Recently, I noticed a decline in my productivity, and this got me really worried and so I decided to dig in. It turns out I had a lot happening at the time and was overwhelmed and struggling to balance it all, so I set out to learn how to create a more efficient productivity focused system that would accommodate the things that mattered and keep me in check. Having used it for few weeks now, I think I can share with you.

Being productive involves choosing carefully or wisely what to do and how to do it. To be productive, you need to optimize time, energy and attention

Productivity starts with goal setting. A picture of what you what you want your life to look like. It helps define your short term goals and daily tasks.

You need to have a vision.

Why set goals?

  1. To keep you motivated.
  2. And to help you prioritize.
  3. Goals help you measure progress.

Tips for goal setting

  1. Define a short term goal and time-frame
  2. Define your time budget
  3. Define a long term goal that will be the result of your short term goal
  4. Put it all together

Here is a sample of mine: My goal is to build an eCommerce platform for SME’s, work 12hours a week and make $1000 revenue in three months, I will continue at this until I increase the revenue to $10,000 monthly, hands-off tech a bit, hire more people and move on to something else

Planning
This process is very important, in fact I do this weekly

  1. Set up projects — different goals
  2. Break it down, list everything you need to achieve the goal. Make sure everything is planned thoroughly. This step is like grooming for Agile developers, it takes time but if well done, makes things fall in to place.
  3. Assign due dates — this is very important. Make sure there’s a date attached to everything

Organize your tasks
After the break down, it is easy to get overwhelmed, because now you have a long list of to-dos with no idea about where to start. I group my tasks into:

  • Today: be realistic with this while maintaining high standards, by this I mean write things you can do and don’t indulge in laziness, I recommend starting small and growing gradually.
  • Next Actions: these tasks don’t necessarily have due dates, but can be done if daily task is achieved earlier.
  • Waiting: things that depend on external parties to be done
  • This week: everything that needs to be done in the current week. These are weekly goals.
  • Next week:Helps you think and plan ahead
  • Later: Tasks that are not due in a while, usually non-urgent tasks.

Prioritization

This is necessary because time is not just enough to everything you want

  • Refer back to your goals and vision — I’d usually ask myself “if I had to pick just three things to get me towards my goal, what would have the biggest impact “.
  • If you do the things that are easier first, you make a lot of progress and have the drive to push further.
  • Add context, it could be based on complexity, duration and or location.

Setting up your calendar

Now let’s plan how we’re going to do all of this work. You need to choose a calendar. I suggest a digital calendar, so you can speed up a lot of the process.

The good thing is that these days mail providers come with calendars and you can setup events right from your mailbox, you could setup multiple calendars or calendar categories for different projects or if you have a separate mail account for different projects you can sync all your calendars easily if you have a smart-phone.

Planning your time

So now we have defined and organized all we’re going to do in our to-do list and identified when we’re going to do them in our calendar. The great thing about scheduling your time is that you literally make time for what you want to get done.

Setup recurring events for regular activities.

The weekly review

This step is very crucial to maintaining this new system. I suggest a weekly journal. You could consider the following:

  • What were my major achievements this week.
  • What challenges do I currently face?

This helps you celebrate achievements; creating a sense of fulfillment and personal accomplishment.

During the weekly review, review your task list — priorities and due dates and also review you calendar. This will also help you plan better for the next week.