A Weird Tricks that Prompts Me to be More Productive

02 Feb 2024

A Background

I consider myself to be quite a productive guy. And of course, that statement is self-proclaimed. But, I’ve got quite a nice systems that works great for me and I’ve crafted and gathered a lot of tools that can help me to be even more productive.

But no matter how well the environments around us are, sometimes the problem is within us. Sometimes we just want to lay in bed, reading random HackerNews articles, watching a random dude reacting to any tech stuff, or something similar even though we know back in our mind we have things to do.

And I’m no exception to that.

A Realization

While doing some cleanups to my dotfiles, I realised that I’ve changed my terminal and my Neovim quite often.

And every single time I’ve made a change to that, I’ve felt productive. I’ve tried a quick look at my GitHub contributions graph, and the contribution amount backs this up.

I’ve tried to analyze my coding behaviour in the past. I tried to compare the day when I made a ’look’ changes and the impact on the contributions:

1# Find the latest 'look' changes
2 git log --pretty=format:"%h %ad %s" --date=format:'%Y-%m-%d' --grep='\(theme\|font\|color\|gruvbox\|cat\)'

The result:

 11867ecf 2024-02-02 feat(alacritty): try to use `Monaspace Radon` font
 20edd3a3 2024-02-02 fix(bat): add default theme color
 3ad8e41d 2024-01-25 feat: adjust themes
 425c26a6 2024-01-15 feat(nvim): add gruvbox themes
 5a4e5c98 2024-01-15 feat(iterm2): add gruvbox baby themes
 6e4332fc 2023-12-11 feat(nvim): regular update & change theme to `catppuccin`
 743385c6 2023-11-07 feat(iterm2): use `JetBrains Mono NL` font
 878205fb 2023-10-24 feat: add iterm gruvbox light, make nvim transparent
 921abbe3 2023-10-20 fix(vim): adjust fold indicator and add max line in `treesitter-context`
10a6c0fd1 2023-09-17 feat(nvim, kitty): change theme and addtelescope `cmdline` extension
11
12# And many more

An Exciting Results

After some analysis (read: ’throw a bunch of numbers to a random Google Sheets’), here’s the overview:

As you can see, for the past half a year back, almost every single day that I’ve made some changes to my appearance configurations, weirdly enough the amount of contributions on that day is quite high.

Oftentimes, the the amount of contributions will last for the next few days even stay for a whole week or two.

The Tweaks

So, what on earth I’ve done? Well, quite simply I just changed the font size, font family, colour scheme/theme, and other little stuff that I’m sure a lot of people will find weird (me included).

But I don’t know why, every single time I’ve made those tweaks, I felt so energised. Like I’m ready to conquer the world. Heck, even this article was made after a font change.

What’s next?

I don’t know. I’m just curious to explore more tweaks that I can use to just simply be more productive.

I hope it’s useful 😉.