I was never someone who was organized or had a strict schedule. I used to wake up around the same time every day, but that's as far as I had usually planned. This was especially true during the pandemic when I was stuck at home with no plans. When I had college, I knew I had to leave for class and come back home in the evening to finish up any work I had. However, with online classes, and later on working from home too, my days were a lot more unstructured. While I never thought much about this, as I started taking on more tasks, I found myself overwhelmed with an ever-growing to-do list and seemingly lesser time to do all of them. This was when I started looking into ways to organize my tasks and increase my productivity.

From my experience, there is no golden hack that works for all when it comes to increasing your productivity. There are tens of things you could be doing, some will help you, but most will make your life unnecessarily complicated. At the root of it, I realized my lack of productivity stemmed from two main problems - a lack of organization about what I had to do, and a growing list of distractions that kept me from focusing on the task at hand. Here's how I'm currently tackling both these issues, to varying degrees of success.  

The distractions problem was easier than I had anticipated to resolve. For a week, I tried to be conscious about where I was spending my time, without making any changes to my day. Unsurprisingly, my phone was a major culprit. I had way too many apps that were too easily accessible, so any minute of free time I had I would open YouTube shorts or browse Twitter. I didn't try to control my time on these apps but instead decided to go cold turkey. I uninstalled any app I thought was a distraction. Luckily, I wasn't much of an Instagram or FB user. Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, they were all gone too now. Initially, I thought deleting the apps was a stretch when I could have easily added a usage timer, giving myself excuses like I come across helpful apps and articles on Reddit, or I might be bored in the metro so YouTube would be nice to have. However, after more than a month without these apps on my phone, I can say I definitely don't miss them. I haven't cut out these apps completely though. I have them on my iPad, but I don't pick up that device whenever I have a minute, so I was definitely wasting a lot less time than before. My screen time went from above 5 hours on most days, to less than 1-2 hours. Minimalism in general seemed like a great approach to getting rid of distractions. I tried to keep my desk as clean as possible, and clear my phone and laptop of unnecessary apps or folders all around the home page or desktop. Focus Modes have been extremely helpful, with iOS Focus Modes or Android Digital Wellbeing Focus Mode as it keeps notifications away while I'm working.

My second, and bigger problem, was organization. When I had a major task at hand, I usually got to it immediately and tried to complete it as soon as I could. However, as I started my full-time job where I had to work on multiple things at a time, and I had to juggle my personal tasks too, it became tougher to get work done. Shifting between tasks constantly it felt like I was always working, even though I wasn't getting all my work done. What helped me realize I was doing things wrong was when I came across a quote from Nir Eyal's book Undistractable which said it's okay to take breaks and indulge in distractions, as long as you schedule these breaks beforehand and make sure they don't distract you during a fixed working time. I didn't have this fixed working time earlier, I was just winging whatever task I felt like doing, or seemed urgent. There was no plan on how long it should take me, or when I would do it. This is when I came across the activity of calendar blocking which has majorly helped me. It's a very simple idea, that takes only a calendar to get started. Some people like doing it in a day planner or journal, but I definitely prefer doing this on Google Calendar so it's synced between all my devices. All you need to do is block a certain period of time on your calendar and label it with what you're expected to do then. You can go further and colour code the blocks so it's easier to see things at a glance. I've created multiple calendars to categorize my tasks into Work, Study, Chores, and Personal Time. When you have a big task, it helps to break it down into subtasks and allot a time slot for each task. While it took me around a week to get into the habit of doing this every day and figuring out how to efficiently plan my day, the benefits I've seen have been undeniable. I no longer have to decide what to do, or take a lot of time on smaller tasks, as I have it all planned prior. The key to making this work is to not crowd your calendar, even if you seem like you have time during the day. Scheduling breaks is just as important as scheduling the rest of your tasks. Moreover, this calendar acts only as a guide on what to do. A task you've scheduled for an hour might take longer, and that's totally fine if you know the task is taking longer by itself and you're not distracted while working on it. This is why breaks are important too, as you can use it as buffer time in case something takes longer than expected.

Along with calendar blocking, I use a couple of other apps to stay organized. Small tasks go on a To Do list. I use Microsoft's To-Do, as it's free with all the major features I need like multiple lists, reminders, and notes, and has cross-platform support. Reminders like getting milk, or paying a bill go into the To-Do list, and it helps to set a reminder for when you think you can do this task, so it's not just lying there while you forget it. Bigger tasks like a work issue go in my Notion. I like keeping a separate To Do on Notion for bigger tasks as I use it to make my notes too. The Kanban view with cards for each task and notes/pages within each task make it extremely organized and I can refer back to my notes in the future if I need it. Finally, at the end of each day, I look at both my To Do lists and use Google Calendar to plan my next day.  

So far, this system has worked out really well for me, without having to make any changes to my lifestyle. I haven't taken up a new skill or changed how I do things, I've just made them more organized. As for all things related to productivity, this might not be something that works for you. Everyone's productivity stems from different causes, and you need to see what works for you. There are tons of resources out there, and multiple viewpoints on what you could do to increase your productivity, but it all starts with you analyzing if you're being as productive as you could be, and what's keeping you behind.

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A few days ago, I happened to be looking at some of the top products and startups in recent times like Stripe, Substack, Robinhood and others. I believed that looking at the services they provide and what they've been working on recently would give me an idea on potential future trends for products and inspire me to work on something new. However, looking into some of these products made me see a common trend. It wasn't a particular field or technology rising like I thought I'd notice, but in fact it was a certain attribute of all these companies or products that I believe made them successful; they hid all the gruesome details of whatever field they were in, from their customers.

Let's start with the best example of this - Stripe. Working with Payments is an absolute pain. Keeping track of the user's details and PII info like card details, invoice management, security are tough enough to manage for a developer without having to worry about the legal documents and financial regulation of their country and everywhere else your product is available. Instead, Stripe handles that for you. The best compliment you could provide for a product like this is that it makes the service they provide work exactly like you think it should. What I mean by this is that if I was asked to describe what a payment system should work like, I'd probably mention a frontend for the input, a server for some validation and requesting the bank to release the funds, and sending the users a receipt. When you start building it from scratch, you realise how many more components work together to make this seem so effortless. Often, things don't work the way they should. On the surface, Substack's idea seems pretty simple. Yet another blogging platform that lets you send your posts as a newsletter. While most developers might be able to build a half-decent draft of such a platform, it isn't till you deploy one that you realise how much must go right. For starters, considering you need to be able to send the post as an email newsletter, you'd need to figure out how to keep all the mails from the new blogs popping up every minute from ending up in the spam folder. Substack's value proposition isn't the fact that you can create a newsletter, it's that anyone can create a newsletter and not have to handle any of the heavy lifting.

Looking into the future, one of the biggest trends I see coming up, and most likely staying and growing, are the rise of No-Code tools. Tools like Bubble let you create dynamic apps and websites with the functionality you need and the designs you have, without having to know a programming language or deal with the databases and hosting. At its core, No Code tools are just an abstraction to coding environments that make it more accessible to everyone despite their technical skills.  However, by no means is this a new trend or something we'll see only in the future. Arguable one of the biggest service in the history of the internet is AWS and that was an abstraction over cloud hosting which let you provision the computation power you need without worrying about security or the network unless you wanted to.

The Facebook motto of Move Fast and Break Things is true now more than ever. Most Indie Hackers and startups want to focus on the product rather than the cogs of every component they require. The best value you can create for them is to take away the boilerplate work and focus on the main ingredients. I do believe that the next big things will satisfy this same criteria of simplifying a niche for a specific subset of people. This means the people to solve a problem are the ones who are already in that field. The Collison brothers were developers who started Stripe after they realised how tough it is to integrate payments into their projects. So the easiest way to think of a new idea would be to figure out what you do in your daily life that could be abstracted. Another way to think of this is as removing a barrier to entry into your domain. Generally these would be tasks that require a specific set of skills a beginner might struggle with, tasks that are time consuming and could be automated, or something that takes away the pain of managing another component of a bigger project. The internet is a huge place, and now more than ever it's easier to target the people you're selling to. You don't have to be solving a huge problem for a majority of people, all you need to do is solve a pain point that affects even a small number of people who are willing to pay up.

A lot of my Twitter feed is about startups, investments and tech news ( All hail tracking! ). And today, as I browsed through Twitter, the biggest news by far was Coinbase's IPO. Nothing even came close to the discussion that was happening around Coinbase going public at a ~$96B valuation. If you're not familiar with Coinbase, they're a company that started out aiming to make cryptocurrency transactions more accessible through their platform, and they charge a fee for every transaction. But unlike other companies going public where employees and investors profit the most, Coinbase's IPO meant a lot to a significant group of people - the general cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors. The massive valuation and worldwide interest in Coinbase meant that cryptocurrency like Bitcoin would no longer be considered a niche, speculative currency but might be more generally accepted.

However, between this rush of tweets, one particularly stood out to me

Sahil met Coinbase's founder Brian in 2011 and had a chance to get in at the earliest possible stage. He declined.
When asked in the comments if he regretted it, Sahil says he doesn't. And it makes sense for him. He went on to create Gumroad, a marketplace platform that's valued at over $100M. While it's still a far shot from what he could've had at Coinbase, Sahil and Gumroad are a success by all definitions of the word. He believed in his product Gumroad and had no way of knowing if Coinbase or even Cryptocurrency had any future. He stuck with his gut and made Gumroad a successful company. However, that got me thinking. Would he have had the same answer if Gumroad had failed and he was a nobody today? What would I have felt if I was in his shoes? The honest answer - I don't know and hopefully never have to find out.

There shouldn't be any sadness in a well thought out decision you made in your past no matter the outcome. Maybe you turned down a job at a startup in favour of a bigger company and that startup became a unicorn. Maybe a stock you sold as soon as it started falling blew up and shot to the moon. I regularly see articles or comments on Reddit about how someone gave away hundreds of bitcoin in exchange for a pizza, or someone sold their Amazon shares in the early 2000s and regret it today. But you have to ask yourself what if the alternative had happened. Amazon shares were in the red for years before they rose rapidly. Sure, there are always going to be people who "predict" a company is going to grow rapidly, or some asset is going to appreciate in value, but for every right prediction there are probably hundreds of similar sounding wrong ones that could sink you. Your gut call isn't just some magical voice from above, it's millions of years of evolutionary biases mixed with responses from your own life experience and trusting it goes a long way.

Steve Jobs had a quote that I've always liked -

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

As part of the Coinbase discussion, investor Dan Romero shared an email he was reminiscing about from over 8 years ago

With BTC being where it is now, Dan could connect the dots that lead him from first hearing about Bitcoin to him now realising what he missed out on by not investing early. Back in 2012, that sentence could've meant nothing to Dan but a general life update from his friend. Had BTC not taken off, those dots would've remained unconnected and this would've been yet another email in the vast digital universe.

An unheard of coin today might be worth millions tomorrow and there's nothing you can do. Maybe one could train themselves to better identify which ideas seem investing in, but that can only take you so far cause execution is everything and even then, some unforeseen circumstances could derail everything in the blink of an eye.

In case you haven't caught on yet, these are just some thoughts I had browsing through Twitter during all this. So many people applauding the early investors, others regretting not getting in on the company or crypto in general. I'll leave you with one final tweet that sums up how I feel about all this, and something I'm sure most people can relate to.

As someone who frequents HackerNews and various other forums, I often see a lot of discussion about privacy, data security and self-hosting. The discussion almost always leads to someone shunning all centralised services that most people use, and pitching Mastodon, Matrix, XMPP or something no one’s ever heard of but that one user is sure is the best decentralised service there is.

However, no matter how good these tools are, I’ve never truly been convinced they’re at a stage where I’d want to use them, or be comfortable recommending them to friends and family. Here are some of my thoughts on why I personally think these services have a long way to go.

Privacy doesn't sell

If you’re someone who’s concerned about privacy, but your friends aren’t, claiming privacy isn’t a good enough selling point for most people. Privacy and Openness are great selling points when choosing a new service, now more than ever. However, they can’t be the only selling point. I’ve come across many a service that promises the highest level of security and privacy but when you use them, you realise why. There’s nothing in the service worth selling even if someone was interested. Many services die out because they focus so much on staying private, they don’t focus on features that would appeal to people who don’t care about privacy, i.e a good majority of the world. Many decentralised services like Social Media or Messaging rely on a network effect, and personally, I wouldn’t invite people to join a service that is noticeably worse in most areas than services that exist. If someone’s regularly using Telegram, it would be tough to convince them to use Matrix in the form that it is currently. Not just does it have fewer features, most importantly it has fewer people. And it has fewer people cause it can’t compete on features just yet.

No Free Lunch

I use Mastodon, a user on the Fosstodon instance. For a long time, I didn’t question how I was able to use it for free, and when I recently started thinking about it, I asked the maintainers what it costs them and how they pay for it. They replied saying it cost them $85 a month to run it on masto.host, and the money was crowdsourced with some users donating regularly. They always kept enough cash to keep them floating for the next 6 months, and the excess was donated to open-source projects they all agreed upon. While this was a really nice thing happening, it doesn’t seem like a scalable solution. Should the service grow to a scale where it can no longer be managed through donations, an instance of a decentralised service isn’t going to get VC funding unless they have some separate side plan to get paying users. Services like Mastodon don’t provide a business plan by default. Many of these services only make money through donations or by offering a cloud-hosted and managed service. Whatever service comes up next, I do hope they can come up with a plan where even other users hosting an instance can get the money needed for maintenance through the users.

The technical wall

One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of online forums, especially ones where talks of decentralisation happen, is how much many people seem to underestimate how technologically abled most of the world is. Services win when they make it easy for the average Joe to use it. Want a chat app? Download one, sign up and you’re ready to go. If someone who’s never heard of a decentralised chat app downloads one to check it out, and the first question it asks is which server do you want to connect to, there’s a good chance you’ve lost them there. Secondly, most people, even if they’re technically abled would find it tough to host and maintain a service. It might be easy to follow some installation steps or spin up a docker container with the service, but if you run into problems, it takes time and some knowledge to be able to debug it (even with the help of StackOverflow) and keep it running. This can’t be expected of everyone, and if people just use a popular instance, it brings us back to the previous problem of the cost of maintenance.

But is it all lost?

Obviously not. The best argument for federated services is the massive success of email. You have a plethora of mail services to choose from, some free, others paid. If you don't trust any of them, you can host your own service but have to deal with the pain of setting it up and getting through all the spam filters. Email isn't perfect even today. There's a lot of phishing and spam mails, but we've come a long way building services to detect the spam and filter it out. Today a lot of decentralised services are being used as "free speech" sites that harbour a lot of fake news, hate speech and more. However, there's scope to work on that and build the required tools to help fix that too. Decentralised services are definitely the way to go in the future, and will take a lot of work to build, maintain, and most importantly, educate and help onboard everyone irrespective of their technical skills.

While you're here, do subscribe to my blog for more of my thoughts and opinions, and let me know what you think about this topic by reaching out to me on Twitter