I eventually pieced together my productivity system over the course of several years. I, too, was entrenched in the idea of newer, cooler, super awesome time-saving hacks and tools. Over time, my interest in keeping up with those tricks died.
That said, this is meant to be more of a guideline than the Gospel. Your productivity system should be a perfect reflection of you and your quirks, not mine.
As I like to say, be an engineer, not a scientist
Note: Great quote: “Be an engineer, not a scientist”
Step 1: Identify What You Are Trying to Achieve
If you were going on a road trip, what’s the first thing you would do to map out your travels?
…you’d start with the destination.
Try this exercise for coming up with a rock-solid goal:
Define a goal and set a deadline (ie. Make your goals SMART)
“I want to grow my blog to 1,000 email subscribers in 3 months.”
Define how much time you can work on it
“I can spend 2 hours per day working on this.”
Step 2: Identify Your Most Important Tasks
At this point, nearly everybody knows the 80/20 rule – Pareto’s Principle – for getting stuff done. 80 % of your results come from 20% of the work. Thank you Tim Ferriss for ingraining this in all of our heads.
Whatever your case, identify the 2-3 most important tasks that you need to do to achieve your desired result. To make things easy, ask yourself this question:
“What are the core tasks that I have to do to [insert your desired result here]?”
Jot yours down onto a piece of paper and hang onto them.
Step 3: Create a High-Level Monthly Plan
Here is where the productivity system starts to take shape.
In this step, you’re going to use your goal and most important tasks to create a high level plan for your first month.
I use Google Calendar to plan out my life, so it only makes sense for me to use it here, too. In an ideal week, here is what my calendar looks like for achieving my goals:
Step 4: Choose a Method for Prioritizing Daily Tasks
Your productivity system needs to account for fluctuating priorities on a daily basis.
My strategy comes from the Ivy Lee Method talked about by habits expert James Clear. I’ve adapted it and implemented it into my own life by using 3×5 notecards.
If you read the story, the Notecard Strategy was good enough for the executives of Bethlehem Steel Corporation. So much so that Charles Schwab, the company’s president, wrote Ivy Lee a check for $25,000…for a simple productivity tip.
After finding out Noah Kagan from OkDork.com used it too, well, I figured it would definitely be good enough for me, too.
The strategy itself is simple. It turns out that a highly productive day actually starts the night before.
Take 10-15 minutes each night to review your goals and to-do’s for the following day. Ask yourself this question: “what are the things that absolutely HAVE to get done on this day?” Make a mental list then move onto the next bullet.
Choose 3-5 top priority items that you want to accomplish. More often than not, you’ll want your most important tasks from Step 2 to take precedence. Here is where you’ll also be breaking those down into specific actions/tasks. Those tasks should be clear, concise, and take no more than 45 minutes to an hour. I’ve found that 3 to 5 well-defined tasks is usually all that we can effectively do in a day. Any more than that and energy, focus, and quality of work become real problems. A good example of a well-defined task would be “complete intro and first section of productivity system blog post”.
List them in order of importance on a notecard for you to look at and carry around with you the next day. This forces you to prioritize your small list of tasks and creates a game plan for the next morning.
The following morning, start with the top task and work on it until complete. Then move to the next. By design, this method helps you knock out the important tasks first thing in the morning. I’ll usually knock out the first couple tasks, take a break, go to meetings, then come back to my notecard and start working again.
I’ve found the Notecard Strategy to be so effective because it: forces me to review my goals and tasks on a daily basis, gives me a clear list of actions for me to work from, and most importantly, I can wake up the next morning and get right to work – I don’t have to waste mental energy thinking about what I should be doing.
Step 5: Schedule Time to Work on Your Specific Tasks
In my habits guide, I talk a lot about making time for your goals.
Since I use my calendar for everything – you guessed it – I plug my specific tasks in there as well.