My Setup For Being Productive!
More accurately, after forever and jumping around many tools and approaches to dealing with personal productivity, I have a system that works (for me!).
Before beginning with this, some people don't need any system like this anyway. They just are able to do what they seek out to do with un-fair amounts of preparation and planning, I know shocking! But it is a lot harder for some people (including me!), and just thinking that you are at fault, and you are lazy compared to them is just un-helpful, it helps a lot more to accept that people are different and some have it harder than others in some areas. However this is not to say, that resignation is the only solution. On the contrary, it's completely possible to deal with a wandering mind which has problem with attention, forgetfulness, etc, it requires crutches in terms of systems that are routine, simple, mundane, and aids the mind in a structured way.
On dealing with anxiety Journaling thoughts is a popular tool suggested by Therapists in the mental health domain. It helps to write down thoughts, as a way to deal with swirling or over-whelming emotions. For me productivity and general life organisation really benefits from the same practice of writing things down. Thoughts are ephemeral, once you write them down, they materialise and they lose their shapeless-ness and so does their nature of becoming paralysing also defers.
How and where you write is generally immaterial, writing in a real book is great but so is doing things digitally. There are a lot of reasons you would want to write non-digitally though. We are spending so much time with screens, through our Phones, and also a lot of us have day jobs which require sitting in front of computers too, it's very reasonable to want to also not taint your writing with that screen.
Despite also having a day job which needs me sitting in front of computer for all the time, I still prefer typing to using a pen. There are a few reasons, a quirky one is having a problem with Palmar Hydrosis which makes me dislike the texture of page on my hands. But aside from that, there are some other perks:
- Easier to add references (web links)
- Easier to backup
- Easier to share with others (via blog)
Now without further ado, here is the core part of having a digital brain system.
- Daily Journaling
- Kanban Board
- Notetaking with Zettlekasten method
- PARA method for notes organisation
Daily Journaling
Journaling is a core part of the digital brain system. Aside from the emotional benefits highlighted earlier, it also has the benefit on making you reflect on the day, which can often lead to secondary actions. Such as having a day where your friend mentions in passing that they like X so much, it's useful to keep this in your notes. If it's their birthday or other occasion, if you have a repository of things they love, and things they dislike, it makes gift selection so much easier.
How I practice it?
I am not regular, I don't do it everyday, I try, but there are often gaps ranging 5-6 days. That is okay. Forming new habits is hard, and berating yourself if you fail for a day or two or even weeks, it causes the risk to stop the practice altogether which is definitely worse than once a week, so don't be too hard on this.
Technical Setup
Journaling is one of those things for me, which needs very low friction. As i go about my day, and things happen, I want to be able to quickly jot down my thoughts, and sometime add some pictures. This means it has to be 'Phone First' for me, because that's what I'm carrying all the time. Another aspect that helps on the low friction part is it being a Widget on my phone. It might seem un-important, but not having to open up a App to do journaling is friction. Being able to see your past journal entries at a glance is really cool, and is a subtle reminder whenever using the phone.
For me this has meant I have alway returned to Google Keep for this purpose. it works surprisingly well. The widgets are beautiful, I add a new entry with current day as the title, and add a #Journal tag at the bottom. Keep automatically categorises notes based on this, and allows the Widget screen to show notes only from a specified tag. This means I can have other notes in Keep (spoiler!), but not have it pollute my widget, which shows a pristine log of all recent entries, it even allows adding banner images if you choose, and honestly it looks beautiful, making it more inviting to write down more often.
Kanban Board
I was made familiar to using Kanban Boards to manage projects though work, mainly through Jira which is used very often in commercial space for this purpose. But I also briefly used Trello forever ago, which also gives this feature. However it didn't struck me to use it for my personal tasks until recently. Kanban better than reminders or calendar events for certain things. These are often use-case where the task doesn't need to be strictly boxed into a startTime and endTime. I have a hard time dealing with Reminders, it quickly overwhelms when there are more than a few items, specially when they are not very simple, and they very often are not very simple!
Kanban is also great at being a catalogue for ideas. A typical workflow for me would like like, I get a idea "Maybe I should write a blog on OCaml", this goes into "TODO" pile, which is basically just a store for all such ideas. When I get around to reviewing the pile, I can choose to either discard it by moving it to "ARCHIVE" or move to "IN PROGRESS" if I believe it can be picked up. It also helps in a big problem for me which is of leaving projects without finishing them, often because I just forget because I need to take a break to do something else, and then if I remember it's too late to continue. Having things in "IN PROGRESS" doesn't mean it will be done, it just as well move to "ARCHIVE" but at least it is reminder that maybe I have my hands full, and I should finish this first before moving to another idea. Lastly, it is extremely satisfying to move to "DONE" pile, seeing a growing list of items that you completed is extremely rewarding.
Zettlekasten Note-taking
Writing down things is really useful. It happens to all of us that we thing we will keep this is in mind for later, but it's so often that we forget. I read so many books, and there are many quotes I love and would want to remember, but it's impossible to recall or re-use it for later. In the digital world, this also extends to things we read or watch as a video, we can always go and search Google again for those things, but that's additional steps, and worse sometime you don't remember that you meant to remember something, that means it's impossible to recover with search either.
However, when I started this, I had the problem that I was writing notes, but unless I periodically reviewing every note I took, I would still miss out on making connections. That meant my notes weren't serving as a memory as I wanted. In our brain, we have billions of neurons, connecting with each other, we are able to link from one concept to another. That is a very powerful construct. At the same time, as mentioned, memory is falliable, so it would be nice if we can re-create the linking of ideas digitally.
This is where Zettlekasten system of note taking comes up. Essentially the key ideas I take from it are:
- Write Atomic Notes: Doesn't need to be perfect english; It should be short, limited to one topic
- Link your Notes: These Atomic Notes should link to other Atomic Notes, forming a network of an idea.
- Process notes into some Output: Process the network of atomic notes into a summary of sorts. The key thing about this type of note would be that it's written as a distillation of the ideas that it refers and should require very little prior knowledge or having to dig into the atomic notes. A good example would be writing a Blog post based on your notes.
PARA Method for Notes Organisation
Once I started writing notes with the Zettlekasten system, it means there is a lot of notes, as they are atomic in nature. These are often linked, so that is one way to go from one idea to another. However there are times, where some category of notes are really pertaining to different areas, which means, the networks don't connect. This is where PARA comes in. PARA Stands for Projects, Areas, Research and Archive. PARA is basically a way for organising notes. For me, Zettlekasten is about what to write in a note? and PARA is about how to organise the written notes? , they are mutually exclusive.
With this method I create 4 top level folders:
Projects
These are tasks that you need to complete. An example would be: Write a fantasy novel - Name undetermined, this is a long term project, with a defined output.
Areas
This folder then gets many folders, and broadly breaks down to different areas in my life. Such as Physical Health, Mental Health, Cooking, Music & Films, etc.
Research
This can be a quote from a book, or a video or blog that you read. When coming up with ideas on a project, they can be used. Also when reviewing them, we could find connections with notes in Areas. If they do pertain to one Area, they can be moved to the specific folder, or otherwise stay here, if they are cross-sectional.
Archive
Any project that is completed, will be moved to Archive, we don't need to delete anything, storage is cheap. There is also a possibility that an Area of your life is closed, and it can be moved, an example could be notes related to care of a little child.
#productivity