Productivity Systems

Following up on The Verge’s miniseries on productivity and how people work…well the latest episode is about and productivity systems. As usual, definitely worth checking out!

However for this week, and this follow-up I thought I’d write about my personal productivity system. Is it perfect? No. Is it ever evolving? Absolutely. In fact, in the end I’ll try to explain where I want it to evolve. I think that’s important to note here. If you feel like you lack a system and it’s all in chaos, it might not be, it’s just important to think about what is actually happening and organize around the habits you already have. You may not realize that you write all of your tasks down on sticky notes…and you feel overwhelmed by physical objects all over your desk. So you might decide “forget it! I’m going to stick everything into Google Tasks” and that won’t feel right. However, maybe a digital kanban board would work well for you and it’ll feel good!

I’ve been working professionally for…about 8 years now. If we include my internships, it’s getting close to 10 years. For many of those years, things just kinda felt like chaos in my brain. Over that time I’ve gone from iOS to Android, back to iOS for my mobile computing, which is a large part of productivity (to a point). I’ve bounced around between methods and tooling, and this is where I’ve landed.

A couple of years ago, I was very inspired by Scott Hanselman’s talk on “Scaling Yourself”. I have a blog that I’d like to use more. I have a deep love for the web I want to continue building for. I love games, and music, and my professional job, and it has at times felt like too much.

Personal productivity isn’t about doing everything, but about choosing what is most important (or perhaps most rewarding), and then doing those things. Makes sense right? A key item I took away from this talk was the rule of 3. Pick your top 3 priorities for the week, make sure those are the right things, and then each day work on 3 things that help accomplish the 3 items you want to get done for the week.

All of my work projects live in Asana, which I think is a great cross team, small team tool. I know of a couple people who use it for their personal projects but I’m not there yet. So at the start of each week, I check the Asana and build my top 3 priorities out of those dates. I use OneNote to mark those things down and then I list out each day. Sometimes I can plan ahead for a specific day but it doesn’t always work like that. So in the end, you get something like,

Top 3 priorities for the week
– Item A
– Item B
– Item C

Top 3 priorities for Monday
– Item X
– Item Y
– Item Z

Top 3 priorities for Tuesday
– TBD
– TBD
– TBD

Top 3 priorities for Wednesday
– TBD
– TBD
– Meeting for Item C

Top 3 priorities for Thursday
– Code review for Item A w/ person
– TBD
– TBD

Top 3 priorities for Friday
– TBD
– TBD
– TBD

Each day I use Microsoft To Do to put in all items I need to do. If it’s a meeting on my calendar, it becomes a task in To Do. Lastly, I use the auto-booking feature in Outlook to set up at least 2 hours of focus time per day. For the most part, I’m fine with meetings getting booked over that but folks tend to not do so, which is nice.

At the end of each week, I review my week in OneNote and see if those top 3 items were accomplished. If yes, then great! If no, usually that means something else took its place and it’s important to consider why that happened. It’s totally ok that it does but doing that reflection can help prevent future fire drills.

Everywhere I have ever worked as relied on Outlook and Office 365 (Microsoft 365?) software and web apps.

At Home

For as structured as I am with my work…at work, it is so much less structured at home that it’s a little silly. Joslyn and I both use iOS for our phones. I balance between MacOS and Windows 11 fairly evenly. but lean towards more MacOS. We have a shared note for things like groceries but not much else. I have a gmail account that is my primary email but I also have a self-hosted email account, that also includes a task list and calendar.

I’m also going to just commit and put my web projects on Asana, which feels like overkill for them to be honest, but I think it’ll be a good way to keep on track. I’ve used the rules for 3 for those before, and that’s worked well but it’s not typically written anywhere outside of a random…notes file.

Wrapping Up

Sheesh this turned into a bit of a ramble. I think about this stuff a lot and my lack of personal organization, in the face of my very organized professional self feels a little…sad. However, no one is perfect and I think that I can really get myself to the place I want to go.