How I manage my productivity

Productivity is often mystified and a hot topic nowadays. To me, productivity is doing the things that’ll help me achieve my goals, whatever they might be.

I use a couple of tools that help me be more productive, these tools take the guesswork out of my day-to-day because I know exactly what I need to do and when.

We all have one key constraint: time. Productivity is getting around the time constraint and managing time in such a way that you can get things done.

There are many baseline skills that I’ve been cultivating that make me more productive.

Being fast using computers is one. I write at 100+ words per minute, for example. That does not mean however that the quality of my work must suffer because I’m going fast.

I always add quality controls to whatever I’m doing and I rely on technology whenever I can. This blog post was reviewed by Grammarly, so I don’t have to spend time looking for misspellings.

The tools that I use to manage my own productivity are:

• Google calendar
• Notion

I use google calendar to manage all my meetings but also to block time to do the things that I have to do, which I track in Notion.

In notion, I have a page for each month of the year. On each monthly page, I create weekly pages, where I then create 6 columns, one per weekday and another one for the weekend. Under each column, I type a list of to-do’s, and that’s how I keep track of what I need to do each day, as a bonus I can always look back at my calendar and notion and get a sense of what I did.

On Google calendar, I arrange my time around any meetings I might have to make sure that my to-dos have enough time to get done. Almost always I get everything that I want to do in a day, but if I can’t I move the to-dos to the next day.

Respecting my calendar and sticking to doing the things that I set up to do is the real secret, procrastination is real, but if you know what you have to do, and when, it’s easier to do the things that you set for yourself.

In the future, I might change the tools that I use, but the underlying principle of knowing what do to and when, will stay the same.

Resources

Notion template: this is not the exact same template that I use but it’s close enough.