productivity

Most of the Finland, especially the IT industry is on vacation throughout the July. I instead opted to have my vacation a bit earlier and have been working most of the month already while others have been gone. Sure there are downsides like being a bit lonely and of course having some on-call duties (voluntarily, as a second tier if needed).

I have twenty different things I follow daily. I have been iterating my system over the past three years actively and am finally found somewhat good balance with it. It might not be perfect and I still keep altering it whenever I feel like I have a better idea. But for that I need to have a closer look at it every now and then. What would be a better way to evaluate the effectiveness of any such system than the results it yields?

Some tasks are just too big or uncomfortable to do that the feel intimidating. But those tasks need to get done too. So which one is better to start with.

Eating the frog refers to a quote by Mark Twain. He said that starting with the task you are least motivated to do makes the rest of the tasks easy. If you have worst behind you there is nothing stopping you anymore.

My work involves mostly thinking and just occasionally writing those thoughts down. The work isn't tied into one place, it mostly doesn't even have to be done in front of a computer. Doing it remote works well, maybe even better in some occasions than doing it at the office.

The first quarter of the year is almost over and it has also been around three months since I did the latest adjustments to my productivity system. So it's a good time to take a look at how has it gone so far.

A quick recap of my system: I have a list of daily tasks, divided into five categories each having 2-5 items. My goal each day is to both complete at least one item from each category and to complete total at least as many tasks as I did in the previous day.

I'm always on the lookout improving my productivity. Recently I came across a classification method called Eisenhower matrix which assigns two qualities to the task and helps you decide if you should do it right away, postpone it or delegate it to somebody else.

After reading about it I was a bit disappointed I was basically already doing it. So nothing new for me. But never the less it's still a really good method deciding the priority of tasks.

I think I haven't written about my productivity system in its entirety. At least not for a while. And as I'm constantly trying to improve it, anything I have written previously is probably outdated anyway.

The system is pretty simple at its core: I have a list of daily tasks I want to compete every day. The items on that list aren't any particular tasks, but rather categories of things to do. The list is further divided in (currently) five categories. Every day I have a simple goal of completing enough items from that list to satisfy two rules:

It's not even noon yet and I have already halfway through my daily goals. There is still plenty of time to both complete the rest and have some free time to just enjoy the day.

I don't even have anything special planned for the day, so I don't even know what could I do once I have everything done. It's a weird situation. Usually, I do spend some time doing nothing before completing so much so maybe I can come up with something the time as well.