Productivity Hack: 1 — Using Ivy’s Method With Evernote
I’ve been using Evernote for a long time, love to the power of content discovery, categorization of todos, notebooks, and notes.
Also, I was started from a few days ago to use Ivy Lee’s productivity method. I’m calling “Ivy” in short.
In this post, I want to share a simple, sustainable method to use Ivy’s method with Evernote.
About Ivy Lee
Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 — November 9, 1934) was an American publicity expert and a founder of modern public relations.
What Ivy’s Method?
Ivy Lee created a very simple, easy to follow method to prioritizing your to-do list, it is effective to avoid procrastination.
How can I start? 🚀
At the end of each work day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion.
At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day. Repeat this process every working day.
James Clear explains with more detail about the productivity method. You can read more in here.
Using Ivy’s Method With Evernote
First, create a notebook called “Ivy” (or whatever notebook you want) Actually, we will fill this notebook with IFTTT
Second, you need to sign-up for IFTTT. IFTTT helps you do more with the services you love. You can integrate services together to do create chains of simple conditional statements, called “Applets”.
Step 1: Setup a Applet in IFTTT, it simply does;
- At 06:00 pm in every day (i.e 06:00 pm, so it’s workday time)
Create a note in my Evernote (in “Ivy” Notebook in my case) - Title; Ivy — {Checktime} (Check time is a timestamp. ie. February 05, 2017 at 06:00 PM)
- Content; included with Ivy’s method just tells me “Write down 6 important you need to accomplish tomorrow” etc.
- Tags; (optional) I fill it with Ivy, Important, Not Urgent (using Importance and Urgency tags are required for Eisenhower Matrix. I’ll post about later)
So, here is the setup of Applet
Step 2: In Evernote
In your Evernote, “Ivy” notebook will have a new item every day at 06:00 pm.
Note tells you to set six important things for the next day.
When you fill 6 things as todos for next day, you are done.
Example from my Evernote
Benefits
- It motivates you to use Ivy’s method.
- It helps you to organize your Evernote todos with the proven, tested method, instead un-organized todo lists on different notebooks.
- It enforces you to define 6 important things for your next day to complete daily
- It helps you to track-down day-by-day your progress to follow from latest day to the first day.
That’s all. 🎉
Thanks for the reading.
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