14 Systems You Need to Stay Focused, Organized and Productive in 2018
You don’t drift into productivity. You don’t stumble upon focus. These things don’t just happen to you — they must be carefully crafted by you.
Here are 14 systems that you need in 2018 — along with suggestions for what I have found helpful for making these systems work. I’d love to hear about the systems you have developed too — please share in the comments.
A system for doing ‘deep work’
Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World’ was one of the best books I read last year. Mastering deep work is such an important discipline because distraction and interruption are so common. Cal writes:
“Deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep — spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.”
Suggestion: If you’re looking for a better way, you should start with Cal’s book. If you’re looking for distraction-busting apps, check out Freedom, StayFocusd and Waste No Time.
A system for managing your incoming messages
You have text messages, Facebook messages, direct messages, personal messages, voicemail messages — and of course email. You need a plan for when you will check each of these inboxes — both to avoid being distracted when you need to be focussed, and to ensure that no important messages slip through the cracks.
Suggestion: I haven’t found an app that brings all of these inboxes together — yet! So in the meantime I’ve set up a weekly checklist in Tick Tick to ensure each of these inboxes gets reviewed and actioned. And while there isn’t an app to consolidate your inboxes, Station is a newcomer that wants to do this for your apps:
A system for saving content to read later
Everyday you stumble across websites, articles, audio and video that you don’t want to (and probably shouldn’t) explore right then and there. You need a plan for how you will save this content, and when you will return to it.
Suggestion: I’ve used Pocket and Instapaper in the past, but I now use a free Chrome extension called Citable to save links to a Google Sheet. If you’re looking for more, Zapier has compiled a list of 18 read-it-later and bookmarking apps.
A system for saving and securing passwords
You know that you need a complex password, and you know that you can’t reuse the same password for multiple accounts. So unless you have a photographic memory (or want to develop a password recipe) you need a system for saving passwords and account login details.
Suggestion: I have used 1Password for many years and I’ve never looked back. Alternatives include RoboForm, Dashlane and LastPass.
A system for managing your tasks
David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ describes a system for “applying order to chaos”. It’s the most helpful book I’ve read for detailing a framework for capturing tasks and then dealing with them appropriately.
Suggestion: The system I use for this is Tick Tick — after a lot of research, it just squeezed out Todoist (also great) as the best platform for my wife and I to collaborate. Before the need for collaboration, my top pick was 2Do.
A system for capturing notes
Ideas. Quotes. Meeting summaries. Movies to watch. Memories to capture. Every day we have all kinds of different notes we want to store and that need a system for collection and retrieval.
Suggestion: I use Bear (MacOS and iOS). SimpleNote is very good, and OneNote almost got me interested in using Microsoft products again. I used Evernote for several years, but I found it was more than I needed.
A system for reading
“You are what you read. The information that you input into your mind informs your thinking patterns, and it influences your output in the form of the decisions you make, the work you produce, and the interactions you have.” — Zat Rana
“You are what you read” is a big call — but reading matters. However, unless you have a system for reading (what you will read, how you will read and when you will read) you probably won’t read. And it’s important to build in time to reflect — to read and not reflect is to chew and not swallow. It feels good at the time but there is no long term gain.
Suggestion: In Bear I’ve created a list called ‘Books to Read’. In this list, I link to other notes, also in Bear, where I record a summary of what I read. I also use a notebook to record my reading reflections — my favourite notebooks are from Baron Fig.
A system for recording achievements
Australians today will have on average 17 different employers in a lifetime, and in the U.S. it’s between 10–15. Given how often you’ll be updating your CV, it’s important to have a system for capturing your achievements that you can reference when needed.
Suggestion: I have a note called ‘Achievements’ (also in Bear) that I use for this purpose.
A system for remembering dates and times
It seems like a no-brainer advocating the need for a calendar — but having a calendar and using is a system many of us could master better (myself included — after turning up 24 hours early to a meeting last week!).
Suggestion: I use Google Calendar, with 3 key calendars — Personal, Work and Family. The last one is a shared calendar where my wife and I add events that we want the other to be at. If it weren’t for these collaborative benefits, I’d be using the Hobonichi Techo Planner!
A system for filing documents
If you haven’t already, it’s time to go paperless (here’s a helpful guide by David Sparks on how to do it). You then need a system for where these files will be stored (Dropbox? Google Drive?) and naming and filing these documents so you can find them again.
Suggestion: 4 years ago my wife and I went paperless (as best we could) and purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap. It has made scanning and then filing fast and easy. Also, whenever we buy something new with a physical instruction booklet, my wife finds the manual online and saves it into a ‘Warranties and Manuals’ folder — then throws away the hardcopy. We’re still working on the file naming conventions — but with the search power of Google Drive this is less important than it once was.
A system for backing up photos (and other important files)
An article by Possibly Mat Honan in Wired in 2012 was the prompt I needed to take file back ups seriously. His story:
“In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed…Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.”
I don’t have many documents I’d be devastated to lose, but I have plenty of photos and videos and I’m sure you do too.
Suggestion: I use Apple’s Photos app to store my photos, and I back them up to a physical hard drive (just in case). For more, check out Brian Barrett’s suggestions in ‘Your Photo Backup Needs a Backup’.
A system for developing your skills (or learning new skills)
Cal Newport (yes, I’m a fan!) writes in book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love’:
“If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.…The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.”
Suggestion: Once you’ve worked out the skills you need to develop, there’s a wealth of new platforms to help you. I’ve benefited from Skillshare, lynda.com, Treehouse, Mindtools and Creative Class with Paul Jarvis.
A system for using social media
The average person will spend 5 years of their life on social media. 5 years! Without a system, valuable hours (years) will slip through your fingers — no one will reflect on their deathbed that they should have spent more time on social media. You need a system for using social media or social media will use you.
- What channels will you be on?
- How will you use each channel?
- How much time will you spend on each?
Given how much time we spend on social media and the opportunity cost this presents, this is one of the most important systems to develop.
Suggestion: There are an increasing number of apps to help you keep off social media including Cold Turkey and Freedom, as well as browser extensions such as BlockSite (Chrome) and LeechBlock (Firefox). A more extreme option is to do what Corey Alexander did and just quit social media altogether.
A system for maintaining important relationships
I had an important realisation in 2017 — the people who post most frequently on Facebook aren’t usually the people I most want to hear from. Or to put it another way, the people I care about most tend not to post to Facebook very often (or at all). I can’t rely on social media to keep in touch with these people — I need to be more intentional.
Suggestion: I am using Tick Tick to remind me to keep in touch with friends and family. Bond (iOS and perhaps in the future Android) is an app that seeks to help solve this problem.
What systems do you suggest? What tools help you?
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