I used to devour this stuff in the beginning of my career, because I always felt like I was drowning in a job that was asking too much of me. Eventually though I got to a place where I no longer needed anymore of these tips. These productivity systems and life hacks are useful, so it is not bad to explore what is out there, but they are tools and tools are not useful unless they are set to a purpose. Also, it is easy to hit a point of diminishing returns, so in hindsight I kept looking after these life hacks for too long.

Ultimately, for me (and everyone is different) it took an inversion of how I looked at time. Before I had a fixed set of things I wanted to cram into available time, and never felt like I managed this well. Realizing two things changed that: (a) work is effectively infinite and (b) the things worth doing or seeing exceed the capacity of a human life. This made me allocate my time differently: professionally I started radically prioritizing what I worked on and how I worked on it to dig up the most useful work from the infinite backlog (techniques: inbox zero, ooda loop, deliberate pauses for contemplation, job crafting). For my personal life I gave up on trying to keep up and spend my time doing things I enjoy, even if ultimately pointless (like reading HN), without feeling guilty to myself for the things not done. I also turned off notifications for almost everything, so I can choose what I spend time on instead of having it chosen for me by my masters in the cloud.

Still, life has a way of getting in the way, so I’m trying to have a more mindful approach to life, accepting what happens instead of forcing it to be different. This is a work in progress.