The Enduring Productivity Hacks from 30+ Years of Self-Employment
9 key things that keep me sane and organized
Productivity hacks make the life I want to lead possible, they keep my stuff, my to-do’s, and my brain okay and in check.
Here are the ones that have stayed with me over time, supporting more than 30 years of self-employment and small business ownership. They each arrived in their moment, proved themselves, and continue to provide a gentle whirr of needed structure to all the things I want to work on and get done.
1. 43 Folders
43 Folders has stayed with me the longest. It’s an organization tool that requires 43 file folders, 12 of which are labeled with the months of the year, the others are numbered 1 through 31 representing days of the month. Each folder is where you store the non-digital things you may need for a particular day or month.
Yeah, some of us more than others still live on or with paper, hard-copy real-world artifacts that need to go somewhere, but even the mostly digital may have things like school forms, birthday cards, paper lists, back-of-the-envelope notes that need to go somewhere and not get lost.
What does this look like in action? At the end of the workday, I remove any contents of the numbered folder…
