I'd say my biggest focus is just organizing everything, and in some cases, trying to break things down. It's easy to know that you need to do something, but sometimes, planning out what needs to occur and in what order can be super helpful. For example, I need to paint the house, but there have been a number of thoughts bounced around about changing the color. Well, I can't paint it without a color, so I need to know that first.
I started designing my system in high school back in the late 90's. At the time, I had undiagnosed ADHD & was super disorganized & was doing really terrible in school. I went through every self-help book, motivational seminar, and productivity tool on the planet over the next couple of decades...basically nobody had
really cracked the code , because after reading every book, watching every Youtube video, etc. I'd ask myself one question:
but what changed? If someone had something that
truly worked, then it would already be available & people would be using it successfully!
So I set to work to try to solve the problem. Nearly 25 years later, I've created what I consider to be a pretty solid solution! Working on the writeup right now, hoping to have it launched within the next few months! It's open-source & uses a free Google Drive account & a free Todoist account. It's very easy to learn. The core idea is that it's a "holistic framework", meaning it applies to every situation in your life, but it allows you to define how
you want to handle each situation, using a special set of pre-defined tools. A few discussion points to prime the pump:
1. To paraphrase GTD author David Allen: we can't actually "do" a project at all, we can only do individual actions
related to the project, and when enough of those actions have been completed, we then mark our project off as "done". So what we need is a tool that (1) manages the volume of our commitments in life (both things we want to do & things we need to do, so that
everything is covered but so that we have balance & aren't being lazy couch potatoes or workaholics), and (2) handles sequencing those so that we have "marching orders" for the day.
2. We operate best by either single-tasking on one individual action at a time, because that's what allows us to give 100% of our focus & attention to the task at hand, or by working on an umbrella of tasks (ex. when I work on IT stuff, I'll start installing Windows on a PC, then while that's going I'll swap out a hard drive on another machine, so it's all under the group of "working on computer stuff". So that means we need a way to wrangle the volume of stuff on our plate, i.e. every single situation in our life, then personally define what success means to us in each individual situation, and then stick it into the system to automate babysitting progress & completion of it, so that our brain doesn't have to remember all of the bits & pieces. That allows us to live proactively, rather than reactively!
3. Individual "tasks" don't really do commitments justice. A better solution is
discrete assignments. So our job each day is to create & execute a finite list of discrete assignments to work on & complete. Think of those discrete assignments like marbles & think of our waking 16-hour portion of the day like a paper towel tube, where we can distribute & adjust those marbles as the day goes on, sort of like a Newton's Cradle toy. This approach is what allows us to shift from
emotion-based execution to commitment-based execution, because rather than trying to self-motivate against the "big picture", our job is simply to execute a finite list of discrete assignments throughout the day. This enables us to make progress on the volume of our commitments, without losing track of what we're supposed to do.
This is called a "personal productivity system" (PPS). Everyone has a PPS; some are weak (like me, with ADHD...constantly forgetting stuff, constantly late, constantly procrastinating), some are average (put in the effort & get through it), and some people have above-average energy & mental clarity (ex. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc.) & can just zip right through everything like magic. A better way than all of those is to adopt a strong PPS that externalizes the volume of our commitments & then handles the sequencing for us. That way we can pick out from an inventory of discrete assignments each night (because we can only truly focus on one thing at a time if we want to be effective people) what we want to do the next day. Not for the whole day, but just for the working portions of our day to get our stuff done, so that we can enjoy guilt-free play time! We will ALWAYS have an overwhelming number of things to do, but our job is to create a daily commitment list of discrete assignments to work on &
to make it easy to do those tasks through preparation.
Because we operate off emotion by default, we suffer from what I call the "volume illusion", where we get overwhelmed easily. Our brain says "seems hard, I quit". A better way to do things is to use a strong, external PPS so that we're not "drinking from the firehose" all the time. The PPS allows us to capture information, commitments, and ideas and then make them usable by outsourcing the storage & processing of them into the system. That way you do things like wanting to paint the house, you can easily define & track the project steps, generate discrete assignments, and then schedule them into your day. This also allows for the flexibility of interruptions & emergencies that derail our plans, because like the Newton's Cradle, we have all of those "marbles" (discrete assignments) lined up & can shift them around easily!
So for your house painting project, the outcome desired is to paint the house. The next action step is to pick a color. So that may mean going down to Home Depot, getting some color samples, and taking them back home to see how they look in-person, then making a decision, then buying the paint & supplies, then waiting for a clear day to put the first coat on, letting it dry, and waiting for another clear day to put the second coat on. In our heads, it's just "paint house", but in reality, it's a BUNCH of discrete assignments that need to be completed in sequence over time, in addition to the dozens of other things going on in our lives (what's for dinner, car maintenance, house chores, work projects, hobbies, etc.). So this is why we need a strong personal productivity system, as a way to bulletproof managing the volume of our responsibilities & then realistically sequencing a finite number of discrete assignments each day.
This approach enables us to capture the elusive beast of repeatable success: we no longer have to emotionally wrangle with the big picture when our energy is low, all we have to do is the next discrete assignment that we "primed our battlestations" for, so that we can hop from task to task & move the needle on each commitment & each project. Once you capture the vision of how productivity actually works in reality, i.e. via single-tasking, and have a reliable tool for managing all of the stuff in your life, then getting stuff done becomes WAY more FUN and EASY because it's not longer about bootstrapping ourselves emotionally & trying to get organized & having to muster up the energy for a big home run each day...we're just eating snacks, not meals, day after day after day! There's a lot of ego involved in our standard way of doing things, because our brain suffers from that "volume illusion" & thinks this approach is too hard & complicated, when really it's stupid easy & makes our lives so much better lol, so it's easy to dismiss a tool like this because our brain doesn't want to have to figure things out & thinks its going to be under the duress of having to do hard, complicated things all day long.
I'll give you an example: I like to do
macros. Super easy in theory, but somewhat difficult in practice because of the food prep & counting involved. Using the idea of a "holistic framework", I stuck it into my productivity system to manage. For my purposes, I wanted to eat yummy food, eat on the healthier side (homemade with fewer preservatives), eat on a budget, hit my macros every day, have a variety of food instead of getting sick of eating the same thing every day, and not have to cook every meal every day in the heat of the moment. So my own custom implementation within the framework of my system was "meal-prep one meal a day, separate from my eating periods". I use my Instapot & APO to make things easier. So in practice, my system babysits the automation portion & I just show up to do my discrete assignments as needed:
1. I meal-plan once a week using some simple tools to pick out what to cook for the week. I then go shopping once a week, based on what I don't have in stock in my pantry at home & what I need to cook for the recipes of the week.
2. After work each day, I cook exactly one meal or snack, then divvy it up to freeze & label the macros with stickers.
3. Before bed, I pick out my food for the day so I can add up my macros & let it thaw overnight. I reheat it using a Hot Logic Mini, RoadPro, my APO, or microwave, if it needs to be hot.
That way, I wake up, pack my insulated lunchbox, and have recurring smartphone alarm reminders for when to eat during the day (I often get distracted & forget lol). In practice:
1. I get to eat yummy food every meal of every day
2. Most of my meals are made at home, which is super cost-effective
3. I get a huge variety of meals to choose from, kind of like my own personal take-out menu
4. I don't have to figure out math for every meal because I already did that last night
5. I don't have to scramble for food each day.
6. If I'm not in the mood for something, I can just switch up the days for the week, i.e. Taco Tuesday can be on Thursday & I can make pizza instead for dinner
7. It allows me to effortless hit my macros every day
8. I don't have to cook every meal every day
9. I have a ton of "emergency food" to choose from when I'm fried
I can't harness those benefits using my built-in PPS (ADHD brain), but I can
easily do it using my external personal productivity system, because all I have to do is show up & follow a checklist for single-tasking on a prepared-ahead-of-time & pre-selected discrete assignment! It takes a few months to get used to this style of thinking & working, because our brain runs off emotions & wants to dive right into doing things & avoid thinking as much as possible, which is fine if we only ever want to be successful at a
few things in life, rather than defining what success means in each & every situation & then using our external PPS to take adult control of our lives in order to have successful experiences day after day after day! It's essentially about using external personal automation to focus on enjoying getting great stuff done! To paraphrase Dave Ramsey, "in order to live like no one else, you have to live like no one else!" We don't have to be stuck doing things the way we've always done things; there are (or rather, will be soon!) better tools out there for us!