Productivity: Instrumental Rationality

Meta: I apologise if this is not of interest to most people on LW. I am posting this here anyway since I estimated there was at least a 5% chance that I would find what I’m looking for here, with minimal investment of my time.

Is anyone here tracking productivity every day? Do you have a fixed schedule? Are you debugging the causes for deviations from schedule and fixing them? What is your goal and why do you think the path you’ve chosen is the best way to achieve that?

I started tracking productivity last week. My last week’s average was 6.20 hours per day (including weekends). I’ve already improved from around 3 hours a day (I’m employed as a software developer, I write backend APIs in Go for a fairly large company).

The existential dread of writing one technically unchallenging API after the next has finally gotten to me, and I want to drastically change my situation as quickly as possible. I started a side project which is making slow progress—I don’t feel comfortable revealing the specifics online, but I’m looking for someone who has a fixed schedule and tracks productivity every day (it’s nice to have social feedback). So far, I’ve been spamming one of my friends for social feedback—but it’s really not working since he’s not as dedicated.

My goal productivity wise is to hit 12 hours /​ day consistently (or an 80 hour week). I expect to get here faster if someone else is also doing the same thing. To be more specific, the workflow I have in mind is send a message after every 2 hours of productive work, talk about how much progress you’ve made, and stress test the path you’ve chosen with constructive negative feedback.

I realise this is not exactly balanced etc., but I’ve already decided I want to do this—so please assume that the productivity goal is a fixed axiom if you decide to comment on this. Thanks!