Abstract Productivity System

I have been writing about productivity for a while. It started with Trello in 2013 and turned into a very custom system of things to track in Notion by 2018. Currently, my day to day is driven by what I call "Yearly Process" that reveals itself in chunks of "Weekly plans". I have had the though of productizing the process from notion into an app (mainly for myself). While thinking about it though, I realized that a productivity process is very tailored to a person and that's why there are so many different apps and systems out there.

In this post, I would like to deliberate on some properties of an abstract productivity system using which as a base, one can form a system that works for them.

It boils down to the following:

1. A productivity system should help you to make progress during "bad" days.

2. A productivity system should increase your trust in yourself.

Let's dive deep into each of these

Progress

Life happens, you could be having the most productive time of your life, only for the streak to be broken by unexpected (or expected) travel. Or you could be sick. A productivity system shouldn't make you feel guilty during these times of unavailability, neither are you expected to be productive when you should be enjoying or recovering.

Getting back to momentum once you are available again should be enabled by your fancy task list. Which means it should have bite sized tasks waiting for you to take take up and well defined themes of what to do.

If you are curious like me, you need a list of things you won't do or do next year. Always protect yourself from being nerd-sniped.

Trust

I didn't make this connection between trusting yourself and productivity systems for a while. In the beginning, I was making the rookie mistake of being too ambitious, only to fall short on goals.

Only when I started aiming for the "next step that I can take" in a bigger goal and capped the ambition to meet myself where I am, I made this connection of trust. I went from the usual over ambition stressful goal system to "I am someone who achieves 100% of his goals".

Of course, this only works if you are honest and don't make the goals too easy. Learning / growth should feel hard like a good workout but never hurt / injure you. The productivity equivalent is that you are stopped in your tracks and stop relying on a plan.

Other Tips

Immutable - Make the system immutable, it is okay to drop goals / change plans but when you do, write a note that you did that. That would help you with honestly finding your capacity and retrospective review, so you can plan better in future.

Administrative tasks - If you are like me an find doing taxes and other admin tasks super tedious. Just keep mental bandwidth that 20% of your time WILL go into doing administrative tasks. Just doing the mental space separation adds to expectation-reality matrix and helps put them on the list and therefore getting them done (you are the person who achieves all of your goals remember wink wink).