If you want to do good work, the first thing you have to do is to get rid of the idea of doing good work. Especially about productivity. Just drop everything you know about “working”.

The next step is to define the objective, the goal.

then you get down to planning. Find the shortest path to the goal and start doing it.

Try your best to be execution-centered, it’s not necessarily the most important part of a work, but it is associated with most failures of work.

If you find yourself perfectly executing everything and keeping a routine, there’s a chance that you’re doing it right.

If you find yourself constantly forgetting to-dos and there’s a lot of misery in what you are doing, then you can be even more certain that you’re doing things right, but that’s also when most people choose to tap out because it sucks a lot.

Opportunity cost is huge, and the notion of sacrifice is enhanced when you’re doing boring work. I don’t believe having fun is necessarily the key to the success here as opposed to what most silicon valley people say. It’s usually just raw dogging stuffs that are honestly straight up disgusting. Try not to masturbate yourself with sf life-style porn, please.

Once you start doing work, you have to design the reward and punishment for yourself. buying a really nice sounding keyboard is a good reward, canceling on your friends is probably a punishment. You have to have this sort of agency over the things that trigger your happy hormones. It’s an art. try to keep yourself at 40% happiness index, don’t jack it up with (literal) masturbation or nicotine/cocaine consumption since the drop will take quite a while to recover from. But if you find it constantly dropping for no apparent reason, you need to add a “happiness injection mechanism” to your routine, for example, purchasing a really nice pen that makes you feel good when writing, or getting up early for that “I’m better than average” delusion. These are the things that potentially make the process of working slightly more pleasant and it should fix the work depression in most cases. If it still doesn’t work, I also recommend drinking during the work, beers work the best for me.

Try your best to lose yourself in what you are doing, not for several months but for a few weeks, you will find yourself deviating from the path a little but still end up learning a lot of things.