0050 - How To Make Your Productivity System Easy To Run - with Jake Desyllas

So you’ve followed the advice my previous talk with Jake Desyllas and set up your own basic productivity system. You know that a system like that is not a pedantic badge of honour, but is in fact the best way to add actions to your ideals – to LIVE your values.

You also know the three components of any successful productivity system:

1. Capture: Get things out of your head
2. Review: Check everything regularly

Organize: Put things in their right place

You probably are in a happy place - so allow me to flame some dissatisfaction.

At this phase, your system can be quite clumsy. That means more effort. More effort is more fragility - will you be able to keep things going when you a hit a lower motivation cycle?

 

I've invited Jake Desyllas of The Voluntary Life podcast once again to help us sharpen the edges of this new set of tools we are building together.

Make Your Reviews Easier

How do you make sure everything's covered in your weekly review? And how do you make sure you actually do it?

A Handy Checklist

Going through these steps will give you the confidence that you aren't missing anything:

1. Clear the decks

Get all the emails, text messages (known as Inbox 0) and social media that slipped through. Everything relevant must be in your capture system (notebook, index cards, Evernote etc.) before you start. Remove old notes from the system itself if needed.

2. Look at your projects list

A project is anything composed of more than one step. It's really helpful to keep a list of these so you know everything's moving forward. Looking through it weekly will generate most of your next week's tasks/to-do list.

3. Review your ideas

Now that the past and present is under control, look towards the future. It's well-worth keeping lists of someday/maybe projects, to-read lists, ideas lists - this where things will go when the inspiration strikes for things you'd like to do in the future. Check on these as part of your weekly review - maybe the time is now for something and exciting!

Jake likes to do step one and then step two and three separately, since they require a different mindset - one is a more administrative kind, the other a more strategic and visionary one.

Making Sure You Actually Do It

As with everything else, habituation is very powerful (maybe necessary) to get this done week by week. Pick the time and day that makes sense in your life. This could be a great time to put some great work music on, or even go to a nice cafe (just don't tell me about it).

I like pleasant company, so I've got a running weekly appointment with my buddy Nick Hazelton the Anarcho-Yakitalist where we do a large part of this process together. This has been by far the most successful approach that I took and it made not missing weeks really easy.

You can get some inspiration on how different people do this by looking up the early episode of the Getting Things Done Virtual Study Group podcast.

Not Just Weekly

Weekly reviews aren't meant to cover everything. Different intervals make sense for different parts of your life.

Consider including a quick morning recap into your start of the day where you overview what you can accomplish today (if you are going to the city, check to see everything you need to get done there etc.) and pick out the most important tasks of the day (three is a pop