How to Build an Effective Personal Productivity System
Why do you need a productivity system?
Your brain is to have ideas, not to store them — David Allen
This is the problem, you rely too much on your brain to remember and keep your life in order. This confidence is unproductive and also creates stress for you. You lead a busy life and you think your brain will remind you of every single thing you want to do.
This is what you entrust to your brain.
- Your meetings, events, and pending commitments.
- The book you read two months ago.
- The course you took
- Topics from last week’s meeting.
What’s the point of a productivity system?
It’s getting all the crap out of your brain and you don’t have to remember everything because the system will remember it for you. Being a productive person is using your time intentionally and effectively.
1: It’s what your brain is made for
2: These are the things we use our brains for but the productivity system can do more effectively
3: They are the things that do not contribute anything to our life if we try to remember them.
In this article, I will show you the apps that can help you boost your productivity
First layer: Keep your life in order
1. Task management
Write everything down on your to-do list.
You can use Task management apps like. Any.do Todo-ist Google Task
How to use your task app
Planning your day should not take more than 10 minutes. But doing this can save you 1–2 hours of your day.
Create a “daily list”: Every night put 1–3 tasks. The most important ones that help you move forward.
David Allen suggests that once a day you review your schedule and decide what you will do with the tasks you wrote down.
Some day
These are tasks that you know you will not do today or tomorrow. For example, in your personal life, it could be hunting, archery, or climbing a volcano. In your professional life, it can be buying a new camera, or recording a podcast with an influencer.
This list is for you to look at once a month and decide if you can take action on those tasks.
The #1 mistake we all make
If it’s not on the agenda, then it doesn’t exist.
Many times you stop using your planner because you don’t have 100% coverage of your tasks. What I mean is that if you don’t have all your tasks in and you try to remember something no matter how small it is, there will be tension. This tension will make it difficult for you to fully trust your system. So write down everything in your system without fail.
2. File control
Seeing a screen like this is synonymous with stress.
What you are looking for is a place to store files in the cloud. Photos, memories, and videos so that when you change your computer or if it is stolen.
Do not lose anything and be easy to access all your information in seconds.
You can try all these tools for free with limited space. If you need more space you can pay for them. My favorite is Google Drive since it has 15GB of free storage.
3. Calendar
Unlike the to-do list. The calendar helps you know what to do at what time of your day.
In my case, I fill my calendar with blocks of time in which I designate each task. Work, study, exercise. However, the best use of a calendar is that you do not forget important dates.
For example meetings, events, or commitments.
For this it can serve you. Fantastical is the only paid one but it has specific productivity functions for work teams.
4. Email
Mail can be your best friend or your worst enemy. This is the problem, you get dozens of emails a day and every 20 minutes you check if the emergency has been solved.
Your mail dominates you and makes you his bitch
The worst thing that can happen to your email is that you use it as a to-do list. What I mean is that people leave tasks there and you have to react to do them in the first second you see them.
This is not only unproductive, but it is also a direct path to misery
I am not saying that you should not treat emails with indifference, the attitude is the opposite. Every email is important.
The idea of having it is that you choose what work to do at a given time. Instead of reacting to whatever is in front of you.
How can you ally with your email?
Unsubscribe from irrelevant emails. If you don’t read the bank’s emails, then do them a favor and get off their mailing list.
Decide what needs to be done about it and take one of the following 6 actions:
Archive: These are usually notifications, which do not require any type of action. They are the “no-reply” emails
Answer: Apply the 2-minute rule. If a task takes less than 2 minutes, do it. In this case, answer the emails that are from a conversation
Calendar: If it is an event, meeting, appointment, or commitment.
Agenda: If it is a task that has a logical action. Don’t do it right away, add it to your schedule or to-do list. Define what day and when you will do it in the future
Notes app: If it is interesting information that can be used for a project. Add it to your notes app to process it later.
Read it later: All the articles that are suggested to you in the mail. If you find them interesting, save them and read them when you have time.
Layer Two Captures New Information
This next level is in case you consume some type of content. Podcasts, articles, YouTube videos, book notes.
How often do you finish a book, only to forget the key ideas two weeks later? We don’t remember things just by reading them once.
Kindle
It goes without saying that reading a book is better for you in the long run than watching TikTok. The problem is that watching TikTok when you’re in bed is easy. Having a Kindle next to your bed makes it so much easier to stop watching your cousin dancing and pick up a good book.
Kindle Benefits
1. Underline and take note
To retain the information in a good book, you need to scratch it and jot down your thoughts. Ryan Holiday thinks of it as “having conversations with the author.” Kindle lets you annotate and underline passages that resonate with you. In addition, it saves them in the application so that you can visit them later.
2. Makes it easy to read books
To get new books you just have to go to Amazon, press the button, buy and they are downloaded instantly. It is usually cheaper to buy them this way.
My Kindle has been one of the best purchases I have ever made. The books I have read have added an enormous amount of value to my life, and I cannot recommend them highly enough.
Read it later
Imagine this, you are in the bathroom looking at Facebook and an interesting video or publication appears and you want to read it. But you know that if you open it it will take you about 10 minutes to watch it and in the end, you spend 3 hours sitting on the toilet.
These apps give you the option to “save” content on the web for later consumption. In these apps, you can see the content on a page to read it or see it in a cleaner and simpler visual design.
The most popular options are:
Build A Second Brain
Readwise
It’s the cornerstone that connects Kindle and the Read it Later app with your note-taking apps. Like Evernote, Notion, and Roam.
Sync your highlights and notes automatically.
What I mean is anything that resonates with you from articles, tweets, books, podcasts, and emails. All that will be stored in one place so you don’t have to look for it later and you don’t lose it.
You can try Readwise for free here
What app can you use to take notes?
Notion may sound like an attractive app if you’re interested in design workflows, customize tables, and systematize processes through pages.
Roam research and Obsidian. They are to create new pieces of content, a map of all your notes that grows naturally, as you continue to grow.
Evernote does like to collect information from different types of sources. Kind of like a digital library.
Why do you need this?
Reveals new associations between ideas. So you can recognize relationships, create connections and be a more creative person. Steve Jobs called it “connecting the dots”
Sharpen your unique ideas. So you don’t suffer from creative block. “It’s not that you can’t find the right words, it’s that you don’t have the right information,” says Sebastian Junger
Slow burn
The biggest benefit of a second brain is to incubate your ideas over time. This means that in your life, you find new information. Anything new can go to your second brain for later use, kind of like simmering.
As Tiago Forte wrote. “The low heat allows the ideas to cook slowly like a delicious pot of stew on the stove. It’s a calmer and more sustainable approach to creativity that is based on the gradual accumulation of ideas.”
This will help you work on multiple projects at the same time. When you are ready to take action, 80% of the work is already done. You just have to connect the information you were collecting.
Your productivity system stays on, has perfect memory, and can scale to any size. The more you delegate the capture and organization tasks to technology.
You will have more time and energy available for creativity and network that only you can do.
