Build Your Own Productivity System in 2022.
The fabulous Ali Abdaal posted a video on his YouTube channel last week detailing how to build your own productivity system in 2022. That got me thinking about how I would create a brand-new system myself.
For me, there are four elements of a robust productivity system:
Routines
Areas of focus
Goals
Projects
These four elements are the foundation of any solid supporting system.
Your routines are the small repeating tasks that you have responsibility for. Things like cleaning your home, washing the car, and other tasks that do not take your life forward but just have to be done to maintain your life.
Your areas of focus are the critical life-enhancing things that are important to you. These relate to the eight areas we all share:
Family and relationships
Career/business
Health and fitness
Finances
Self-development
Spirituality
Lifestyle and life experiences
Life’s purpose
They all mean something to us; the question is, what do they mean to you, and what can you frequently do to keep these areas in balance.
(If you want to learn how to develop your areas of focus, I have a mini-coursethat will take you through all eight of these areas and show you how to build them into your life.)
Your goals relate to your vision for your life in ten to twenty years. The vision can be broken down into small annual goals that help you to keep moving towards that vision. For example, imagine your goal is to travel the world for a year when you retire.
To achieve that, you will need two things: money and your health. If you neglect these two essential areas of your life, you won’t be travelling much beyond the street you live on. This means you would set a financial and fitness goal each year to keep these in check.
Your projects not only relate to your professional life but also your personal one too. To keep these moving towards their completion date, you need to see the tasks that bring them into your daily and weekly life.
On top of that, you will be collecting random tasks that need to be done at some time.
To build a productivity system from scratch, I would start with my routines and areas of focus. Then, list these out into independent lists, and set each to recur as frequently as they have to be repeated.
The goal is to offload all those little things you have to do from your head to your task manager. This will free up a lot of space in your mind for creative thinking.
Once these tasks are fixed, you will only need to review them every three to six months to make sure they are still relevant or move the dates around to make things a little more efficient.
Once my routines and areas of focus are set up, I would look at my goals. Goals are there to initiate a change in your behaviour. For example, the purpose of losing weight is not to lose weight. The goal is to change the way you eat and move. If you don’t change the way you eat and move, any weight you lose will pile back on once you return to your old habits.
So, the question would be, what tasks can I perform to help me change a bad habit into a good one? Exercising for thirty minutes each day, for instance. Only buy whole foods and not processed. How can you turn these into tasks?
As with your routines and areas of focus, goal tasks want to be repeating as frequently as they need to initiate that change.
Finally, I would add project tasks. Here the only tasks I would be concerned with would be the tasks I must complete this week to move the projects forward. Project notes and details should be kept outside your task manager. When you review those projects, you would move over any tasks to your task manager that need doing the following week.
Building a system this way would give you a clean, focused daily task list. A list that would not be overwhelming and one that ensures the things in your life that are important to you are taken care of.
The backend work — listing out your routines and developing your areas of focus — is the key to building a system that is robust and one that will serve you in the long term. It ensures that what is important to you is being taken care of, and it will keep your life in balance.
This contrasts with the way most people will go about trying to build a productivity system. The focus often begins with apps and then dumping everything they feel they need to do into multiple project folders into an app they do not fully understand. Then, once the task list becomes overwhelming, the app is discarded in favour of the latest, shiniest object as if the problem was the app.
The issue is never the app. The problem is always the system. If you never take the time to build a structured approach, you will always feel overwhelmed, stressed out and tired.
If you want to build your own productivity and time management system, start with the foundations — routines, areas of focus, goals, and projects — and build from there. It might take a little longer to get things up and running, but you will save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long term.
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