How to Effectively Organize Your Time at Home with Evernote
Lessons from an introvert whose quarantine is everyday life
COVID-19 has plunged the whole population into remote work. While for some this is a boon, for some it’s a nightmare. “How the hell do I work at home, when kids are around, and where Netflix beckons to me from the TV set?” you might ask. Fear not, for I have come equipped with answers.
Let’s see my credentials first, so you know who you’ll be getting advice from.
I’ve worked from home for the past five years, and for the last three, I’ve added distance studies too. To top it all off, I’m introverted, so I don’t go out anyway. (Finally, I don’t have to come up with excuses why I’m not joining people on Friday night.)
In short, I spend a lot of time at home, which makes me uniquely equipped to answer all your burning questions regarding how the hell one can be productive while stuck at home.
You need a structure.
Now that you’re left to your own devices, it might tempt you to go easy on yourself (which is good, if done purposefully). At home, finding a structure isn’t easy. With kids running around and stuck with your partner, you’re lucky to get some things, the basics, done. But to make the most of your quarantine time, productivity-wise, you need one.
A structure gives your days a direction that you need to stay on course (we’ll talk about that in short). A structure keeps your decision tanks filled, so you can deal with random stuff that inevitably pops up. Mark Zuckerberg supposedly has only one outfit that he wears, jeans and a black shirt, exactly for this reason. In short, the structure makes your life easier.
Step 1: Weekly planning — strategize
Let me guide you through a simple yet effective process that keeps me motivated and productive.
First off, I use Evernote to do my weekly planning, but you can do it in any way you prefer. On paper, in Excel, wherever. The important part is that you can see it and refer to it.
What I start with are the priorities for the week. Each priority corresponds to an area of my life that I’m maintaining or improving.
To give you an example, my current priorities are:
- Writing
- Learning
- Work
- Sports
To figure out what areas of your life you can prioritize, reflect on your current situation and move on from there. This exercise is not about figuring out new stuff to implement (although you can). Rather, it’s about documenting stuff that matters to you and writing it down.
When you have the priorities down, the next step is to write one to two sentences for each. The sentences should give you a general direction for what you want to accomplish that week.
The entry for writing then looks like this:
- Writing — “Focus on writing, marketing, and learning. Write every day and be smart about it.”
Once you’ve noted the general direction for each priority, it’s time to get granular.
For this part, I create a table. Each priority corresponds to a column. I create an additional column for random to-do tasks that don’t correspond to any of my priorities. Cleaning up, taking care of emails, and fixing stuff at home would fit here. The first row of the table looks like this.
For each priority, I write down how much time I want to invest. Then I create a checklist of specific tasks that I want to accomplish. Let’s stick with writing as an example.
The beauty of Evernote is its simplicity. You can create the same table in 2 minutes (already includes one minute of choosing which colors you like the best). And, my favorite, you can use the check-mark option to tick the tasks you’ve already completed (check-mark evangelist here).
You proceed with all other priorities in a similar vein. Pick one, go granular and specify each task. This concludes the weekly planning stage.
An important note: Weekly plan is here to give you direction and structure, but it shouldn’t stifle you. When you feel like deviating from it, do so. We’ll talk about tactical changes based on your daily progress a bit later.
Step 2: Daily plan — time for tactics
So, now you’re sitting there with your wonderfully organized table, ready to be deployed like a Russian missile during the cold war.
Now you only need a pretense to start.
Enter, daily planning.
In daily planning, you take your masterful weekly creation and distill it into one day. Ideally, you want to do your daily planning a day in advance in the evening. This is because,
- You spare your decision stores (Zuckerberg style) that way and
- You can implement tactical changes you’ve accumulated throughout the day.
So how do you plan for the day?
Use a simple rule of thumb Kenneth Chenault, the American Express CEO,
Pick the top three things you want to accomplish tomorrow.
Why three? If you’re anything like me, you will over plan. Similar to hungry shopping, overplanning is when you plan too much for the day and end up with a bunch of stuff that you don’t need. To prevent that, limit yourself to 3 priorities a day at first (once you get a sense of what you can accomplish in a day, you can bend and break this rule).
For my daily planning, I use a daily planner from Moleskine. Each page has contains one day in a year, divided by the hour.
So, looking at your weekly plan, pick 3 things you want to accomplish that day. Your guesses about what you can do during one day will probably be way off, but you’ll calibrate that over time. Just pick 3, work through the day, and see how much you’ve accomplished.
Include breaks too, like lunch. You can cross them off and they are an integral part of the day. You should see them as a priority number 4 if you will.
Also, when you note the 3 things you want to accomplish, put a timestamp on them — a ballpark estimate of how much time you can/will/want to invest. This is because sometimes you can get stuck with a task and you’ll forgo the others because of it. While justified in some cases (when you’re flow-writing your next teen werewolf novella and reaching the 10k words mark), it can also lead to you not accomplishing what you wanted to do. One day like this is okay, but when you have a chain of days like this, you will not feel good, which makes it likely you’ll ditch the schedule altogether at some point. And we don’t want that.
Here is how my daily plan looks halfway through.
If you discount my morning routine, lunch, and book reading, I have 3 priorities for this day: “Histstadt” (my side job), writing, and workout.
A couple of things here as you go on with your day:
- Check the things you’ve accomplished. The bigger the check, the bigger the accomplishment. When you write down that exquisite tick mark, feel good about it. Imagine orgasm, cheese-crusted pizzas, or whatever else makes you jump out of your shoes.
- Mark the tasks you didn’t do. I use corner brackets for that. These tasks will transfer to the next day.
- Write down the progress you’ve made and the stuff you want to do the next day. This is so you can pick up where you left off easily. Here is where you can get tactical and adjust your weekly plan based on your progress.
Here is how it looks at the end of the day.
Now that you’ve planned your week and your day, you can start putting it into practice. Write down three priorities for the day, see how far you get, note your progress, rinse and repeat. Collect your notes so that you can implement them during your weekly planning and improve your week.
Concluding Remarks
This system works because it provides the necessary structure yet is flexible enough so you don’t feel stifled. To make it work, make it your own. Make your own adjustments and see how they work. If you stumble upon something good, let me know — I’m always looking to improve my planning game.
