How to Get Things Done When You Have no Time

This last month or so has been a hell of a busy time for me.  Working long hours, with a 1 year old at home who needs attention while trying to squeeze in social events, exercise, sleep, reading and personal projects is a lot to juggle.

How have I managed to rock a streak of 53 consecutive days with open source github activity, learned Flask, read 3 books this month and made progress on several side projects?

The Github streak never would have happened if I didn’t have a script to email me every hour after 5pm that I don’t have activity on my account.  This simple nag makes sure I don’t go to bed and forget to write some code each day.

Thinking of things to code each day has pushed me to explore new ideas, practice concepts, study APIs and do tutorials. In retrospect it is astounding just how much interesting stuff you can get done when you do a little bit every day.

A simple nag will actually make you find the time when you don’t have it.  Several times per week I find myself up later than I would have been otherwise trying to write just a couple more lines of code.  Once you start on an idea it’s not easy to let it go unfinished; it’s hard to commit code that won’t even compile.

Activity has spiralled off from this daily coding.  A couple days of hacking on some stock market analysis algorithms got me checking Amazon for books,   which in turn got me to completely overhaul my personal finances.  On another tangent, trying to think of ideas for things lead me to a tutorial on Flask and more books on that subject.

Want to get more done?  I’ve improved on the Jerry Seinfeld Productivity Secret with a simple script to make sure I don’t destroy my streak by being absent minded.  The knock on and compounding effects from all this daily activity has been unexpected and amazing.