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Poll: What is your #1 productivity killer?
166 points by elwell on Aug 14, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 101 comments
Referring to time that you think would have been productively spent if not for this agent. Productivity refers to whatever you traditionally regard as productive use of your time. Please choose only one option. After voting, upvote the poll in order to increase the sample size.
Hacker News / Reddit
432 points
Depression / Lack of interest
301 points
Tiredness (even after sleeping a reasonable length of time)
143 points
Obsessing over development process / tools / editors ('fine-tuning' .vimrc or .emacs)
96 points
Feeling stuck / "coder's block"
88 points
Workplace design (open floor plan, etc.)
64 points
Family / Relationships
55 points
Pornography
34 points
Office politics and/or meetings
34 points
YouTube / Netflix
24 points
Drugs and/or Alcohol
22 points
Slow internet speed
20 points
Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI)
14 points



For me it comes from decision paralysis. "I should finally go through a Haskell tutorial! Well wait, there's still so much I should learn about python. I should build something with it. Maybe a simple web site, I already have familiarity with that. I could use one of those frameworks, Django, Flask, Bottle, Pyramid...that reminds me, I never got through my ASP.net book, I spent $30 bucks on that, should at least finish it. Ah but I'm right in the middle of Slaughterhouse Five, and thats been really good--Fuck it, whats on reddit."


I am building a product for you.

In the meantime, I can recommend the book "Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work" by Chip & Dan Heath. Its not self-helpy but very practical and succinctly lays out a set of useful techniques.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Decisive-make-better-choices-life/dp...

For the example you gave, that type of indecision can be caused by lacking a specific goal so you don't have any meaningful criteria to separate the options. Clarify your goals in sufficient detail and the best option that supports your goal will likely become obvious.

If that doesn't help then one of suggestions in the book would be things like 10:10:10 where you imagine yourself 10 minutes, 10 weeks, 10 years into the future, and consider the best and worst outcomes of each option.

This is great way to pursue long-term high impact routes which can be clouded by short-term emotion. Conflict between short-term pain / long-term aspiration can be one component of decision paralysis e.g. learning Haskell today might be painful but life-changing whereas incremental python learning might be easy short-term but long-term low impact.


What's the product idea? Do you have somewhere to collect emails?


> I never got through my ASP.net book, I spent $30 bucks on that, should at least finish it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs


Thank you. I intuitively knew such a thing existed, this was great to read.


LOL..


I can definitely relate to that that, in more ways than one. One recent example was just packing for a move. The company that hired me is paying for the move and movers to basically pack everything up and ship it off to my new location. I wanted to do some of the packing myself to hasten the overall moving day and also so I know where some of my things would be. Well it turns out, just packing a simple book shelf turned out to be much more time than I expected. I had all of these different ideas floating through my head - should I donate this book? Should I toss it? Should I give it to a friend? Is this even my book, did I borrow it? Is this packed "correctly" so that the movers would bless it off to meet their standards? Would they have to repack? Did I over pack this too much? So many different ideas and decisions. When the movers came in, they just had a single, simple mission - PACK EVERYTHING AND GET IT OUT. There was no decisions to be made, it all had to move. I think this is a learning opportunity for me but I haven't figured out how to utilize it yet.


Damn it. You were already reading my freaking mind and then you had to say you were in the middle of Slaughterhouse Five too?!?

(Did a bunch of us buy that on a Kindle Daily Deal or something?)


Slaughterhouse Five is a short and compelling book. Why not read a page of it now?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass


Thanks, you have enlightened me as well as contributing to today's procrastiducation.


Well, you should totally do the Haskell part!


this is precisely what i am thinking now.


For me, it is actually thinking of other ways to do things I've already done. Not always better. But I seem to obsess over really truly fully understanding an issue.

I do think finally reading Knuth's work is helping here. As he manages to show just what that means. Far beyond anything I would have ever expected. And, amazingly, it is completely approachable!


A Yak well-shaved is worth a whole lot of time in the weeds.


It's difficult to determine if time spent "truly fully understanding" will be a net time gain or simply time wasted. In most situations, I'll lean towards the former.


For me, definitely wasted. So much so that I now harp on everyone else for first getting the bloody job done. Then, if/when you have time, delve deeper.

Seriously, look at what I did here: http://taeric.github.io/Sudoku.html I still want to clean up parts it. Terribly so. What does this have to do with my day job? Really... nothing. Nothing at all.

Edit: More relevantly, what do my cleanups that I am obsessing over really help with understanding? Probably nothing. I just think I should clean up the function names and such. Stopping to actually understand how the fundamental algorithm works and where else I could/should use it isn't helped by my structuring the code differently.


At that level, it really depends on what you want to get out of life. You are not your job, or your car, or even your dissertation.

You may really want to know what code perfection means to you, but you might also want to know what it's like to have a family, or run a marathon, or whatever.

Don't risk your job, but spending the time to make something as good as you can make it is often rewarding.

Not to be all morbid, but the clock is ticking, death comes for us all. If it's bugging you, you should fix it - even if no one else cares. If your own satisfaction isn't enough, you should set it aside and do something worthwhile. (whatever that may mean for you)


Great! but please don't ask questions from Knuth's book when you interview someone for programming job. Please. :)


:) Not to worry there. I lay no claims to fully understanding his books. Just that I find them enjoyable and more approachable than I had thought.

Also, I am literally the only person at work that will vote to hire someone regardless of whether they got all of the answers "right."


People having conversations around me are my biggest productivity killer. Sadly I'm in a small open office environment where it is culturally acceptable to have personal conversations with your coworkers at any time of the day, as if we were in a break room. Our manager is one of the worst offenders. None of my colleagues are developers so they're not really bothered by it as much, but I have a very hard time being productive and writing good code when I can't hear my own thoughts. It's very frustrating.


The easiest and most most acceptable solution to that is earbuds/earphones. Put music on, put rain sounds on. If someone comes up to you to talk about non-work stuff decide whether it's a good time to take a quick break or to breifly explain; I'm busy, man.

I've got the same layout at work and I'm even the go-to tech support guy, but when I want to get shit done I'm not afraid to tell anyone to stop bothering me.


A note of caution when using the, "I'm busy, man". It borders on appearing rude, even if you didn't mean to be.

One of my colleagues was a recipient of that dialogue and his working relationship with the other person almost ended at that point.


I've found success at times with the pomodoro method, and the pomodairo tool. I have a ticking clock on my desktop, and if someone comes to bother me, I can easily point to it and say, "Can this wait another 12 minutes?"


I'm a fan of mynoise.net. Sometimes you want total silence, but a wide mix of quality noise can help focus the mind.


I've suffered from this a great deal. I have completely soured on the open office concept - at least if you want me to do anything that requires focus.

Headphones help, but unless you're a complete sociopath, it's impossible to not dedicate some amount of mental resources to human interrupt handling.


Earplugs work for me.


Not in the list, but task switching is my #1 productivity killer. It's ten times harder to work three projects at the same time than one.


I must second this point. I'm fortunate enough to work a job where, every few months, I manage to shirk all of my day-to-day duties and get to spend a few weeks just hacking on some big, long-term, greenfield project of my choosing.

After seeing how productive I am during those windows of pure, blissful coder-escapism, getting back to the emails and little issues on GitHub and helping my coworkers... it absolutely shatters my productivity. Not because I don't like doing the little things (they give a zen-like satisfaction all their own, like a well-used checklist). It's the constant context-switching. When I do need to code, it's so tough to get into flow, knowing that I'm likely to be interrupted again at any moment by someone needing help with a bug, or some server or client that's on fire.

...

I was also tempted to request an "All of the above", as all of the issues (yes, all — I was tempted to check every item on the list) play into this, for me. Anything and everything can, and does, cause me to get out of flow — unless I isolate myself completely, and truly know that I am isolated. Then I can flow.


This is mine too. Sometimes it's switching from various meetings and calls, other times it's various emergencies, and other times, it's from other random events. On the days where I can shut out all distractions, I find myself very productive. Unfortunately, I can't afford those kinds of days too often, but I do try to optimize my schedule and environment for them whenever I can.


im in the middle of trying to design and program an app and maintain/extend the existing web version. my schedule looks something like this:

monday: app programming tuesday: web programming and management wednesday: app design thursday: app programming friday, saturday: anything, as long as its productive. not necessarily related to this project

i find that having a day to just play around is really helpful in keeping things fresh. if it weren't for that i would go bananas. great learning opportunities as well.


Tiredness and Internet distractions for me. I've also found that when I'm tired, I tend to be more likely to slip into more lazy habits like reading HN for an hour at a time.


Of course Hacker News will "win" this poll, because people who use HN a lot will be the most likely to complete the poll. It'd be interesting to have a poll which removes HN and asks to choose your first among the rest.

Experiment design is hard.


Depression/Lack of Interest is at least giving HN a run for its money. Besides, not everybody who spends time on HN will think it's their biggest productivity killer. Definitely A productivity killer, but maybe not the biggest one.


Plus, for some people, Depression/Lack of interest can be an underlying cause for spending too much time on sites like HN.


Maybe this is a new feature. If HN polls > 90%, it will do the decent thing and automatically delete itself from the internet :)


You have "Slow internet speed," "Drugs and/or Alcohol," "Repetitive Strain Injury," and "Pornography" but no "Meetings?"


Sorry, that's a product of spending the last few years doing startups and freelance; I haven't had many frustratingly long meetings. I would add the choice, but it's too late in the poll so it would be too disadvantaged.

Edit: Actually, I've added it to "Office politics".


Meetings could probably come under the umbrella of "Repetitive Strain Injury"...


This list seems to be full of both causes and symptoms?

I would say Depression / Lack of interest / Feeling stuck would be what causes me to stop being productive, and reddit and hacker news browsing is a symptom of those.


Meetings.

#2 is the frustration that comes from bad tools. Spending 4 hours trying to get simple things to work while I crawl through config file hell. Msbuild, I'm looking at you. It kills my time and my motivation.


The top answers are fine, but I would also like to add naming projects. Nothing kills actual productivity like stopping to name a repo or a folder or something silly. Lately I've been trying to "go literal" as a way of making it over this hump, but goddamn do I love a good code name.

Codely? Codester? Codr? Namingway? Namegame? Codeboss?


I spend way too much time on this too.

Unless I can think of a pun or rhyme that clearly works semantically, then I almost never bother with "cute" names like that and just go either with unrelated nouns, or a boring description ("[thing]-finder") as a name.

On a side note, what is with all these startups naming their companies "noun-ly"? I find it kind of disjarring, nonsensical, and even annoying. At least the "twttr" type names I can sort of understand.


Actually just picking useful names for variables, field id's, application sections etc is another huge time-sink.


You know, I hear this a lot, but I don't believe it. Generally, if a variable is to store a service, I call it `service`. If it stores a factory, I call it `factory`. I find the space of variable names to be much less confusing and more straight forward.

Unless we get to weird code wankery things where the variables don't represent real things but like mechanics. But that's far and few between.

val worldDestroyer = summonMe()


I'm surprised by how few people said office politics. That's by far the problem that has the most potential to instantly kill my entire productivity and interest for an entire day. The second I have to ask myself "why am I dealing with this shit again?" is the second nothing else gets done for the day.


Hacker news will ruin me. I've checked HN three times since sitting down 45 minutes ago. I don't even have a file open yet, I am literally staring at my home folder on my right monitor. My HN addiction has literally caused me to take 45 minutes to open Nautilus.


The need for a social life, and work. I only have a few hours after work each day, and I'm torn between building a social life and learning/building new things. The choice is a really difficult one, every day.


sounds like you could use a schedule, so you don't always feel like you should be doing things.

pick different days of the week/times for socialising and learning things. stick to them once you find the right balance.


Obsessing over development process. It's a really bad problem for me. Vim; code format preferences for a handful of languages; Visual Studio preferences; XCode preferences; Windows keyboard shortcuts; OSX keyboard shortcuts... Even if I stopped doing it right now and coded with the settings until I die, there is no way the timed saved using them would surpass the time spent tweaking them.


Task switching used to be a big issue for me, so I reassigned command+T so that instead of opening a new chrome tab, it played a discordant buzz.

Since it's harder to press that button than it is to type Command+T, I opened fewer tabs and was able to stay on task more. This is by no means scientific but curious to hear if it works for anybody else.


Shouldn't social media (Facebook/Twitter) be on this list?


I'd like to add Imgur...that site is the handiwork of the devil.


Lack of interesting/challenging projects that come with a air of freshness every 2 years.

This never gets discussed enough. But if there is some thing else more interesting than your day work, your mind wanders off to the next easily accessible interesting thing. In most cases that is HN/Reddit/whatever. The problem may not be HN itself, but a rather more fundamental thing than that.

Every time I've changed jobs or projects, I've seen a sure increase in my productivity.

There fore if your productivity is just flat. Its probably time to check if you have a good enough project to work on, or check if there is other stuff like office politics and a unfair work environment.

Very rarely have I been in a situation where my productivity has fallen due to things apart from these. Even if it does, simple work arounds generally come handy.


What's great for me working at Facebook for the last three and a half years is that I can get that productivity reinvigoration by switching teams and solving new problems, without having to learn quite as much stuff as I'd need to at another company, and keeping my existing reputation and also my friends and work acquaintances.

I've worked on at least four teams since I joined (and a few smaller projects) - ranging from spam fighting systems, search infrastructure, internal infrastructure management systems, and now on the CDN team.


I wind up trying to understand the framework, and not solving the problem I'm working on.


my biggest distraction is finding the interest in my work again. the spark is gone and chances are it won't come back - powering through is my biggest challenge. i'm productive each day, i make it a point to be, even something small - but not as much as i'd like to be.

one thing that's helped me in the past few days is segmenting my to-do list into three columns: short, mid, and long tasks. anything under 10 minutes in short, 10-60 in mid, and 60+ in long. if i'm not feelin a long task or know i'll be interrupted soon, i'll pick something less time consuming. this of course hinges on knowing how you work and what you can expect.


Marked "drugs" but it is a combination of caffeine and nutrition. For max productivity I need a long stretch with energy and mental calm. Over or under eating creates drowsiness or distracting hunger. Over or under caffeinating is also a problem. The real reason I quit smoking was because I couldn't work for more than four straight hours without the cravings starting to affect my focus.

EDIT: workplace organization and sleep have been problems in the past but not now, thanks to melatonin and a private office.


The biggest thing for me is excess decision making. I'm a programmer, and when my day require making 10 or 20 design decisions, things really start to slow down. (this can lead to some of the other things on this list, like feeling tired, feeling stuck, surfing the web, etc, as it leaves me drained).

I think at the end of the day, our brains have a limited power to make tough decisions, and it's wise to clearly define a programmers tasks so he/she doesn't have to make them.


New tools tend to sidetrack me quite a bit-- for example, new databases and such I just have to try out. Usually it's relatively productive, though, because it lets me know about what tools are out there and which ones could be applicable... But it still is excess "research" that doesn't really need to be done.


ADD and wheat allergy. When I accidentally eat gluten, it completely destroys my ability to concentrate for a day or more.


I wonder about the link between wheat and ADD.

If I eat too much wheat I seem to get strong headache and tiredness one or two days after, but if I take my Concerta I won't be getting them.


I only realized it when I first started taking Ritalin and it decreased my appetite to the point where I was having only one meal a day.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/this-is-yo...


If depression / lack of interest, i would highly recommend a thorough checkup, including imaging if possible. I've had a crap few months, motivatonally and productively and it turns out I'm really quite ill. That being said, being quite ill has given me a lot of motivation to move forward...


Being disinterested in a problem mixed with a bad environment (technical debt, bad documentation, things that just don't make sense) tends to shut me down completely.

Meetings, task switching, and status updates will frustrate me but I can generally get back on task fairly quickly.


If you're tired even after sleeping a reasonable amount of time, you could be burned out.


Expectation. And/or social pressure.

Expectation makes me clamp up and produce work that isn't as good/gutsy/valuable. Social pressure makes me spend years on things I didn't want to be doing.


Meetings.


For me, it's other people talking to me. The day a week that I work from home, I get so much more done because I'm left alone to work.


Health. I've been had off and on intestinal pains. You can work through a lot of things, but gut stuff definitely isn't one of them.


I am surprised that depression is No. 2. And I am very surprised at the number of liars here being that Pornography is second last.


I am assuming that most people are interpreting this as "what stops you being productive while in the office" :P


Twitter.

Really though I can get focus whenever I want, I just require 10 minutes of focus upfront in order for me to forget about the internet.


Traveling between collaborative spaces... Working from Cafes and other open spaces without a persistent office sucks.


The grass is always greener -- I hate going to the same office every day.


http://stellar.io/interesting


It is all about the meetings before the meeting to avoid unproductive time wasting


What, no Facebook poll option?


Locking up due to burnout.


I'm impress that Facebook is not in the pool's options...


Where the hell is Facebook? Born on this earth to slow it down.


For the last two weeks: Ebay, and building Lego bought on Ebay.


I'm surprised "email" isn't on here.


Having to explain things several times to people before they actually listen to me long enough to understand what the problem is. I suppose that falls under 'office politics'.


"I don't know" should be an option.


You forgot gambling, AKA the stock market.


Unstable product requirements.


Gaming.


meetings are the #1 productivity killer. please add it as an option.


obsessing over branding


same number of votes for pornography and RSI, hmm...


video games (drug?)


Lack of motivation


Procrastination?


Clash of Clans


Other: Work.


Polls.


Twitter


School.


facebook.


this.




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