My strategy to overcome productivity challenges

It was summer of 2007 and I was 12 years old when my dad bought me a book. It was not just any kind of book, it was my favorite book I've never had. I always had great grades at school so he would buy me anything I want. We never had a lot of money, just a lot of debt, so you learn to appreciate little things like that.

Now, you're going to be surprised when I tell you, but it was a book about programming. I was finally able to learn what was bugging me for a year. I finally had a chance to create something from nothing. If you're unfamiliar with programming, it's pretty similar to writing. Sometimes the shorter and simpler the code is, the better the results are. I don't want to brag about programming (at least not for now), but I want to tell you what happened next.

So the book has arrived, and there's a few things one usually does when he or she gets a book.

What makes reading an art?

At first, you read it so fast, skipping through pages, you get so excited about the content. You simply forget it takes time to actually understand what you read. Yet, you get that feeling of fulfillment. It's not about the book itself, not even about the content or the way it was written. You feel great because you know what you'll be able to do once you finish it.

In my case it was a college book that was way too complicated for someone of my age to understand. But the power of will is one of the most amazing mysteries of life. Of course, there are some far more important things than programming when you're 12. In my case that was playing soccer with my cousins and friends. And like always there is this boring, dull time you've got to spend at school and doing homework. To be clear, I've never been impressed with school, I always felt like I could and should take my education in my hands, because I've always loved learning.

You know, when you're very young and someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, you choose something totally unexpected and then they laugh and think you're so cute. But what they forgot is something really important. Maybe they didn't forget it, but they told themselves it was crazy to think like that. After all, how many people you know end up doing what they want? And I really mean WANT it. Are you willing to risk everything you have and everything you have achieved for whatever you work on? If you don't, you should probably take a step back and dream! :)

So what is the important thing they forget?

People forget that when they were young, the reason why they always answered the same question in a different way, was that they thought everything was possible. When we get older, we tend to find the closest thing to a comfort zone we can find and let life go by.

I would lie if I said I knew that back then. I definitely wasn't sure what I was going to do with myself. All I know is that I would have moments when I would sit and study for hours and feel happy afterwards (not for school of course). It's weird because it didn't help me at all with what I want to do with my life. In fact it would just make me more confused because there were so many things I considered interesting.

But let me go back to my reading process for a moment. After I read the book quickly I was not satisfied with my knowledge. I knew examples in it were not meant for someone of my age, but yet I wanted to master it.

So.. How does a 12 year old read a complicated book?

The short answer is, the 12 year old wakes up early, really early. What I did that summer would affect everything I would do ever since.

My dad would go to work around 5:30 AM, and it was not just once I would tell him good morning. I've decided firmly to:

Wake up as early as I can
Read a chapter from the book until I understand it clearly
Write the code when I was allowed to turn on the computer
Have time for playing soccer with my friends :)

Even though I didn't really understand it back then, one of the most useful things my parents have done for me was limiting my "computer time" to 1 or sometimes 2 hours per day. It not only did a lot for my health, but also it forced me to be productive. Naturally, I used to play games for hours before they saw it was getting out of control. So once the rule was set, I knew I couldn't do much in any game in such a limited time frame. Then I realized I had to use it in a smart, systematic way.

I would do the same every morning all summer. And I've achieved more than I could've ever dreamed of. I was beginning to understand what programming was all about. Thinking about concepts like pointers, references, classes, objects, encapsulation, code organization and many more helped me to learn how to think analytically.

I'm not 12 years old any more (or why I'm writing this)

So what happened in the meantime? I don't really like to get attention a lot. But what happened in the last few years made me realize some things about challenges. I've had many, really. I've failed so many times I would need to turn this post into a book if I talked about every and each of them.

After a quite successful "school career" (sometimes I like to consider myself funny :) I enrolled the same college that book was written at. So, how can someone who read such books at the age of 12 fail so miserably as I did?

Shortly, what happened is that I've got an IT job just before finishing high school and spent whole summer working there, met some amazing people learned a lot, and.. Well, I've started a startup with my friend. And I would argue having a startup is the hardest thing in life.

Naturally, having a startup takes a lot of time and energy of everything else, at least if you do it right. So I have really messed up college and I had to repeat a whole year. It's especially hard when you need to change the entire product, literally.

I could write a lot about how hard it was, or what exactly happened, what were the reasons I failed and so on, but it would take so much time and space so I'm just going to leave it behind. So please trust me when I say I failed in pretty much every area of life.

However, the exact reason why I'm writing this is that right now I have my last chance to stay at college and after we had to change everything at work we finally started to have a steady growth and we're getting a lot smarter at business side. As you can imagine, that is very time consuming. Since I've got a month since the finals (and it's my last chance to stay, there are 5 exams) I had to come up with a system.

My hustle system

This photo shows all the programming work I do in a week.

Now it may not seem that much, but consider that A) I get a lot more done and B) I study for the rest of the day. And I have to study a LOT, I've been at college just a few times this entire year. The average sleep time I had in the last two weeks is a little above 5 hours.

What I've been doing can be summarized as:

Wake up at 6 AM
Walk to the office for 20 minutes
While walking read books about the things that are useful for the business and life (marketing, copywriting, etc.)
Work without any distractions, fully focused for a few hours (since I'm the only one in the office during that time)
Take a little rest and continue with reading books while resting - it's extremely thankful time to read
Repeat the working - reading process
After finishing every planned task start studying

Now, how do I study?

What I've done is I defined what I need to study by a specific class. For example I have to study Calculus II, Electrical engineering, Physics I and so on. Then I took every chapter from those classes and set exact time ranges for each. Separation of chapters per studying theory and solving problem sets and homework helped a lot. Also, for every class I've set two time periods right before exams so I could have a few days:

to go through each homework and extra problems one more time
for going through past exams

It's not really how much time you spend on it, it's all about organization. So this step is extremely important. If you're interested I could write a much more detailed plan and describe how exactly I do it. I use free apps so there are no costs.

The results

I've used the similar system when I didn't spend any time at college and still managed to pass every exam. This time I had to take it to a whole another level because of lack of the time.

I'm using the system every single day for two weeks already. What I found amazing is that every day I'm able to get a good rest while still managing to do everything. That's definitely the biggest difference between it and anything else I've tried in the past. Usually I would feel exhausted while not managing to do half the work I do now. So for example I've managed to be exactly where I wanted to be with studying, completely finished the change of our product's UI and fully read 2 extremely helpful books on marketing (I've just started to read one about copywriting).

Keep in order for me to succeed in it, I had to apply these two most important things about the strategy correctly:

Wake up as early as you can, no excuses
Organize every single step, even if you mess it up, you're going to be able to make up for every time you miss a deadline - because you'll feel more pressure when you can see the deadlines written somewhere

I apologize for all the grammar mistakes, I'm not a native speaker. My goal is just to help anyone having a similar problem.

I'm definitely willing to work on the method and adding to it, if you have any suggestions I'm here! Thank you for your time!

I edited every photo in this post in a free online photo editor. I'm going to write something about it soon!