My current Productivity System — Update April 2024

Overview of the authors productiviy workflows, created with Obsidian Canvas

One post that skyrocketed the stats of this blog was from Dec 31st, 2023, where I gave an overview of my 2024 productivity system. In this post, I want to give you an update concerning the tools, workflows current challenges within my system.

To be sure concerning the wording: For me productivity system includes everything that helps me organize my life, feeds my curiosity, and helps with general productivity. Other people might call it a second brain system, PKM system, or Life operating system. I prefer to refer to it as PKM most of the time.

To make it easier to follow I´ll keep the same structure as in my old post. So let´s start with the paper journal section.

• After some back and forth I noticed that keeping up with three paper journals and my everyday Bullet journal (Bujo) is too much of a hassle for me.
• I´ve let go of my Hobonichi weeks and added a heath bullet to my Bujo practice. I tracked sleep etc. in the Hobonichi but got no benefit from it. So I let it go by the end of March.
• For the digital Artists of Life workbook the monthly planning and reviewing sections didn´t work for me at all, which are like 80% of the whole book. I´ll use the yearly reflection pages at the beginning when I plan next year again. Otherwise, I´m using the self-reflection wheel template every quarter as part of my reviewing process.
• I have mixed feelings about my yearly Bujo. I noticed that my monthly reflections are much longer than I expected, so most likely I´ll buy a 2nd “yearly” journal for July — December. I´m glad I´ve invested in a high-quality journal from Leuchtturm. Having three different pages where I write some kind of daily lessons or event tracking is a bit of a hassle these days, so currently I´m figuring out if it´s time to eliminate one. I´m struggling with the layout of my finance tracker as well, so I don´t know yet if it´s time to migrate this part into a digital system soon.

The backbone apps for my productivity system

• Readwise and Readwise Reader have developed into the main backbones of highlighting my stuff and adding it to Obsidian, which is my central note-taking app. b
• My Obsidian app is kinda working. For blogging and stuff, it works well. The one vault where I have everything done has a size of almost 2 GB now, which makes the sync and mobile performance pretty slow. I did a bit of decluttering in between, but it didn´t improve the situation a lot. Currently, I´m in a phase where I´m considering tweaking my workflows and whether I need everything on my phone or not.
• New addition to my system: Google tasks. It´s fast, easy to use, and integrates well with my Google calendar. I noticed that I want to have my task list and my idea lists for this blog available quickly on my phone. All repetitive tasks now live there and are also displayed in my Google calendar.

Other Apps

• I´ve started using Notion as a collaborative tool with my boyfriend for our flat hunt. It´s not a fancy system and it will be discarded once we move together.
• I´ve tweaked my Google calendar a bit by adding different calendars for online and real-life events. Tasks from Google are displayed there as well.
• My everyday Bujo is still the most used item in my system. As my blog posts feel like journal entries as well, I´ve started the practice of printing out these posts and sticking them into them as well.
• The use of Google Photos and Google Drive hasn´t changed a lot. I just had to upgrade to a pricier subscription plan as I ran out of storage space when I restarted creating digital art.

Current Challenges and potential Tweaks

• I´m rethinking my workflows concerning PKM a lot. I´m in a phase where I consider stuff like adding voice notes as parts of my PKM, as writing everything down from my cluttered mind feels overwhelming these days. I have to decide whether it´s worth decluttering my 1-for-all Obsidian vault, outsourcing aspects of it, or creating a fresh start in a new vault. I´m not 100% sure what to do yet. Stuff I might want to outsource are areas like life admin (stuff I bought, important documents), printable PDF templates, or orphan photos that aren´t linked anywhere.
• I have a love-hate relationship with the Readwise plugin for Obsidian. It´s comfy to get everything into the system seamlessly. On the other hand, lately, I tend to highlight a lot of clutter, which I remove by creating trash notes. Some days are like “Lovely that everything works”, but slightly more days are like “WTF have I highlighted?”. So I try to have a lot of 10–20 unlinked Readwise notes every day and skim whether it´s just something for a trash note or worth keeping.
• My love-hate with tech continues. These days I work full time in an office job and spend the majority of my spare time in front of a laptop as well. There is a thin line between being a curious person and having a healthy real life away from screens outside your head. During the last weeks it seems like I´m moving in the wrong direction.
• As mentioned on Twitter I had to learn the hard way that I didn´t do enough research before buying this laptop in August 2022. I bought it because I wanted to do handwritten notes on the touch screen. But the tech doesn´t allow it, as I found out a few days ago. It´s a hard pill to swallow, as a new laptop isn´t financially possible for the rest of the year. Stuff like having a tablet connected to the computer never worked for me. I have to live with that for now, but my next laptop will be 2-in-1 for sure.
• As much as I love reading about my different topics of curiosity, I feel the urge for my PKM to become more lightweight and streamlined. I want to try out Capacities and Tana to get some inspiration for my main PKM and maybe outsource some parts of my PKM to these apps. Out of the blue stuff like memory keeping/journaling, blogging or life administration might be outsourced this way.
• I finally need to develop a system for exercise and health in my PKM. So far it´s just a few notes here and there, but nothing worth mentioning. It´s time to develop a system that gets me into doing stuff.
• The initial setup with 25 lists in total at Google tasks feels overwhelming. So I am considering using google tasks for stuff I want to do only and migrating my blogging ideas into a different app. Capacities might do the job, but with just 2h of using it so far, I´m not sure yet.
• With all these potential tweaks I decided to put myself on a budget for PKM incl. drive space. All my subscriptions are about 250€/year in total. I pay like 250€/year for my subscriptions only. Adding stationary and I´m somewhere in the range of 350–400€/year. This is on the edge of being financially sustainable. So I decided that I won´t allow myself to add a new subscription for the rest of the year.
• Additionally I am researching to find “the one” journal for <10€ and order them in bulk. Like 90% of the time I´m an A5 plaid grid girl, so decided to reduce the number of decisions I have to make by grabbing a new journal every month.
• For my daily journal practice I experiment with having a separate booklet for daily plans and my journaling practice. Last month it was a lifesaver, but now I´m back into the habit of having one journal for both.

Honestly, this post turned out to be about twice as long as I expected. Feel free to share your recent tweaks to your system or anything that I might miss here.