So, This Is What the Most Productive MONDAY Looks Like for Me?! 🔥👌😲

This is what the day looked like:

🌘 I slept at 1 AM Sunday’s night.

☀ And woke up at 4 AM on a Monday morning (intentionally).

I’ve been meaning to make a drastic change in my schedule for quite some time now, but my time is hardly my own when I’m interviewing for a position at a few companies. Wrote about it in my 2017 Year In Review.

⚡ I meditated for a while and began my work at 5 AM.

📺 I’m recording my new online course → VSCode.pro nowadays.

📹 In the next six hours, I recorded about ~10 videos and that’s a lot of work.

🚀 My recording workflow is currently a work in progress. It’s changing faster than the speed at which new JavaScript frameworks are being released. I do a lot while recording a single video — call it over-engineering but it’s how it is. Here’s a gist of it all:

1. First of all, I prepare a topic, thinking about what I am going to talk
2. Then I switch on recording in Audio Hijack (custom workflow thanks to Brian) — this stops any noise and too loud voice print from getting recorded. Which results into a generally clean audio recording from even a USB mic like mine (details about what I use)
3. Then I loop this audio via Loopback to create a custom audio device within my system that is my main audio device
4. Then I use SwitchResX to change my screen resolution to 1280 x 720 with HiDP to record at 16:9 which is a good standard
5. After that I switch on recording via Screenflow — my screen and the Loopbacked audio from AudioHijack (which is in turn recording my audio via Rode Podcastor)
6. Then after recording a single video, I create a folder named after the lesson I just created, then I save it as a 1-REC-RAW.screenflow file then I make a copy of it and rename it to 2-REC-Proccessed.screenflow — from which I export lossless audio and save it as 3-Audio-RAW.aiff
7. After that I open Adobe Audition CC 2018 and start a predefined preset for a multitrack (thanks for Joshua who helped me build the preset) — inside this preset I import the Raw audio file from the last step, I process it a little, and then export the entire multitrack session which I in turn export as a 4-Audio-Processed.mp3 file
8. This new processed audio file is what I import in my 2-REC-Proccessed.screenflow file where I process both the audio and video files — trim down long puases, mistakes, umz and aaz
9. Finally, I export a 1920 x 1080 video file called 5-Video.mp4 from screenflow ready to be uploaded at my Vimeo pro account with custom export template
10. Then I play the video to see if it’s good and upload it to Vimeo pro

🙈 That’s a lot of work for one single video recording, that you’ll watch in what 2 to 5 minutes. I wrote more about this workflow and over-engineering in my 2017 Year In Review.

👌 So, when I say that I recorded and post-processed ~10 videos in six hours, that’s an achievement — I am so proud of. Highest I could ever go.

☕ Drank a cup of coffee after a couple of weeks. Trying to do away with coffee-addiction for a couple of years now.

😴 At 11 AM I watched my daily dose of English TV Series and slept again.

☄ Woke up again at 3 PM and was pretty fresh to start the work again.

🤖 Then a couple of developers wanted consultancy and support so I took an hour off my schedule to jump on a call and helped them with a project.

❌ On the last Saturday, I arranged this #GlobalAzure meetup and lost my memory card with all the pictures in it. Wrote an email to send to the attendees about what had happened. All I was left with were these Instagram Stories my wife recorded while I was talking about Azure Cognitive Services with MongoDB Atlas project that I have been building. Give it a watch →

🔥 At around 6 PM I recorded a VSCode hot tip to share on Twitter. I then deployed the hot-tip via pug based static site builder I wrote which generates hot tips for me that I build with Azure functions and deploy with Netlify.

🕌 I also managed to meditate/pray five times on Monday — incredible AH!

🍵 Then I took a cup of tea with a few kebabs thanks to my wife Maedah.

💰 Had to deal with a few taxation issues out of the blue. Pretty strange!

🗑 Wrote a small open source library and managed a couple of issues/PRs at GitHub. With over hundred GitHub #OpenSource repos I do that almost daily.

💪 Finally, at 8:30 PM I was at the gym. Spent an hour on cardio/treadmill, and then about 45 minutes exercising for biceps/triceps and shoulders, including a few aerobic exercises.

🍲 Came back home to eat dinner, watched an episode of Billions and went back to bed by 1 AM. What a day it was.

I slept twice in 24 hours and worked for ~10 hours, with 3 hours of exercise and other stuff. Never imagined a Monday could be so productive.

👇 Here’s what my RescueTime data looks like. Pretty sure it was more than 85% productive — but I’ll take 85 any day of the week.

🤔 Humph, that was a lot! Even to write about.

BTW. I loved the idea of sleeping and waking up twice in 24 hours. It’s the best way to maintain positive energy. I used to follow three different schedules early on in my career but this one just might be the answer to it all. If I could do that 15 days every month, I’ll be three times more productive as I am now. That focus would do wonders.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Peace! ✌