After making some changes to my work habits/environment, I wanted to do a writeup on two that seem to have had the greatest postive impact on general productivity.

1. I stopped listening to Spotify while trying to do things

Like most, I really enjoy music. So naturally I put some on to fill my ears anytime they're not otherwise occupied. To justify this practice, I'd checked out several posts about the productivity pros/cons, and it mostly boiled down to:

[WORST] Bothersome Noise < Music or White noise < Silence [BEST]

Firing up Spotify, not without costs

Living in an apartment complex with thin walls, firing up Spotify to stream some radio became automatic before starting any task. And it was certainly effective at drowning out miscelaneous neighbor noise.

While it took time to notice, I believe this turned into a pretty distracting habit with some negative effects:

  • Time and focus lost switching between Spotify and work to vote on each track
  • My mind actually blanking at song transitions, in anticipation of having to skip or approve of the next song
  • Stopping work to check out the artist or name of an unknown song I like, and getting sucked into a rabbit hole of discovering remixes and related artists

I was conditioning myself to be interrupted and break focus every 3-5 minutes.

Embracing white noise

While not nearly as entertaining, I find listening to white noise both effectively drowns out aural distractions and does not require my attention once started.

Lately I've been using Noisli, which is simple to use with a great variety of background-noises (e.g. camp-fire, wind, coffee-shop, etc.) that can all be layered together. I generally emulate a stormy day (wind/rain/thunder) along with a crackling fire and light coffee-shop ambiance :)

And again, best of all, once set, I don't have to think about it again.

side note: listening to a static playlist over and over again, while mind-numbing, may remove the drain on mental energy required to play DJ-on-the-side (though it may present other issues).

2. I switched to Vim

I'd attempted to start using Vim (the esoteric and oft revered/maligned text editor) at least twice prior, but was usually had to call it off when it came time to "actually get something done", forcing me to revert to a more familiar editor (Sublime Text, still pretty great). The combination of Vim's classic feel along with the promise of awesome efficiency (upon achieving some level of mastery) was always enough to draw me back in a few months later.

Luckily, having time off has rescued me from having to 'be productive' for long enough to finally make the switch to Vim. Hurray!

I won't go into a ton of detail about the configurations I'm slowly building up (though I keep an up-to-date backup on GitHub) or what I've learned so far. I'll save the 'deeper' insights (if they ever occur) for a future post.

Instead here's two non-exhaustive lists:

Things I like about using Vim
  • Text editing clearly has the potential to be super fast and efficient (and after about a month of daily usage, starting to experience some of that)
  • Getting 'better' at Vim feels rewarding. This is similar to learning key binds in any application, but with Vim you're essentially required (i.e. forced) to learn and use them (no cursor/menus to fall back on in the terminal). This of course also contributes to making it more cryptic and unfriendly to beginners.
  • I get to stay completely in the terminal, which has had the side-effect of growing my shell knowledge/usage (I use iTerm2 for my terminal, along with zsh)
  • Silly but true, it helps me to get in a 'serious' coding mindset much better than using Sublime Text does. Probably some combination of the added challenge/opportunity to improve my efficiency along with the classic appeal.

And for others considering the switch:

Things that helped my transition to using Vim (from Sublime Text)
  • Setting a color scheme I like (molokai, close to what I had in Sublime)
  • Starting out with a blank .vimrc (customization file) and adding in configurations manually (so I know what's going on and have a general knowledge of the features/settings available to me). It really helps to chip away at all the unknown features by adding them incrementally.
  • Attempting to revel in the learning curve and stave off frustration by keeping it fun. Having no deadlines really helps with this last one :)

Runner-up: Using a standing desk

I certainly enjoy the flexibility of being able to alternate standing and sitting for periods of time, but often (as in right now) I just find myself perched on the barstool with horrible posture.