Productivity now and then

Two days ago I overheard a discussion at another restaurant table about personal productivity early in one’s career and later on. One of the participants said something like that they simply weren’t as productive as before. From time to time I get pretty much the same feeling but thinking about it for a bit longer, I actually don’t think I’m less productive than before. Especially when I work on things like webmentiond I can produce lots of output at a good quality level in basically no time at all.

What changed over the last decade, though, is that my work no longer consists exclusively of producing code. Oftentimes decisions on a high level have to be made. My brain, for some reason, simply doesn’t count this as productive time even-though it most certainly is! Making decisions is extremely taxing to my brain and especially in the evening I’m more often than not too tired to even decide on things like what to eat the next day.

But also when it comes to code, the systems I now work on are far more complex than earlier in my career. Heck, 6 months ago I basically created an experimental backup systems for data stored in Kubernetes clusters with support for multiple data stores and retention plans in two weeks or so. That’s definitely up from implementing a wishlist in an online shop. What I need now, though, is more structure. I doubt that nowadays I could get anything done without some kind of task organisation system like GTD or bullet journaling. Earlier, my brain could simply work better within a chaos.

Or did my own definition of chaos just change and in what areas I deem it acceptable? 🙄