I think this is a great idea. Two days ago I was thinking about creating a simple page on my website where I declare my goals for the day, and then my accomplishments. I still have to do it but I think I will soon.

Over the summer I was working for a small green-technology startup. I was working from home so I had to email my boss at the end of each working day with what I'd done. That accountability was really good in motivating me to maintain productivity.

You could also try out http://www.stickk.com/ :-)
I haven't tried it myself, but that is a site that is created especially for that sort of thing.

Here's what all I got done today:

1. Walked someone through setting up virtualbox on their mac over skype
2. Evaluated software for our startups 'virtual office'
3. Worked on clients website and fixed a bunch of small annoying minor issues
4. Published new massive 2000+ word blog post. Had Ramit Sethi (new york times best selling author) book mark it.
5. Restarted ebook writing by deleting everything because I wasn't happy with how how well the different parts connected. Found more sources to tie everything together, worked on outline, and found more topics to research.

All in all, I'd say it was a more productive day than if I didn't have to type up what all I did. I think I could have been even more productive. I'll be back tomorrow with another update!

Today I did the following:

1. Installed Git and XAMP, configured and downloaded repos, worked on setting up development environment for front end of website.
2. 2 hour Skype chat on virtual office infrastructure, figured out what to do for each category and figured out where to go from there.
3. Worked through first chapter of ebook and outlined storyline and narrative. Collected important facts, dates, names. Ready to write tomorrow morning.

It feels unproductive. If I can execute on 1 and 3 tomorrow, I think I'll feel like today was worth it.

Today was pretty unproductive. I did write quite a bit ~1000 words, and really fleshed out the first chapter and the forward. Obviously, there's more words to be written, but I know where I'm headed. I worked on cleaning up my downloads folder, desktop and general areas of clutter on my computer and on my desk. Not super productive, but not a complete loss.

An interesting observation though: If I'm aiming for 70% success, that's 109 days a year that I'm not productive. That's a lot! I wonder what the implications are of this? Most people probably fail to be productive 100 days a year?

I spent most of today traveling around and generally out and about. Not much on the productivity side, but I wanted to introduce two ideas.

1. Context. I've set up two laptops in my office. One laptop is strictly for work, the other is for play. When I start to work on the play one, I move over to the work one and vice versa. The idea behind this is that there will develop a mental break that says, "When I sit on this computer, I work" and hopefully that will help prevent distractions.

2. I've created three groups that an activity can fall in. The first one is high impact, and I want this to be 60% of my time. The next is maintenance, planning, reading books, etc. That should account for 25% time. The last is 15% time and for me is basically messing around on the internet consumes 90% of this time. I'm sure other minor things could consume this time. This is a result of trying to plan out every 10 minute and then 30 minute block of time during the day and failing horribly at it. I think If I know what I want my day to look like, it shouldn't matter what order my day comes in.

I've spent a lot of the last few days planning, so I don't have much to say I got done.

I haven't done much time tracking lately, but I can talk about the context switching. I've been using it for 4 days now, and it has made me HUGELY more productive. I must be rewiring my brain to know that I only work on my macbook and only surf on the ubuntu machine.

I didn't notice this until I started doing this, but what I'd do is work until I got stuck. Then I'd open up cnn, HN, or something like that and start surfing and never really get back to work. Now I keep working through that, because I'm in a context.

I think this first step makes other productivity hacks much more useful!

Really enjoying following this Noah.

> I didn’t notice this until I started doing this, but what I’d do is work until I got stuck. Then I’d open up cnn, HN, or something like that and start surfing and never really get back to work. Now I keep working through that, because I’m in a context.

Another two things that can help with this -

1. Go somewhere without internet at all.
2. Turn off automatically connecting to the internet, so you have to sign on to do something.

The second way is surprisingly effective - just the 10 seconds interrupts and forces conscious thought.