Sketching Paris
I brought my sketchbook but haven’t had much time to wander and draw. I def want to come back when it’s warmer and spend more time with zero plans.
Paris fashion week
Officine Generale
More thoughts on my Paris trip when I get back, but posting this to keep my streak going!
Creating my productivity system
Funny to write about improving my productivity after the most recent posts shitting on it. But writing about something helps me think it through.
(A warning: this post is not polished, and is mostly a mind dump.)
My current challenges
I have a lot of different roles - Business owner, writer, stylist, on top of other roles I aspire to have such as artist.
I work mostly alone - I currently can’t delegate a lot of things.
My criteria for a system to get things done
It should be simple
It should be accessible on the go
It shouldn’t require a lot of special tech or tools
The process I’m going to be using
I’ve stolen bits and pieces of from GTD, Cal Newport’s Trello concepts, and Khe’s $10k work.
Sketch of me trying to workout my system
Summary of the system
Main components:
Capture inboxes - You should always have a place to capture tasks, notes, recommendations, appointments, etc so you don’t have to rely on your memory.
Sort & Clear - Set aside a recurring time to sort what’s in your inboxes into the appropriate App (Trello, Pinboard, Notion) The goal is to clear the inboxes at the end of each day or week. This is where you can decide if something is even worth doing.
Assign & Do - Now you can go through each app is assign the tasks to a date to complete.
My pinned Inbox note. A mix of random thoughts, quotes, client tasks to do, post ideas, etc
My capture inboxes
Most recommend having 1 digital and 1 analog “inbox” to capture things (e.g. an App and a notebook you carry around.)
I mainly use a pinned note in my Notes app titled “📬 INBOX.”
If I ever do jot something down on paper, I usually almost immediately add it to the inbox note.
In the rare occasion I write something down on paper because my phone is dead/not with me, I’ll put it in my inbox note the first moment I get.
As you can see in the screenshot of my inbox note above, what I capture is all over the place.
Sorting & The Apps
I found that things I write into my inbox fall into 3 categories.
Things I need to do (e.g. client requests, doctors appointment, reach out to landlord)
Recommendations (e.g. a good keyboard, bar rec, book to read)
Information/ideas (e.g. idea for a blog post, doc I need to write for freelancers, etc)
I narrowed down 3 apps to organize these:
Within Trello
I have boards for each of my main roles:
Personal - For anything related to my personal life. Important dates for my wife, doctor appointments, stuff I need to do around the house
Personal stylist - For client work
The Essential Man - Admin biz things, freelancer work, writing, digital courses/products
I’ll create boards for temporary projects - For example, I’m currently planning a book. So I created a board for that.
Within each board, I use a version of Cal Newport’s column categories
Queue - My version of Cal Newport’s “Backburner” column. Basically tasks for that role that haven’t been assigned yet.
Figure out - Tasks where I can’t move forward without something specific
Waiting to hear back - A task where I’m waiting for someone to complete something before I can move forward (e.g. waiting for a client to schedule a call)
This week - Tasks that MUST be done this week
Today - Tasks that must be done today
Done - Tasks that I’ve completed
Sunday review of coming week’s tasks - Spend 30 mins Sunday morning and move tasks to “This week.”
Do the task - I do the tasks in the appropriate time blocks in my calendar
Pinboard
Pinboard & Notion
For Pinboard items - I’ll add anything from the Inbox and tag it. I’ll assign a task in Trello to review certain things. (E.g. I might add a Trello task to book a reservation for our anniversary with a note to review pinboard restaurant recs.)
For Notion - I’ll assign a task in Trello to create a Notion entry in the appropriate Role board in Trello.
Time blocking calendar
I find I work best with time blocks. I found I need a good amount of time to get into work mode, and I need long stretches of mostly uninterrupted time to work on something.
Current schedule and blocks:
~6-7am: Wake & Breakfast
~7-10am: Deep writing block: Daily journaling and personal blog
10am-3pm: TEM block - either client or writing time
~3:00-4:00: Admin (Emails, etc)
~4-4:30pm: Trello processing
4:30-6:00pm: Gym
I’ll update on how this is working for me over the next few months.
Unoptimized life
I love this article by Evan Armstrong “In Defense of the Unoptimized Life.” It articulates so much of what I was thinking when I wrote about busyness.
I especially enjoyed the Kurt Vonnegut bit about his wife getting on his case for going out to buy envelopes:
“Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy 100 envelopes and put them in the closet?
And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know...And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
It’s easier to be honest
My wife has been watching the Bernie Madoff doc on Netflix. The bit that stood out to me was his confession. It became too much to keep up the scam.
I can only imagine the level of stress and anxiety that comes from being a fraud.
It reminds me of that saying, “If you tell the truth, you only have to remember one story.”
It’s just so much easier to be an honest person. (And much more peaceful.)
Be a tourist in your own city
I went to see Hong Kong Ballet's interpretation of Romeo & Juliet yesterday at NY City Center with my wife. We dressed up and went all out.
It was the quintessential NY date: a ride over the bridge at night, a black tie show, and a martini to cap the night off.
It was my first time doing something like this (even though I've lived in NYC for 18 years). It was, without a doubt, one of the top two things I've done in NYC outside of getting married at city hall.
On the way back, we talked to our Uber driver about the fact that it took us so long to do something like this. Being a born and raised New Yorker, he totally related. Though he's never seen the Statue of Liberty or seen many "New York" sights, he always seeks out the "touristy" stuff when he travels.
It's easy to take it for granted when you're so close.
It was such a great reminder to not be afraid to be a tourist in your own city.
Busyness
I’ve been working on refining my systems the past few weeks. And I’m being careful about taking a lot of the advice out there.
Cal Newport points out the rise in “productivity as a hobby.” (There’s been some backlash on “Toxic Productivity” content.)
I speculate like fitness tracking, the “busyness” of sorting, tagging, flipping switches in complex systems and apps scratch that productivity itch.
It’s like running on a treadmill.
You’re doing the work, but technically not going anywhere.
I did some Asana training and found myself even more overwhelmed than I was before.
I ended up making a spreadsheet version that’s basically a checklist. Sadly, I don’t think there’s a lot of content clicks to be made from it.
Short-term easy is long-term hard
I love this quote from Farnam Street.
“Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy.
We’d rather do the easy thing than the hard thing. That's natural and normal. I call this the mountain. You can climb it, or you can avoid it, but it's not going away.
On any given day, we can avoid the climb. We can stand at the bottom, look up, and say, "I'll wait. Hopefully, the mountain isn't here tomorrow." But we all know the mountain is still there tomorrow. And instead of looking smaller, it's even larger.
The easy path today makes a hard path tomorrow. The hard path today makes an easier path tomorrow.
The choice is yours, but the mountain isn't going away.
The longer you put off the hard thing you know you need to do, the harder it becomes to get started.”