Hello everyone! 
I’m mattozzo, and today I’m going to talk to you about a really important topic, fundamental to do a nice job, but quite ignored from the majority of the population: productivity!
I’ve seen so many people talking about motivation, but not many talks about productivity! So I decided to write an article by myself, putting all the knowledge I’ve got in the past few years into one single article!
Now you may be thinking: “I’m yet super productive, I don’t need to waste my time reading this article!” Wait! I’m 100% sure that in this tutorial you’ll find some tips that you didn’t know before! If you will not then that’s okay, you simply lost your time (I’m sorry for that).
So let’s begin!
Schedule your work
That’s pretty obvious, right?
Well, it is. But not everyone do that or knows how to make a good schedule.
To make the perfect (not really perfect, but close to it) schedule you have to take in consideration the following conditions:
- Time available
- Tasks to complete
It’s really important to take in consideration these aspects, since not balancing them could lead to more stress, less productivity and consequently more waste of time! We don’t want waste of time!
I like to do my schedule the simplest possible, with not too many colors and all the necessary informations.
However the schedule is your, and you decide how to do that: with different pens, with colors, on a sheet of paper or on an agenda.
That’s your personal schedule, so I suggest to take some time and find what’s the best (use a sheet of paper for this. You don’t want your agenda to be full of doodles).
What I discourage is to do it on the computer, since it’s not as immediate to access as the “physical” schedule. And the physical schedule can be positioned anywhere, while the computer one can’t. But that’s up to you.
Organize your time
Now you may be wondering: “Matt, why did you make a paragraph just to talk about time?”
Well, that’s simple: time is not only the time at your disposal, but it’s the time of the work sessions (The time of non interrupted work) or the time of the breaks too!
Since I’ve talked about work sessions, I’ll talk about how to organize the work sessions.
I use a pretty cool method to organize my work sessions that’s called the Pomodoro technuiqe.
What you do is basically get your work time and cut it into slices, each one of 25 minutes, alternated with 5 minutes of break after each work session
During these 25 minutes you have to be 100% focused, no distractions, and during the break of 5 minutes break you have to be 0% focused, no work.
Just get up from your chair and do something else, but don’t stay on your workspace.
During the work time don’t look at the timer, and remove all the distractions.
That’s a good technique for numerous reasons, where in my opinion the most important is staying motivated.
“Alright, now I know how to maximize my time productivity, I know how to work for longer and now I can do my 20 hours work shift!”
NO, YOU CAN’T!
You can’t work that much, it’s crazy! You have to take in consideration that you need to sleep, to eat and to take a shower!
You can’t skip sleep just because of work! Sleep is one of the most important things in life: it keeps you motivated, it gives you energies, it lets your bad thoughts go away, and a lot of other benefits.
So why should you give them up?
Remember to sleep at least 8 hours everyday. Without sleep you don’t go anywhere.
Organize your work
That’s something that everybody should do, no matter the age or the work.
“Okay, now I know that I have to organize my work, but how?”
Get your main task, for example making a game, and subdivide it into smaller peaces. For example they could be:
- make the map
- code the map
- make the swords
- code the swords
- make the gui
- code the gui
Now we have the list of our tasks! Now get the tasks and write them in descending order from the hardest to the easiest.
- make the map
- make the swords
- code the swords
- make the gui
- code the map
- code the gui
Get the hardest task, in this case “make the map”, and do it. No matter how hard is it or how bad you are at it. Just do it.
I know, this may be frustrating to do, but trust me, your motivation will stay high until the end of the project!
But that’s not everything! Now you have to decide when to complete each task!
Let’s get our list, and let’s assign to each task a deadline or a determined amount of time to complete it:
- make the map (day 1)
- make the swords (day 2)
- code the swords (day 2)
- make the gui (day 3)
- code the map (day 3)
- code the gui (day 3)
You don’t feel satisfied yet? Alright, let’s add a time deadline!
- make the map (day 1) (18:00)
- make the swords (day 2) (16:00)
- code the swords (day 2) (18:00)
- make the gui (day 3) (14:00)
- code the map (day 3) (16:00)
- code the gui (day 3) (18:00)
That’s how I like to organize my work.
You can organize it as you want, but remember: not too little, not too much. An halfway.
Keep your workspace ordered and tidy
Attention: the workspace we’re going to talk about is not the Roblox workspace, but your real workspace, so your desk or your table
Your workspace is one of the most important tool at your disposal. If you use it right, you can get a big boost in your productivity. But how?
Keep it tidy
That seems to be stupid, but it isn’t. Let’s say you have two desks:
This one
And this one
Which one would you choose?
Obvious, the second one!
But why?
Because it’s more tidy!
I don’t say it has to be shiny, but you shouldn’t make it look like a dump!
It’s really important to tidy your desk since it will be your best friends while working, and if your best friend is smelly, dirty and sweaty it will not be that enjoyable to stay with him…
I forgot, tidy your computer too. It’s not a pleasure to use an oily mouse or to type on a dusty keyboard, especially if you are allergic to it (like me).
Keep it like a Zen Garden
You probably know what a Zen Garden is: it’s a garden made expressly for the purprose of the meditation and peace.
So why not do the same with your workspace?
For example, you can put a little plant on the left of your desk, or a small lamp on the right.
Find something that helps you concentrate. For example, I like placing a bottle of water on the left of my computer. It makes me feel like: “Wow, what a relaxing place!”.
That’s all subjective, so I can’t give a real advice. The only thing that you can do is to try and see what fits the best!
Remember: all the methods here presented are personal, so you may be finding helpful doing something else to keep it the best looking possible.
Remove all the distractions
I could have put it into the “keep your work space tidy and ordered” section, but it’s way more important and long to discuss to put it into another section.
The first thing to do while working is to get your phone away.
Put it in another room, into a closet, over a wardrobe or somewhere else, but keep it away from you. With this I mean to keep it silented too.
The second thing to do is to stay away from internet. Use it only if you strictly need it, like to search someting on the Wiki or to ask for help, but don’t open other pages.
It happened to me a lot of times to open a certain page because I needed to do something and after a few seconds getting trapped into Twitter for up to half an hour.
Incredible!
Right now I don’t know any good website locker (for example to stay away from social media), but I’ll search for a good one!
The third thing you can do is to hide your timer (do you remember the pomodoro technuique?) and to not look at it for any reason. Any. Only if you have to go to the bathroom or if the house is going on fire.
Here’s the fourth thing, in my opinion the most important one, and is to remove all the noises.
And here comes the bad news. With noise I mean music too.
I don’t say that because I’m a bad guy who don’t want you to listen to your favourite songs, but I say it because it distracts you!
But here comes the good news. You can listen to some music, but it have to meet the following criteria:
- No singing
- Low volume
- Something natural, like the rain in the forest
Try listening too this kind of music and you will notice that not only you prefer this one while working, but it seems to be less noticeable too!
If your problem is not the music, but something else like your brother screaming while playing Fortinite or your mother singing in the shower then you can do these things to make them less noticeable:
- politely ask the person the noise come from to lower their voice or their radio/something else
- close the door
- put your earphones on, but no music
- take a break until the noise lowers
The fourth thing you can do is to not bring food with you
“Why can’t I eat my favourite biscuits while working?”
It’s simple, It distracts you! And don’t say no, cause it does to everyone.
If you bring food with you it’s going to distract you in various ways:
- First, your thoughts will be on the biscuits (or the food you brought) and not on your work.
- Second, putting the food on your desk will draw your attention to it.
- Third, eating your food while working can cause you to dirty everything: The mouse, the keyboard and even your desk.
But here comes the good news: You can bring water with you!
Water usually don’t have showy packaging, so the first and the second problem are gone. Water doesn’t dirty (if you pour it on the desk it will, so be careful) and it’s good to drink when you are thirsty. Please don’t drink too much or you’ll need to go to the bathroom.
That’s it! Now you know what to do against distractions!
Use all the tools at your disposal
That’s really important. If you don’t use all the tools you have you can end up losing big amounts of time!
Only with experience you can can say if a tool is useful or not for you, and if you have a certain experience you probably know this yet. If you don’t have that much experience then I can show you some useful tools that you may like (These are mainly for scripters and builders, but I’ll talk about some tools that may be useful for any user).
Plugins
Everyone knows what a plugin is, but not everybody uses it. Plugins are really useful when we talk about productivity, since they can complete tasks that would require minutes to complete into a few seconds.
Here are some links of Youtube videos talking about the most useful plugins out there:
- Video by Model Creator
- Video by @Alvin_Blox
- Video by @UseCode_Tap
Flowchart
If you don’t know what a flowchart is, is basically a graphical representation of your code made of rectangles (and other similiar shapes) and lines.
Here is an example:
A flowchart can be really useful when talking about big and complex codes, like the code of a spaceship or of a robot. Luckily a flowchart isn’t that hard to write, but if you don’t like it you can use the pseudocoding language!
Pseudocoding language
The pseudocoding language it’s a written rappresentation of your code in a language that’s an halfway between english (or any other language) and machine language (in this case, Lua).
Here’s an example:
Blueprints
A blueprint can be really helpfull when building or modeling, since it gives you an image of what you want to achieve, and it lets you “copy it” reaching a precise result.
You can search for blueprints online (like here) or you can draw them by yourself if you want something more personalized.
Paper
The good old paper!
Paper can be used for a lot of things, like to write flowcharts, blueprints, sketches or ideas.
I always have some of them near my desk, just in case I’ll need to write an idea or a note.
These are pretty much all the tools that comes into my mind! If you’d like to add some other tools (for example for artists, since I’ve not talked about them) you are welcome!
Thanks for reading this article! I hope you found it useful and interesting!
If you enjoyed this article please, leave a like. By this way you show me that you like my content!
I hope to see you on the next tutorial!
Bye 
thanks!