Productivity Hack for Bootstrapping a Company on 2 Hours a Day

Here it is, the single greatest productivity hack I’ve learned while building GroupTrip.

Perform a mental backup before you stop working. #

Take 30 seconds in your editor of choice and write down what you would be doing for the next 15 minutes if you didn’t have to stop.

When you come back to work, you have an instruction sheet that you can immediately tackle without having to think.

If I sit down at my laptop from scratch, it often takes me about 20-30 minutes to get in the zone development-wise. I have to remember where I left off, what I was doing and load all of the pertinent info into my head before I can pick up where I left off. If I only get an hour or two at a time to work on a product, that means anywhere from 30%-50% of my time is wasted just getting to the point of being productive. Ouch!

This is kind of a micro version of Marc Andreeson’s write three tasks before you go to bed except instead of writing the major things you want to accomplish in the next day, you write down just enough detail to get you back into the frame of mind you were in before you stopped.

It takes 30 seconds and easily saves me 30 minutes of dev time a day. Not a bad ROI.

Your turn, what keeps you productive working on your side project?