r/ProductivityGuide

Hi everyone! I'm 19, and I just finished high school. I'll hopefully be starting engineering (or a preparatory engineering program) after the summer, so I have around two months with more free time than I've ever had.

The problem is... I've realized that school took up almost all of my life. I studied a lot, but outside of that I never really built hobbies, projects, or useful skills. Now I don't want to waste another summer just scrolling on my phone.

.I'm naturally a curious person. I love learning about psychology, history, engineering, languages, biographies, aviation, cars, motorcycles, and almost anything interesting. The problem isn't curiosity—it's knowing where to start. If you were 19 again and had one summer before college, what would you do?

I'm looking for things like: Books that are genuinely enjoyable and teach you something (not typical self-help books) ,Websites, courses, YouTube channels, or communities that made you smarter or more curious ,Skills that are actually worth building before university ,Sports or hobbies that improved your confidence or discipline ,Small projects that helped you grow or even looked good on a CV later.

I'd especially love recommendations that made you think differently or changed the way you see the world

I will start, I have relaunched my newsletter which i started in 2024 but last month someone on social media asked me about it and shared some feedback so i kind a decided to restart it and in last month it got 200+ subscribers in it so i m happy.

what about u?

There are a lot of productivity tips that get repeated everywhere.

Some sound too simple to make a difference.

For me, it was tracking what I actually completed each day instead of making bigger to-do lists. It made me more consistent without feeling overwhelmed.

What's one piece of productivity advice that you thought was overrated but ended up helping you?

I feel dumb asking this but does anyone have a productivity app or habit that actually made them do more work, not just spend more time organizing their life?

I keep falling into the same loop where I download an app, set up categories, make a perfect little system, then somehow I’m just maintaining the system instead of doing the thing I was avoiding.

I’m not really looking for the prettiest app or the most complicated setup. Just asking for recommendations from people here who found something simple that actually changed their behavior.

What worked for you and what did you stop using?

So I'm a CSE student, and I usually have a lot of projects going on just because I love building things. But a lot of the time I'd wake up and think, "What should I do today?" and somehow that would lead to procrastination.

So I built something for myself. I'm not trying to sell anything here—it's just a tool I made for myself, and I thought you guys might want to try it too.

The idea is simple: plan your projects, tasks, todos, and habits.

Then, when you wake up, just check your bucket and pick what you want to work on.

Here's the cool part: the bucket automatically organizes everything and shows your tasks in order of priority. It doesn't decide your day for you—you still pick what you want to work on. It just makes it easier to see what matters so you can choose without overthinking.

So yeah, give it a try and let me know how you feel about it. I'd really appreciate any feedback.

https://kiro-rosy.vercel.app/

I'd be happy if it could help even one person.

Recently I've realised that the biggest boosts in productivity often come from small changes and not huge hacks. For instance I've been looking for ways to reduce the constant switching between apps like moving between random tabs.

I tried using many apps like Notion, Springpad Al and few others in my workflow. It's not anything dramatic or life changing, just little tweaks that help keep daily work from getting too chaotic.

What's been a small but noticeable change that helped you be more productive?

I feel like almost everyone starts using a productivity app with good intentions, but eventually stops. If you had to give one reason why you quit, what would it be?

I've spent the last few days reading a lot of discussions here and in other productivity communities.

One thing keeps standing out to me.

The majority of people don't seem to be saying:

"I don't know what I should do."

Instead, they're saying things like:

"I wasted four days scrolling."
"I have 100+ tasks and don't know where to start."
"I removed every distraction, but my mind keeps wandering."
I know my priorities, but I keep doing something else."

That made me wonder if, for many of us, the problem isn't knowledge.

It's staying aligned with what we already decided was important.

I'm curious if others have noticed the same thing.

When you lose a productive day, is it usually because you genuinely don't know what to do...

...or because you knew exactly what mattered but gradually drifted away from it?

Hey Founders!

I've got a genuine question. We obsess over systems for our startups. okrs, sprints, metrics, feedback loops, the whole thing. but like... what about our actual lives??

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Energy management, deep work, personal goals, relationship and many more things that we need to do during the process of building some product. All of it kind of falls apart the moment the startup gets intense.

I'm researching whether a Life OS built specifically for founders would actually be useful. not another notion template. something that treats YOUR life with the same seriousness you give your startup.

So tell me honestly - what's most broken in how you manage your personal life as a founder? what do you wish existed?

No pitch. Genuinely just trying to understand the problem before building anything.

I’ve been spending way too much time trying to understand what people actually do on my websites after they land there. Traffic numbers are fine, but they don’t really answer the useful questions.

Like, are people clicking the pricing button? Are they submitting the form? Are ad clicks turning into leads? Did the Meta pixel fire properly? Is GA4 even tracking the right events?

So I started testing a few tools to make website tracking less annoying. Here’s what I found useful so far:

1. Google Tag Manager

   Still feels like the main base layer. Not the easiest thing to use, but once it’s set up properly, it keeps all the tags in one place instead of editing the website every time.

2. TrackingCoder

   This was useful for avoiding the manual GTM setup part. It scans the site and helps generate tracking for events like forms, button clicks, ad conversions, etc. I’d probably use it when setting up tracking for a new site or fixing a messy one.

3. Hotjar

   Good when numbers alone aren’t enough. Heatmaps and recordings make it easier to see where people pause, rage click, ignore buttons, or drop off.

4. Plausible

   Nice for simple analytics when you don’t want to live inside GA4 dashboards. Not as deep, but way easier to understand at a glance.

5. Stape

   More advanced, but useful if you’re getting into server-side tracking or trying to improve tracking reliability for ads.

My main takeaway is that website tracking becomes a productivity problem really fast. The tools are supposed to save time, but bad setup can waste more time than no setup at all.

Curious what everyone else uses. Do you prefer keeping everything manual in GTM or are no-code tracking tools good enough now?