☀️ Building your Productivity System
How to build a robust system that works with you instead of against you
Hey friends!
Welcome to another edition of The Report. This week’s newsletter will be focusing on all the pillars that make your productivity system work. Think of this system like the engine that powers your life. With a little bit of investment and organization, you’d never have to worry about that missed appointment or those important meeting notes. Having a productivity system will ensure that you have all your things in order, so that your time can be better spent on things that are actually meaningful to you.
A productivity system should ideally consist of four essential things:
- A task manager
- A digital calendar
- A note-taking app
- An email app
With just these four tools, you are able to free up a lot of space that you are using by storing information in your brain or in a random notebook. By streamlining and organizing your life within this four tools, you have more free time to actually get things done and improve your productivity.
My personal task manager of choice is Things 3. I use Things to manage my tasks now and in the future, keep track of all my big projects and work on my habits. A task manager can also be paired up with your calendar so that you plan your tasks and also make time to do them. Some apps that can help you do this include Routine, Amie, and Sunsama.
Having a digital calendar is also an equally important part of your productivity system so that you can plan things in advance and have time to do everything at the pace that you are comfortable with. A digital calendar can help you keep track of all your events and ensure that you are not stretching yourself too thin. I personally use Cron for my calendar needs.
For someone like me, my productivity system is incomplete without a note-taking app. I personally use Craft as my tool of choice to keep track of my writing, my notes from classes, any ideas I have and more. Today, a lot of the note-taking apps out there (even more basic ones such as Apple Notes) provide the ability to seamlessly create your notes with zero friction so that your ideas and information can stay with you, always.
Finally, the last pillar of any good productivity system is an email manager. We are bombarded with so many emails everyday, with only a small percentage of them containing actual important information that we need to act on. A good email manager is extremely important to help you quickly sort through the noise to find the information you need. While I personally use Outlook, there are a lot of email managers that emphasize on fast sorting and hitting inbox zero. Some of my personal recommendations include Superhuman, Big Mail and Spark.
With a solid system in place, you are now free to take up whatever additional tasks you need and be sure that you won’t ever fall behind in either your professional or personal life. Once you are comfortable with the system you create, you can try to expand it or change it up in a way that suits you.
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