One reason behind this dissatisfaction is that people simply like to organize their digital work in many different ways, just as you may choose to write your weekly tasks on post-its while your office-mate likes to write them on a whiteboard. And even if you choose your own software, the productivity setup that serves you well in one project or role may be utterly unsuited for the next.
But now, a new category of software is making it possible for anyone to create their own custom productivity dashboards, no coding skills needed. These tools, such as Airtable, Notion, and Coda, each work a little differently, but they all add powerful functionality to basic spreadsheets or text documents to give you the benefits of programming without the hassle of writing your own code. For the past six months, I’ve spent most of my workday inside one of these tools — Coda — and I’m amazed at how much more I can get done by using a productivity dashboard I’ve built myself.
Know the problem(s) you’re trying to solve.
Your frustrations with the tools you’re using now are your best indicators of what you need to build into your own custom dashboard, so start by jotting them down. Then evaluate the different DIY productivity platforms based on how easy they will make it for you to solve those particular problems. In my case, I was trying to address a couple of limitations in the Google Sheet I’d long used to track all my story ideas and pitches: I wanted a bigger edit window, and a way to work more easily with a spreadsheet with many, many columns. Coda solved those problems.