes these are tiny things, but we all know how quickly tiny things can grow 😄
As a result, I developed a tendency to do something every single afternoon and, of course, on weekends, because that's when I had more time. My productivity dropped dramatically. I genuinely didn't feel like doing anything anymore, and everything I did was basically just “good enough to get it over with.”
Free weekends don't just help me rest. I even let myself get a little bored. Usually, at some point, I get that feeling of, “Ahhh, I'm rested now, I'd actually love to work on this!”, and I deliberately don't do it. At most, I write the idea down. It's only when your brain finally relaxes that it has room for creativity.
It's not like I close my laptop on Friday evening and don't open it again until Monday morning. Sometimes I reply to your comments, which I really enjoy. But no answering emails, creating content, and so on. Which brings us smoothly to the next point:
3. Plan Your Week in Advance
Okay, this particular tip isn't exactly controversial 😄 But it really works. If I want my weekend to stay free, I need to plan everything else throughout the week. But I also have to do it in a way that doesn't completely bury me in work, because the whole point is to do less than you could.
You don't need sophisticated tools to do that. Usually, I dump everything I want to do into ChatGPT as a stream of consciousness, and it turns it into a daily plan, taking into account what's urgent, what's important, and so on. For example, today I had some admin stuff plus this article, and tomorrow evening I'll focus 100% on editing my sci-fi story for an anthology (fortunately, I'm finally on the home stretch…).
4. Set Embarrassingly Achievable Goals
This is the key to avoiding procrastination. If you set yourself a goal like “I want to become a Staff Engineer at Google”, your brain will decide that you might as well sit down and do nothing. Unless you're already a Senior Engineer at Google, in which case it's a perfectly reasonable goal 😁
You get the idea, right? It's one of those things coaches are always telling us 🤣 And on this one, they're actually pretty right. A goal should be realistic and measurable, and ideally, it should depend on you — although, of course, that's not always possible.
If you're learning programming and want to do it professionally, a good goal is “become a junior developer,” or even “get an internship.” That's something you have a chance of achieving by learning this and that and sending your CV to companies. If you're interested in speaking at conferences, you don't tell yourself, “Now I'm going to become a tech influencer” xD. Instead, you try to come up with a cool topic and get accepted to a meetup. And so on, and so on.
5. Deliver Only What You're Asked For
Haha, how many times have I fallen into this trap! In software development, we have this thing called an MVP, and I think we should make MVPs in life too.
More than once, I've found myself spending time polishing details that simply weren't necessary. Am I saying that going the extra mile has never helped me? I'd be lying if I did. Sometimes the extra effort genuinely paid off, although I'll never know whether “good enough” would have worked just as well.
More often, though, it went the other way. In the best-case scenario, I simply did a bunch of unnecessary work. In the worst case, I built something the client didn't even want because I thought it was better and so cool! Of course, it was easy enough to undo and nobody got hurt (except me), but the fact remains: my “extra” work wasn't just useless. Sometimes it actively made things worse.
Obviously, in your own projects, do whatever you want. But when you're working with clients, I'd recommend sticking to this rule. Want to add something extra? Agree on it with the client first (and preferably charge extra for it).
6. Know What “Done” Means Before You Start
This is an extension of the previous point. If, for example, you set yourself a goal like “I'll learn JavaScript”, you'll never finish. I always laugh that when I was a junior, I used to put my JavaScript level on my CV as “very good,” and now I only put “good” 😄
Instead, aim for something like “I'll complete this tutorial and take the test at the end” or “I'll build an app with these specific features”.
7. Reply to Small Things Immediately
This is a tip I learned from my former Development Manager. If you get an email or a message that will take you no more than five minutes to answer, do it immediately or within an hour. Unless, of course, you're in the middle of something super urgent or in a deep work. Don't let it sit there for days.
It's a fantastic way to keep clearing things from your life's “backlog.” As a bonus, it'll make you the perfect “low-maintenance” coworker, contractor, and so on. Where's the downside?
And that's it. Obviously, these tips won't work in every situation or for everyone. I can imagine moments in life when we genuinely need to push hard because we're doing a bootcamp, facing an important deadline, or whatever else. The problem is that those “moments” sometimes get out of control, and a few weeks turn into a dozen months. Which is, of course, a pretty straightforward path to burnout and wanting to throw the whole damn thing away.
So I wish you more free evenings, more free weekends, and, in general, a life where you don't work yourself to death ☺️
For more super-useful life hacks 🤣 you can also follow mi on LinkedIn.
