One thing I've done to increase my productivity after reading a comment from a Hacker News post [1] is recording my work sessions on OBS.
The benefits for me are two-fold:
1) It keeps me accountable while working and
2) I can rewatch my work sessions and recall my thought process from a future me perspective.
It's amazing how much you forget about a day, but by watching the recordings after the fact, you recall the micro lessons you learned during your work sessions and you have the opportunity to encode these lessons into your long-term memory.
Kind of funny when I record 2 hours of getting nothing at all done and screaming in frustration, but there we are. Call it radical honesty if you will.
I find it absolutely exhausting though. I max out at 5 hours a day if I talk the entire time.
I find adding a blog post for each screencast to be even better for productivity. I often find myself going back to them to reference something.
People are saying the original post is weird but honestly I think this is weirder. There is no way I could do this. You must be super-extroverted to be willing to let it all hang out publicly, warts and all.
Obviously it's important to make sure you aren't bothering other people in a way they cannot easily ignore. You shouldn't make too much noise, especially at night, or create too much smoke or other bad smells. But being weird hurts no one. Why should I limit my own freedom out of fear of being weird? If it seemed to have a negative effect on my job prospects I might be less weird, but I find the opposite is true. Being weird has probably had a negative effect on my dating life. Then again, I don't want to date someone who is going to restrict my creative freedom by hating my weirdness anyways. Being a coward is far worse when it comes to finding dates than being weird, and being weird in public can help you learn not to be a coward.
I also see letting it all hang out publicly, warts and all as being a sort of protest. If the only ones publishing coding streams were the [Jon Gjengsets](https://www.youtube.com/c/jongjengset) of the world, people like me might simply give up. Surely I'm not the only imperfect coder. Surely I'm not the only one in the world who has spent 10 hours bashing my head against the wall because of a silly typo. I'm here to shout from the hilltops, that it's OK to play amateur football. We don't all have to bend it like Beckham to have fun!
I guess the main thing though is, that I don't really believe anyone will watch all my videos, so I don't feel self conscious doing them.
I do the same thing and if I had some more brain power and free time I may just have invented https://www.rewind.ai/ as I thought of using ocr to find stuff after the fact. Leaving handbrake overnight to crush a 20gb file to throw in google drive is the sad part of this routine.
I had to look it up too. In this case it’s Open Broadcaster Software, but they seem to treat OBS more as a name than an acronym so the usage seems appropriate. https://obsproject.com/
Because that's the name of the software. Google will return it as the first result. It is technically an acronym, Open Broadcast Software, but all the marketing material refers to it as OBS.
I often feel the same, but I think OBS is the name here: OBS may be Open Broadcasting Studio, or Broadcaster Software, but it seems to mostly go by and be referred to as OBS…
The benefits for me are two-fold:
1) It keeps me accountable while working and
2) I can rewatch my work sessions and recall my thought process from a future me perspective.
It's amazing how much you forget about a day, but by watching the recordings after the fact, you recall the micro lessons you learned during your work sessions and you have the opportunity to encode these lessons into your long-term memory.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215277#32215958