Better notebook means better focus
Today I want to talk about how important is to strengthen your note taking skills to improve your focus as I found myself back in the days I worked remotely 😍.
When you’re working remotely, whether you do it from home 🏡, from a coffee shop ☕️, your parents house 👵, the beach 🏖 or an isolated chamber in an old WWII bunker 🏰, distractions are going to be the biggest monster to beat in the room every single day.
When you start, distractions and loss of focus were happening too often 😑 and my self-organization was still far from fit. Soon after, this was the main source of stress in my life.
I decided then to start researching how distractions affected my work because it’s not just about avoiding them, a chat message, email, meeting, or (if you’re in-office) an approaching colleague are still things that you need to manage but that can take you out of focus very easily affecting your performance.
📚 Use a work journal
There is no real consensus about how long does it takes to recover focus when a programmer gets interrupted (distracted from work), but you’ll generally find numbers between 10–15 minutes. (time to be back on your full focus productive state)
So, as a countermeasure I started writing a programming journal 📚,with the thoughts 🤔 I was developing, links 🔗 to webs I looked and the context 📝 of my decisions as my day evolved.
Just as a scientist 👩🔬 would write a lab notebook 🧪 to be able to reproduce their experiments and bring contextual information to their decisions
Why aren’t programmers doing the same?
I’m currently using jrnl.sh as programming journal 📚, but a folder structure with markdown files in your chosen cloud folder opened with sublime text or your preferred text editor should be more than enough.
This drastically helped me to recover from interruptions 🏋️♀️ by guiding my brain back to the previous state by reading how my thoughts evolved, but it also forces you formalizing your approaches, and help you log your actions.
After 1 day working with a work journal, writing a programming blog post is half-done.
📓 Improve your notebook
Besides the programming journal, I’ve generally used some type of notebook/sticky-notes method to remember things that are important and keep track of ideas.
I got introduced into productivity-management methodologies by Joaquin Peña where I got a really important learning from GTD (Getting things done):
GTD Step #1: Capture what has your attention
Whether you agree or not with the rest of the steps of GTD, this one really nailed it, the first step to better focus is to note things down, reducing your stress by taking them out of your head.
🚨 How to prioritize
Fine, after everything is noted, how do you organize what’s written there?
I’m a big fan of the Eisenhower matrix method because of it’s simplicity.
The idea is really simple, you just cluster all pending things into 4 categories (Do 🚀, Plan 📆, Delegate 💁🏻♂️, Eliminate 🚫) depending on 2 dimensions (Urgency 🚨& Importance 🏆) as shown in the following image:
So go ahead, note your TODO list and cluster everything as stated above
Done?…. Awesome
Now remove everything in the eliminate 🚫 side, poke people or send emails to delegate 💁🏻♂️ things that you don’t really need to do by yourself, create a reminder or book a slot in your calendar for everything under plan 📆 , and pull your sleeves with the ones in the do 🚀 section.
Easy right? Now you can focus in what’s really important
This is the fastest method I know to remove the anxiety of seeing everything to focus in what’s really important and start feeling productive.
🌈 How to organize your notebook 🌈
This might be it for most of the people, but I found myself that after a few months of work, my notes mixed with tasks and drawings from brainstorming sessions got together so entangled that the past became useless.
Here is where I discovered one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time:
Bullet journal is a system to handle your notebook so everything has it’s space. They entire concept is build around a highly efficient way of taking notes and logging tasks which is called rapid logging. A system that states that you can save up to 60% of content when taking notes in your notebook.
(If you wanna know more of the original proposal, here it is).
I couldn’t really buy it as-is because I would then misuse some of the proposed pages as the future log and month view (I use calendar an reminders for that) so I’m maintaining my notebook using an index, a daily log and project pages for gathering ideas or note things of what I’m researching.
Another tweak I did was to rename some of the rapid logging concepts to make them compatible with the Eisenhower matrix method, so I have the following
• Task
x Task completed
< Delegated
> Planned
•̵ ̵E̵l̵i̵m̵i̵n̵a̵t̵e̵d̵
What are you waiting to organize yourself better?
