How to Fine-tune Your Productivity System When You Have A Little Extra Time.
This week, it’s all about what you can do to fine-tune your productivity systems so when we do come out of this pandemic you hit the track running.
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Script
Episode 128
Hello and welcome to episode 128 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about what you can do with that little bit of extra time each week because you no longer have to spend hours commuting or stuck in traffic jams.
Speaking of having a little extra time, whether you have taken the free COD course or not, now would be a very good time to do the course again (or do it for the first time)
It’s completely free and it will give you everything you need to begin building your own productivity system.
Remember, you are a unique person with your own way of thinking and doing things. This is why developing your own system around three core areas—collecting, organising and doing—is the best place to start.
Details on how to join the course are in the show notes and I hope you get as much value from it as the thousands of other people who have taken the course already have.
Okay on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl, like most people I am stuck at home and find I have a lot of extra time on my hands. I don't want to waste this chance. Are there any things I can do that will help to make me more productive?
Thank you, Mike, for your question. It’s something I have been doing. Looking at the way I do my work, seeing if I can find more effective and efficient ways of doing it and of course clearing up old folders, wardrobes and drawers around my home.
So what can you do to make your system more efficient and effective?
One area you may want to start with is to clean up your notes app. This is an app that can quickly fill up with a lot of old notes and stuff we collected and no longer need and just get forgotten about.
Now if you are anything like me, you may have a few thousand notes, so the question is where do you begin? For me, I start with the oldest notes. These are the ones most likely to be deleted.
Most notes apps will allow you to flip the way they are organised. You want to change your order from last in to first in—or oldest first. This just makes it a little easier as you will be organising from the top down—the natural way—rather than the bottom up—the unnatural way.
When I last did this, I had around 6,000 notes in my notes app. Clearing up 6,000 notes is quite daunting, so I decided to do 3 months at a time. I had three years of notes, that’s 36 months and so I divided that by 3 and that gave me the number of days I needed to clear up my notes app. - 12 days.
Doing it that way reduced any pressure and it turned into a fun experience. For the record, I got those 6,000 notes down to around 4,000 notes in just 12 days. Although I am sure it wasn't real, my notes app did feel a lot faster after that cleanup.
Another area you can cleanup is your to-do list. I find a lot of people have projects in there that are dormant. Projects that if you were being completely honest with yourself were not projects but wishes. If you know deep down that you will never get round to doing the project (or task) then clear it out.
For the more sensitive of you, you could create a master list of these projects and tasks in your notes app. At least then you won’t feel too upset having deleted a lot of old stuff that has been hanging around for a while.
Although, I find deleting them completely means if they are important, they will come back up in the future and then I just re-add them as a new project. The truth is most of these deleted projects and tasks never come back—they were just a lot of wishful tasks and projects.
It’s a very hard thing to do, but it can be very refreshing and similarly to when you clean up your notes app, you get re-energised with your to-do list and having less in there speeds up your whole decision-making process.
A lot of problems with our to-do lists comes from not being able to let go of projects and tasks that have been hanging around for a while and we have somehow convinced ourselves they are important. If you have not touched them for two or three months (or more) they’re not important and you should let them go.
For example, if you haven’t started writing the book you intended to start writing in January, you are not going to do it anytime soon either. Let it go.
By all means, keep your notes in your notes app, but if you are not actively writing your book, let it go. It’s taking up cognitive space in your mind every time you see the project and you really do not want to be wasting precious mental energy on something you clearly are not motivated to do (if you were motivated, you would be writing it!) Let it go.
In the past, I’ve had a number of projects like this just sitting around in my projects list and every time I do a review I am reminded I am not doing anything about it. It does not make me feel good about myself. I know if it was important enough I would always find time to do it. I also know if something is not really important enough, I just find excuses for not doing it. And I can often feel as if I am a genius when comes to excuses. Just let them go.
Now for the elephant in the room, so to speak. The files on your computer. I know, this is likely to be the scary place. How are your files and documents filed? Are they organised? Do you know where everything is? If you’re like most people, probably not. While you have a little extra time, now would be a great time to get these cleaned up and organised.
Now when it comes to organising your files there is not going to be a lot of help out there for you because we are all different. The way I organise my files is likely to be very different from the way someone else organises their files. I use the tagging function on my Mac to organise my files by the different areas I work in. My productivity business, my communications business and my personal life. I also use iCloud as my main cloud storage system (with a little help from Google Drive for collaborating) When I’ve tried helping other people to set this system up, we usually fail spectacularly. That’s because we all think differently and we would naturally search for something in a different way.
I began my working life just as computers were beginning take over the office (the early nineties) and so we were still heavily reliant on the trusty old filing cabinet. So, my first exposure to filing documents was with an alpha-numeric system and a metal filing cabinet. So for me, organising my files by area and alphanumerically just makes sense.
I’ve come across software engineers who have what appears to be incredibly complex coding systems for organising, but for them, they can find anything they want faster than I can with my system.
But no matter how you organise your files and documents there will always be files and documents that need cleaning up, deleting and archiving. Now’s a great time to do that. You may never get this opportunity again for a very long time.
Another area you can take a look at is how you structure your day. For this use your calendar. Go back to before the pandemic came along and see where you were spending your time during the week. Look at the meetings you attended and decide if that was a good use of your time. I have found that many of the meetings I used to attend were not all that useful and were surprisingly easy to be excused from.
Something I’ve been playing around with over the last week or two is developing my “perfect day”. What I’ve done is created a new calendar and called it “my perfect day” and added the things I would like to spend my days doing. It’s been a very interesting exercise as I discovered I want to begin my days writing. It could be a blog post, a podcast script or a book I am working on. Later in the week, I want to spend time doing my video and podcast recording.
And, I would like to be able to exercise twice a day. Running in the morning and weights in the afternoon. That was something that came up while I was playing around with what my ‘perfect’ week would look like.
I would begin the day at 7 AM and write for two hours. Then go out for a run for forty to fifty minutes. Come back, shower, have breakfast and then do some planning and communication work until lunch. After lunch, a little more writing and around 4 pm go to the gym for an hour.
What I discovered was teaching my English classes didn’t feature very much at all. This has given me some food for thought about how I want my days to go in the future and I can now begin the process of building that ‘perfect’ week and turning it into reality.
Not only is this a fun exercise, but it’s also eye-opening. You often find that what you are doing now—or before the pandemic—is not what you want to be doing. It may just be the stimulus to get you to make some significant changes that could lead you to find that dream work and turning every day into an amazing day.
Finally, one more area you can take a look at is your home working environment. This may be the first time you have worked from home and you have discovered that you do not have a good environment from which to work. Asking the question “What would I have to do to turn my working environment at home into the perfect workspace?”
I did this exercise a couple of years ago and it led me to ditch my desktop computer, buying a more powerful laptop and an external monitor and it transformed the way I worked. It’s wonderful now to be able to move around and work from my sofa from time to time or just unplugging my laptop and heading out to the local coffee shop to work on some writing or video editing.
Sometimes the little things can make a huge difference in the way you get your work done.
So there you go, Mike. Quite a lot of things you can take a look at and clean up. Doing this, what I call, backend work can give you a huge boost in your productivity because your apps will feel faster, you will have renewed enthusiasm for your system and your files will all be current and meaningful to you.
I hope that’s been helpful. Thank you, Mike, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you feel this episode or any of my other episodes could help someone you know, then please share this podcast with them. And, don’t forget to retake or take my FREE COD course. It might just help you to finally have a system in place that will help you to Bec less stress, anxious and overwhelmed.
Stay safe and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.