How to Build Your Own Productivity System

A day always has 24 hours. Time is the only resource that is exactly the same for everyone on this planet. That’s why effective time management is such a precious skill. Knowing how to organize your productivity and work gives you an edge over everyone else. You become a wizard of time.

But it’s also a rare skill. Effective time management is hard. Some people have some sort of system in place to manage their work. And yet others don’t even know where to start.

In this post, I’m going to cover how you can build your own productivity system so you can manage time efficiently.

All we need is 5 steps:

1. Eliminate Before Optimizing
2. Build Your Productivity System
3. Incorporate Productivity Hacks
4. Find Your True Tasks
5. Delegate Efficiently

Let’s go over each one in detail…

#1 Eliminate Before Optimizing

I had more than 300GB of photos and videos.

Our smartphones have enabled us to take pictures every single day with a click of a button. Over the years I accumulated thousands of videos and photos. A while back, I copied the folders into Dropbox and an external hard drive so I would have a backup in multiple places in case something went wrong.

Over the years, I would pour myself into deleting out of focus or similar pictures, renaming folders, cataloging by year. I normally did it in the Dropbox folder, which meant that the other two sources — my computer and the external hard drive — would be an “old version”. When I had new photos, I would put them on the computer hard drive.

I visited Japan and the US this summer and wanted to copy my camera photos into my photo library. Question was, which one? Dropbox was probably the most recent version, but it didn’t have all my phone photos, which were on my hard drive. The external hard drive had an older version of both, but I was not sure how old. I decided it was time to — once and for all — organize and…