My productivity system for 2024
It´s the last day of the year. And I´ve kept asking myself whether I should write a yearly reflection post here or not. But I felt more like giving you an update concerning my productivity system for 2024.
To my surprise, I learned myself that I want to track more things on paper during the last weeks, which is why I´ll add 3 paper “journals” to my system next year
- Hobonichi weeks mega for everything concerning health, nutrition, fitness, exercise, supplementation, medication, etc.
- I´ve purchased the digital version of the Artists of Life workbook by Lavendaire (AOL)leucht as I´ve found it has some very useful templates and reflection questions.
- A bullet journal (Bujo) for long-term collections. I´ve purchased a Leuchtturm monthly calendar with the notebook in B5 size. I´ll use it as a future log for long-term projects, my finance tracking my every-month collections “events” and “lesson of the day”. I may add “daily highlight” as well, I am not sure about that yet. This has become necessary as I journal a lot… One paper journal every month. And for a few very important collections it became important to me to have them all in the same journal.
To be honest: the AOL and the long-term Bujo have some overlap. For scheduling stuff and habit tracking this Bujo will be a place to go, but for reflecting stuff I´ll use the AOL workbook… I am only 90% sure about how I´ll use which book and try to stay curious about how these two will work together.
Two apps I´ve implemented into my system this year which became essential for me:
- Readwise for taking care of all the highlights from ebooks, blog posts, and YouTube videos. It´s the priciest subscription within my PKM this year but together with the official plugin for Obsidian it has become the main backbone for processing the media I am consuming.
- As some of you might remember, I experimented with different apps for my main note-taking this year. Evernote stopped working, Amplenote was okay, but after about four months it turned out that it wasn´t mature enough for my needs this year. So I went back to Obsidian in July / August. I am still tweaking the system a bit here and there, but together with the official sync service it meets my needs for 90%… Which I am fine with.
Last but not least I want to talk about stuff that is used more or less the same way as last year:
- Google calendar for reminders of repetitive tasks, time-blocking, and scheduling
- My everyday paper bullet journal as a central inbox and tool for reflection
- Google Photos for storing my photos as well as storage of the digital copies of my paper journals and sketchbooks
- Google Drive for backing up my files including my Obsidian vaults
Stuff I´ve stopped using this year:
- Year of you daily prompt book: Somewhere in May I noticed that I didn´t get anything out of journaling the one prompt per day.
- The Daily Stoic (by Ryan Holiday) and Daily Laws (by Robert Greene): In both cases reading these one-page-per-day books didn´t inspire me anymore. The styles were too repetitive, and the lessons were almost equal at several points. There was no spark of joy or any deeper reflection on reading these every morning, so I let them go. I guess I´ve stuck with The Daily Stoic for almost 9 months before letting go and approx. 4 or 5 months with the daily laws. Through these practices, I learned that I prefer not to read in the morning as I tend to reflect on my stream-of-consciousness writing while having breakfast.
Little tweaks of the system I see coming within the upcoming year
- Planning more with long-term projects. As I´ve mentioned I have to tackle several health-related projects in 2024. To be honest, I prefer to think in systems instead of in projects, but for some issues like moving together with my boyfriend project planning will become inevitable.
- I´ve procrastinated on experimenting with increasing the speed of Obsidian on my smartphone for longer than I want to admit. But waiting 10+ seconds to open the daily note is no longer an option for me. This will be one problem to solve in January.
- I still want to find some kind of rules concerning the dailies. I have them in Obsidian as well as in my Bullet journal. Sometimes it´s a duplication, sometimes not… When it comes down to stuff like online classes or webinars I am unsatisfied with my current system which consists of screenshots and paper notes.
- I´ve gotten a bit lazy concerning writing things down during the last weeks, especially as I was unable to have a paper journal with me during most of my working hours. As I am slowly losing trust in myself concerning my notes I want to experiment a bit more with voice-to-text journaling and adding these to my dailies in Obsidian.
Wish you a nice New Years Eve and seeing forward continuing my blogging journey here next in 2024.
