Perfect productivity is a myth

When you have to deal with loads of tasks and projects, professional and personal, creative and technical, it is not often easy to find the best way to stay productive.

Everyone speaks about productivity, about systems and processes to make your daily routine 100% efficient. So much behavioural science, economics, psychology and other fields are united to discover what makes us superhumans. Best selling books and most popular TED talks are all about productivity. In our quest for work-life balance, we want to optimise time so as to fit all possible work tasks and also good leisure time in 24 hours.

I have tried many of the techniques and read many such books. What do I think now? I wonder where all these gurus were when I was at school. More and more I believe it would be useful to teach kids how to organise and learn new information before actually teaching them math and physics. How much time would have been saved?

However, I had always had my own systems and productivity models. I was quite efficient when my schedule was on fire. I build my own Pomodoro techniques and GTD methods. Looking back I can see now what actually works for me and what doesn’t.

They say that between losers and winners, the difference is — the system. So every time I see a new bestseller that was read by millions, I buy it, craving a miracle pill that will make me a Wonder Woman. Those books don’t mention how many people have actually changed their behaviour based on the system.

However, some recent ideas resonated with my inner critic. I discovered it is most useful for me to learn how the brain really works. From the books and talks of neuroscientists or any other scientist who works with the brain or emotions. As a science nerd, I like when everything is proven with facts, experiments and statistics. I do not appreciate simple promises of fantastic outcomes.

From what brain science says there is no one-fit-all system. Copying advice from books might not work the same for everyone. We are all different and our goals, tasks and workload are different. Obviously, it doesn’t mean that these books are useless.

From all that I’ve read, I can see now why something isn’t working for me. Learning and experimenting is the best way to find the perfect system of your own.

Let’s look at some of the methods (only mentioning those I know and tried):

Task's organisation

• Getting Things Done (or GTD) by David Allen David Allen’s TED talk. The idea is rather simple: capture all your tasks and thoughts on the list (paper or app); clarify those tasks breaking them down into smaller steps; organise the tasks by category and priority; refine the list regularly, and actually engage to tackle the task.
• Another way to organise tasks is The Eisenhower Matrix. It is a tool, that looks like a matrix, that helps prioritise tasks based on whether they are urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or neither urgent nor important.
• An even simpler task organisation method is The Kanban Method (its general idea). It is usually already implemented in some note-taking apps in templates, like, for example, in Notion. I was using it without knowing that it is actually a system. The idea is to visually break down your tasks between To Do, Doing and Done. Such a system is supposed to help prioritise the to-do list, limit Doing to 3 items. I believe it is also satisfying to put items in Done and see how the column is growing.
• Batch working is my favourite method. It consists of doing the same type of task or projects in one batch. For example, you write articles for Medium. Instead of writing an article per day, you write 7 articles in one day and then publish every day. Or if you have a social media campaign, you prepare all the posts at once and then publish one by one. This is just an example. While batching allows you to have maximum focus on one task and as some say it creates mental clarity, it definitely doesn’t suit everyone and every task.

Time management

• The Pomodoro Technique aims at maintaining focus with the help of a time structure. Using a timer you break down your work in multiple sessions. The standard advice is to take 25 minutes of work, then a 5-minute break session.
• A similar idea to Pomodoro is time blocking, where you block time for different projects or tasks in your agenda and don’t switch in between. The point is to stay accountable to your goals and not lose focus and energy while jumping between tasks.

Motivation

• Don’t Break the Chain is more a motivational method of keeping track of your achievements. The idea is to keep track of successfully completed tasks, often creative. Every day accomplishing these tasks you mark with X, and when you feel like skipping a day you look at this chain of Xs and feel motivated.

Some systems are good and feel very efficient but are not suitable for you at all, because you simply function differently.

If you know that something will distract you, you need to plan to not meet with the distraction. For example, I receive a lot of email newsletters. I need them for work, but not on a daily basis. I know that if I open one or two, I will be stuck for a few hours. That’s why I have dedicated time for newsletters, and in the meantime, I created a separate folder in my inbox where all the newsletters go without me noticing them and getting distracted. I can see them only where I need to.

To find your perfect productivity system you need to create it yourself. No one else can know what’s best for you and how you function. It is completely normal to have weird habits that are important for you to be taken into account in your daily schedule. Use good practices and advice but make them your own.

Few tips to take into account:

• You need to be able to stick to your system. If it feels hard and requires a lot of effort there is a big chance that you will quit when the friction will reach maximum. For example, if you decide to start working early in the morning, but at the same time you go to sleep late, you will be exhausted in the morning and lose motivation and energy for the whole day.
• Minimize distractions. A good note-taking app can be a life-saver or it can be a burden. If it takes too much time or does not work intuitively, using it can quickly become a waste of time. For me, until I found Notion, I used too many different tools, from apps and new google docs to post-its and notepads. I had notes and to-do lists everywhere. I was losing ideas and finding them too late to remember what it was about, couldn't keep track of lists and to-dos. With Notion, even though it took me some time to learn how to use it and organise my notes, now I don’t lose so much time stressing about forgetting everything. The right app can make us more productive, but this step should come last in designing our own productivity system.
• Review and refine. It’s good to stick with a system long enough to know whether it’s working for you, but if after a few weeks you notice the system is either not sustainable or doesn’t fit your goals, you can always change and improve it.

Structured or creative or both you don’t have to follow common rules, but to make your own. Experiment and try again. Making one small progress today, don’t forget to enjoy this win tomorrow.