On productivity

I have been asked multiple times about my time management strategies, as I seem to accomplish much more than most people. This post is a collection of my experience-based methods.

The experiences I share in this post are based on a variety of roles and responsibilities I have held throughout my career and personal life. These include jobs requiring a high level of autonomy, management and supervisory positions, military experience up to the headquarters level, numerous positions of trust, volunteering, and endless personal projects. Ultimately, these experiences have shaped a lifestyle focused on getting things done.

It's important to note that this text does not aim to promote my lifestyle as superior to others. However, I recognize that it is common for people to desire to accomplish more than they currently do. In this post, I share my thoughts on how to achieve that goal.¹

Sanity check

As a reminder, all actions should be goal-oriented. When you need help with time management and getting things done, it's essential to remember what you are trying to achieve and why you have chosen that specific goal as worthy of allocating resources to. It is occasionally wise and recommended to zoom out and remind yourself why you are making space for the exact tasks on your platter. We form habits quickly, and it is very easy to lose the root of the tree. For more on this topic, check out my post about creating headspace.

Tools

To start, I'll provide a simple answer to the most common sub-question: no, I don't use any dedicated applications or fancy digital tools for time management. While I might be a bit unconventional in that I have multiple calendars in use for different purposes, the core idea is simple: just use any kind of calendar that is easily accessible to you. Equally important is forming a routine of using it, as you need to have the habit of adding tasks and events to the calendar(s) and keeping it constantly open. I am actually so accustomed to using my calendars that I seldom need to explicitly check them during the day, as I quickly memorize what I have planned for each day, but that is not the baseline situation.

I use Google Calendar for physical events, appointments, and family notes, as it is automatically synced with my phone. For task management, I use plain old Excel. The grid forms an automatic calendar, and one task fits in each cell. Tasks are easy to rearrange by dragging, and I color-code them based on priority using a simple scale. This way, I can see at a glance how many tasks and what priority level tasks I have for a given week or day.

While it is usually necessary to have some level of daily planning and classic calendar work, I tend to use a X-month plan which includes rudimentary weekly plans. Usually, this means around three months, though the plan might be clearest for the next month and a half to two months, with the horizon getting hazier after a certain point. This entire plan can usually be fit onto a single sheet of A4 paper. Its purpose is not in the details; it reflects your general mindset and high-level goals for the coming hundred days or so. Putting those thoughts onto paper as a list already forces you to formalize your plans and direction. In addition to the monthly plans, having those 12 to 14 weeks listed with a couple of main focus points for each of them orients you towards what is coming and helps you maintain an overall balance.

Rhythm of the day

Knowing thyself is a crucially important basis for doing basically anything goal-orientated. Human beings, as biological entities have individual differences in their day rhythm. If you don’t know what time of the day is most productive for you, you should spend significant effort to find out. The ideal would be to secure that time slot recurrently for high-energy work and use rest of the hours for more mechanical tasks that do not require as much brain power.

I think an essential associated strategy is ‘eat the frog’, which means starting your day with the mentally hardest task you have on the platter. The reason behind its difficulty might be either mental or physical, meaning that it requires willpower or just hard work, but the implication remains the same. Start with it: this way you have immediately achieved a major milestone at the beginning of your working day, and it doesn’t haunt you for the rest of it.² Sending the unpleasant email, making that tedious phone call or reading a complicated research paper as soon as possible will make the rest of your day better.

I’m most productive in the morning before twelve, so for me, this naturally means starting my day eating frog(s) and pounding in until lunchtime. After that I can mentally downshift, bask in the sense of achievement for the rest of the day and enjoy not having something lurking in the back of my head most of the day. If you are most active during evenings, perhaps you can apply eat the frog by beginning your evening shift with the hardest task.

Keep your desk clean

A key theme in many people's grievances is the seemingly endless waves of tasks that are like a force of nature, uncontrollable and thus neglected, forgotten, and badly done. This is a somewhat false narrative, an emotion instead of a fact, and one can do quite a bit to stop the tide. I acknowledge that we have different personality types, and what is innate and natural for me is difficult and S2-type stuff³ for someone else. Nevertheless, if you want to use your time efficiently, you need to be in control of your time and tasks, not controlled by the flow of them

I discussed calendars above, but I'll repeat one common-sense guide: use a calendar, period. However you want to call it, use any method that allows you to list and categorize your tasks. After that, we can talk about subtler tricks.

First and foremost is task allocation. When a new task pops up, you have two efficient options: either do it immediately or transfer it to your task list immediately. For anything small (less than ~10 minutes)⁴, it is strongly recommended to do it immediately. There are no benefits in waiting; never let small things cluster. If you can't deal with the task fast, you need to at least transfer it quickly. Use e-mail drafts, temporary lists, paper sheets, whatever - just keep the things in a pile and away from your working memory. I usually use the Sticky Notes desktop application for stuff that pops up during the day and clean it up before the end of the day.

As a fail-safe mechanism, you should also regularly check your inboxes on different platforms. I usually go through my emails and company's own message platform on Fridays, checking that I have reacted to everything from the previous weeks. This takes very little time if your system is otherwise in order but helps to see if anything has slipped through the cracks, as inevitably happens occasionally.

An element of this topic is learning how to let go of things. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. It is far better to get tasks done and sub-projects, even bigger projects, finished than to sit on them, polishing them endlessly. We can borrow a trio of concepts from economics here: diminishing returns, the compound interest effect, and opportunity cost. They apply to most fields in life, if not all. These blog posts are a good example: if I were to hone them, say, 50% more time, my estimate is that they would get 5-10% better. With a plethora of conflicting projects battling for my time, that is not a good return on my investment, and it is better to push that publish button earlier. That way, I will also accumulate many more posts over time than if I were to always sit a week or two more on each one.

Keeping your desk clean also means doing so literally. A permanent state of chaos inevitably eats up energy. Arrange an environment where everything has its place and where order exists. Then just keep up with it; don't leave your desk out of order. When the physical surroundings where you work are in order, it is easier to transfer that into the e-reality and the architectures of your mind than to do demanding work in a messy physical environment. Less distraction, more results. This applies to your virtual desktop and, say, Google Drive as well.

Keeping the balance

Successful and productive people tend to be achievers; they enjoy the feeling of accomplishment itself, probably also the status involved. It is easy to be an over-achiever - to always aim higher and do more. I am not an exception. However, unlike many similar people, I have not had a burnout.⁵ I have, though, had minor health issues and I have experienced a lot of tiredness through the years, and I have learned from that. It is vital to learn how to keep a balance between achieving and staying functional, both physically and mentally.

As a first note of this, I strongly favor rest in motion -philosophy in contrast to “rest at a vacation”, “waiting for the weekend”, “work hard, play hard” and similar attitudes. Your daily life should be arranged in a way that you are recovering constantly; if not completely overnight, at least within a reasonable period of time. Human life has always been profoundly cyclical, and it is normal to have more intensive cycles and more leisure cycles. These can be measured in weeks, months and even years. What matters is the ability to simultaneously know how to push yourself near your limits, and to keep off the limit.

It is very important to have enough slack in your life, mainly because having enough headspace is the source of creativity, secondly because fighting against the mob for anything else than a short period of time is futile. As Raemon tells everything worthwhile about slack here, I don’t have much to add. Knowing your own warning signals is probably the most important thing, as your body and mind reliably do give you signals about getting near the limits. The mob is ever-present and can always force itself to the surface.

At the same time, you should not fall into the trap of comfort. We live in a society and time of very high living standards and hyper-individualism. The mainstream narrative allows and promotes endless excuses for not doing anything worthwhile. Do not mix comfort-seeking and a real need for slack; learn to be sensitive to yourself and distinguish static noise from the yells of the angry mob that needs to be dealt with.⁶ The only way to develop yourself and actually get incrementally better at anything at all is to push yourself out of your comfort zone and take up challenges. If you can embrace that kind of a lifestyle, you will get over time exponentially better at living in general than the peer group. I can also confidently say from experience that the tolerance for experienced discomfort can go up quite high, and I think it is a very important skill to develop.

I have two personal tips that I have found quite useful. The first was to remove all time-sensitive goals concerning my “free-time” projects from all my task lists and calendars. I still have goals, of course; I want to have books read, for example, and I have a vague plan in my mind about the books I’m going to read in the next few months. Putting these into the lists, however, makes them associated with work and metawork, i.e. “serious stuff” from the perspective of my mob. It might be harder to enjoy them and easier to feel more pressure to accomplish the personal projects if they are on those lists. Just keep them inside your head and follow your intuition about when to do what on those topics.

The other trick is to always have something extra good booked into the calendar. This is especially useful if you are going through a time of extended hard work or hardship, as your mind needs escape hatches. Often they can be in the semi-far future, and often they do not need to be realized⁷ for them to serve their function. It is generally psychologically good, though, to have an event, a trip, an evening dedicated for your hobby, something waiting there. The trick is to cement something good and worthwhile that is going to happen, so you can tap into that if you need a temporary boost to motivation.⁸

1. There are some good posts on this topic elsewhere as well. Lynette Bye’s Five Ways to Prioritize Better is solid, and should offer something for everyone as it has a lot of different approaches included.

2. There is of course the risk that you underestimated the size of the frog. In that case, either accept the price and force yourself through it, if it really is worth it to get done; alternatively split it into sub-frogs and deal with one of them.

3. See Dual Process Theory.

4. For example, short reactive e-mails and messages like confirmations; booking regular appointments; paying bills; changing light bulbs; taking out the thrash; putting your dirty clothes into the bin; in general putting any physical object into its correct place.

5. I must say that despite reading official descriptions of this phenomenon it remains unclear to me where the exact boundary of a burnout lies, as some people seem to use it for general tiredness rather than something clinically definable. I’m also curious about the cultural aspect and the effect of zeitgeist behind the experience of a burnout, as the word is only fifty years old. However, this is linked to the wider question and discussion about the relationship between growing amount mental disorders in Western population and the widening definition of mental disorders.

6. I think most people know some common form of these, such as hard fatigue, brain fog and non-standard deviations in mood, but we all have our individual ones as well. If I’m doing work-category stuff in the evening after what is apparently a long and hard day of work already, I occasionally start sneezing and my nose starts running. It will stop soon after I switch to something light. I have found a couple of similar mental patterns as well.

7. Thus the effectiveness of daydreaming for those people for whom it is a natural thing to do.

8. As long as you remember that motivation is a feeling, and unreliable as an source of action. It is an asset, but not the backbone of steady progress.