Wednesday is the hump!
I always tend to focus my attention during the middle of the week on what I’ve done so far, and whether what I have planned is going to have a chance at still getting accomplished by the week’s end. Most weeks I feel like Wednesday comes too fast.. but most likely I feel like that because I just wasn’t as productive overall as I could have been on Monday and Tuesday, so by Wednesday its eating at me a little.
So every Wednesday as I begin to think about my posts here on Medium.com, my thoughts tend to focus on productivity and organizational strategy. I analyze my calendar and my strategies every single week. Am I doing the right thing to stay on track? I think about it constantly and I’m hyper-focused on it much more than I’ve ever been in my life!
Today I would like to share a bit of my organizational world
Hopefully you get a little something from this, and I would love it if you could share your tools and strategies in a response! Thanks!
Here are 10 tools that I use daily to stay goal focused on my 2018 goals:
1) iPhone Clock App: The Bedtime feature
Many in the productivity world will suggest that you not use your cell phone as an alarm clock every morning. I’m sure there are many valid reasons out there for not having your cell phone right by your bed every night. I read and consider all of those view points but the Bedtime Feature on the iPhone is actually pretty great.
I choose a goal for Bedtime and a time for waking me up, and as long as the phone was just sitting in its charger all night (meaning I’m lying in bed most likely sleeping), its keeping track of my sleep hours. Its not the most accurate maybe, but if I go into the app I can see a report of each night’s sleep, and I can set higher goals for myself moving forward. Most of all I’m just aware of how much sleep I’m getting and being aware is the first step to getting better at anything.
2) Gratitude Journal, or a goal oriented journal in general is amazing for morning focus
There have been numerous blog posts suggesting paper journals are better than digital journals, and then there is science behind writing something versus typing it, but regardless of all that, YOU SHOULD JOURNAL!
I choose the digital version every morning. I wake up and stretch, drink a little water, breath for a minute, then I pick up my phone and write a journal entry.
There is a danger that is always talked about regarding picking up your phone first thing in the morning right out of bed. You read productivity giants saying stay away from it because you’ll have the tendency to look at social media and be distracted quickly. I will agree that this is one risk of keeping a digital journal on your phone, however, I’ve decided to take the challenge.
What I do is set a reminder in an app that prompts me to start a gratitude journal, and it comes across my screen as a notification right as I’m waking up. The first notification is usually the journal reminder.. so I hit it, and off I go!
This is not the post that I want to write about the pros and cons of journalling. I think I will do that some time in the future. For now, lets leave it here. I love journalling in the morning, giving thanks for the people and opportunity around me, reminding myself of the tasks of the day, and I’m done.
3) Withings Scale
I stopped taking a weight measurement about a year ago. The app I was using (Withings .. something) has now been bought by Nokia and is called Health Mate. My Withings Scale sat in our bathroom all alone and never got any attention. This year I was looking at that thing thinking, its really silly that we aren’t using it. So I updated my app, put new batteries in the scale, and now we are off to the races. I’m eating better, feeling better, and tracking the experience in a couple of apps including Health Mate. Its great!
4) Calendar
I wrote a post last week discussing my use of a calendar to block off my daily actions that I take that work towards my goals. Everyone seems to use a calendar a little differently. I really didn’t start this method in earnest until I walked away from a full-time job working for someone else. As soon as I went independent I became very cognizant of how I was utilizing my time (even more-so this year).
You can read here how I approach my calendaring activities each week as a musician, but just to summarize: I decided how much time per week (total of 168 hours) I would like to dedicate to certain needs and desires in my life. I built a small spreadsheet in Numbers to keep things organized. And after I had the amount of hours for each activity, I then blocked that amount of time off while I’m in my Weekly View.
Now everyday as I’m getting into my day when I look at the phone or my computer Calendar app, if I’m in Daily or Weekly View I can visually see my activites blocked out and that keeps me focused and organized.
5) Voice Reminders: Siri on the iPhone
Siri has come a LONG way. I can’t say that I really used voice activated anything for the longest time even though there are countless amount of uses on the market today. I resisted the voice instruction commands for quite a while because I felt like I could just pick up the phone, set a reminder in the Reminders app or OmniFocus, and be on my way.
In the past year I’ve been much more aware of the time that I’m spending on each little task, and I realize that over-time it all adds up. So I decided to start using Siri to set reminders.
After I load the washing machine and I’m walking away I ask Siri to set a timer so I won’t forget about the clothes when they are done. When I’m cooking and I notice that we ran out of something, I ask Siri to add that item to a grocery list. Basically, if I have a thought, it is always better served if I immediately write it down, or in this case, speak an action that allows me to get it out of my head and move on. Its great and now that I’m more aware of how to do this, I find more and more chances to tell Siri to do all kinds of things.
This leads me right into number 6. I now tell Siri to add a grocery item to a specific Context (like a Publix list) in OmniFocus. And then the next time I happen to drive past a Publix (grocery store where I live) a notification pops up on my phone reminding me that I need that item!
6) OmniFocus
I use the Omnigroup’s software on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad called OmniFocus. This software has made a huge productivity leap in my life. Like I’ve explained in a previous post, it is ONLY just a tool that you can use on your journey, however, its really one of the best out there. You pay for it.. But as the old saying goes “you get what you pay for”.
I can’t go into all the things OmniFocus can do here in this post, but I’ll keep it short and sweet and tell you its like having the Reminders App on steroids. You can set individual Defer Dates or Due Dates on any task. You can group tasks by Context, like a place, or a person that you need to communicate with, and it reminds you every week (or at your discretion) to do a weekly Review of your Projects so you’ll stay on task.
I’m in this app every single day, and every week, once a week I comb through like it proposes and I review all my goals/projects to stay on task.
7) Automatic Sensor to track business milage
Most everyday I work from home, but chances are, if I go out, its because I’m networking with clubs, researching gear, dropping by the local music store to pick up supplies, or I’m headed to rehearsals or gigs. I have a lot of personal driving that I do, but because of the nature of my business I need to track business milage for all of my trips related to my work.
Automatic.com is where you need to go to check out a great solution for keeping track of your milage no matter where you take off to. And the dashboard that you sign into on their website (or the iPhone app) allows you to see all your trips and tag them as business! Their software also works with IFTTT to bring you so many solutions for organizing business milage, expense tracking, and so much more.
I have an Automatic Sensor in my vehicle and I’m always aware of how far I’ve come or even how far I’ve got to go if its a repeating event. This has been a life changer for me over the last two years.
8) Banktivity
Fancy word huh?
Banktivity is made by a company called IGG Software. There are lots of ways to track your expenses day to day, but about 7 years ago I found iBank, now Banktivity. There is a desktop version, and an iPhone App that syncs together so you can enter transactions from either source and always stay on top of your finances.
What I grew to love about this software is the time that it saved me when tax season rolled around. I could search and chop up my yearly transactions, easily see where I spent all my money, gather all my business expenses together for easy filing, etc, etc.
On a daily basis, as I spend money, I will enter the transaction on the app. It auto-syncs with its counterparts, and beginning each month as I write out a family budget, it’s crucial in showing me what I spent, and helping me make better decisions on how to spend (or save) my money moving forward.
9) Apple Watch
My use of a watch declined as I got older. I started to think that it was redundant to wear a watch if I was just going to look at my phone all the time (I’m sure you can relate). Even when the Apple Watch was first being announced, I really couldn’t get excited about it, because again, I just didn’t think I would care about it.
I was wrong.
Not having my Apple Watch on makes me feel naked and annoyed. Oh.. come on don’t roll your eyes… HA.
Being able to filter the messages, emails, phone calls, notifications all through the Apple Watch has been a life changer! “Don’t know that number: DECLINE”. “Oh look, the wife sent a text, better get back to it quick!”
Any notifications that you deem useful, can come through on that watch first thing, and you aren’t taking time out of your day to pick up the phone for everything. Chances are you pick up your phone for something… and it distracts you for something else: See Number 2 from this list!
10) Evernote
I resisted becoming a paid member of Evernote for the longest time. I’m not sure why. I’ll pay for good software like OmniFocus and Banktivity, but why didn’t I just pull the trigger on Evernote?
There are so many note taking apps out there now, and honestly, many of these apps are rich in features, searching, and collection. Evernote got started early in this game, and over time you’ve seen many modern day note takers copy Evernote features because people got used to certain workflows as a standard affair.
But still I used Evernote, the free plan, for many years. I kept telling myself that as soon as I found a use-case to get a Premium plan, then I would go for it. This year I realized that I could digitize all of my home, medical, and tax records and store them in Stacks in Evernote, and then I could grant access to family members to see those documents at any time. WIN.
So Evernote has been a huge part of my organizational strategy daily now. I use it for even more research gathering, idea off-loading, and record stashing than ever before. I basically just opened the flood gates, and I’m running it as hard as I can, clipping webpages, scanning receipts, and adding tags daily. Its a killer tool in this productivity world and I can’t recommend it enough.
Takeaway
I hope the tools that I use on a daily basis are helpful for you, or at least they give you some insight into my daily strategy for staying focused on my goals.
If you have any questions, or need any more recommendations regarding the use of these tools, I’m happy to help!
