A few ideas on some points you touch:

• Working out: I have all I need at home (pullup bar, basic set of weights). I do my strength training in around 20-30 min. Sometimes I even use the minute of rest between sets to cook. I couldn't be fit if I had to go somewhere like a gym to train, it just takes a lot of time. Unless you are into lifting super-heavy and you need advanced equipment, why not stay at home?
• Meals:
  • Rule #1 is to have your kitchen well stocked. Every saturday, I decide what I'll eat during the next week. Then, I write what I need in order to cook all of that and I go and buy it. This way, I never find myself not having the ingredients I need.
  • Rule #2: always cook some extra servings. If I do pasta bolognese for someone else and me, I'll actually cook 4 or 6 servings of sauce instead of 2. The additional servings go to the freezer. Now I can have lunch some week day in 15min by just boiling pasta and heating up the sauce again (and I'll probably do that while I work out). So, I get a healthy, home cooked, tasty lunch and workout in ~30 min. If you want to take this to the extreme, you can do some batch cooking on the weekend and have all your meals for the week. I don't need to got that far, so I don't.
  • Not a rule, but more of a tip: knowing how to cook a lot of different things let's you find meals that suit your life (due to the time you have right now for cooking, due to the ingredients you have right now if your fridge, etc). Investing in knowing how to cook many different meals provides you more flexibility that makes things easier.

On the rest of them: my work organization is a mess. But let me challenge you here: why do you wanna be so crazy efficient?

I think it's much more important to pick the right tasks than to be crazy productive in doing them. I don't mean to say being productive is not nice, but I wouldn't obsess over it. There is a lot of people doing stupid/unnecessary/pointless stuff in a super efficient way, effectively getting them... nowhere.

Instead, you could make sure you are doing the right things, peacefully do them at a normal, sustainable pace, and happily go to sleep every night knowing you did what you could and you are one step closer to whereever it is you want to be.

On days I want to get work done, I change my environment ever so slightly to change the tone. My PC I work at is the same as the one I use for entertainment, so this part is pretty important for me. Maybe you put up a shoji screen or change the temperature of the lights in the room, or open the blinds. Maybe just throwing on some background music.. Whatever ends up working for you.

If you have the freedom to do so, dedicate a weekday as a day to get non-work stuff done. I call these my admin days.. Days that are dedicated to doing chores, shopping, making appointments.. That sort of thing.

I've recently started a new plan to deal with frequent context switching and getting bogged down in low marginal value work. Each week, I'm ranking my top four priorities and devoting one day to each of them.

That might mean limiting your number of concurrent projects, or just putting some on the back burner for a week.

I'm a big proponent of taking breaks to stretch or walk around, whenever you start feeling burnt out.

Fortunately for me, my wife handles the meals.

How do you plan your workday? - look outside and check the weather, if it's raining something computer related. Sunny garden/wood work.


Do you limit SN/social media in some way or use browsing blockers? Definitely 30 minutes in the morning and in the evening, that's enough.

Do you limit the number of concurrent projects? No, dozens on the go all the time switching between them.

How do your breaks look like? Espresso.

If you cook at home are there tricks you use to optimize the time it takes? Batch cook is a must.

Where does family time, walking, chilling, working out fit in your day? After the school run, beach time with the kids and dogs. 

I create a file called YYYY-MM-DD.txt at the start of each day.

In it, I write my daily tasks, takeaways from meetings I attended, people I spoke with, and everything I learned from that day. I store each file in a directory called notes.

When I need to find something, it's as easy as :

grep "thing" 2022-*

At the end of each year, I create a file called YYYY-summary.txt with important information that I want to carry over into the next year.

I've used this process for 15 years. It's simple, efficient, and, best of all, free.

I am in the same boat. I actually started trying to use a physical kanban board I created in my office with cards for work and personal stuff. It hasn't stuck yet but it's an idea.

Man, people have all these elaborate plans... I just sort of turn up and avoid as many distractions (i.e. meetings) as possible. I work in software and need 3-4 hours of unbroken concentration to get anything decent done.

This is just how I do things; not advice...

• I wear pretty much the same thing everyday.
• I eat pretty much the same thing everyday. Maybe I'll eat out once or twice a week to mix things up.
• I use my inbox as my punch list. If it's not in there, it doesn't exist.
• I put my devices on DND during business hours and only check new messages at 3 points during the day (when I start my work day, after lunch, and an hour before I clock out) just to make sure I'm not missing something important. This frees me from most distractions.
• I take frequent breaks as my brain requires them – this could be a stroll around the office/house, or 20 minutes of Stacker News, gaming, youtube or even work in the garden.
• Once or twice a day I go for a 30-45 minute walk around the neighborhood. Usually in the morning before I do anything. But also if someone pisses me off.
• My family... where the hell IS my family???

I’m a teacher. On a given day, I have to teach students for 3.5 hours and attend a meeting for another 2. That doesn’t leave me with much time for anything else. So my methodology is to complete one important task every day, come hell or high water haha

Erm I post and comment on SN intermittently throughout the day. Because I want to keep my cowboy hat. Also because I find that receiving sats for my written content helps me from feeling resentful about the things I don’t really wanna do at work xP