The Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity Methods

Unlock your potential with the Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity Methods. Discover strategies to streamline your tasks, enhance your efficiency, and transform your daily routine. Embark on a journey towards achieving more, while doing less.

Eating Live Frogs: Do the Worst Thing First

Helps avoid procrastination while ensuring that you make progress on the right things

• Schedule your daily tasks from hardest to easiest
• You’ll get your most important, intimidating, anxiety-inducing tasks(aka your frog) done while your energy is high and your day will get progressively better

Productivity Methods Overview

Low Type: Visual, Tactile

• Struggle with procrastination.
• Medium Type: Abstract, visual, tactile
• Need to prioritize a large number of tasks, but prefer lists over graphs
• Are in the early phases of a big project and need to strategize before jumping in, but need to turn creative brainstorming into an actionable to-do list.

Personal Kanban

Time commitment to get started: Low

• Type: Visual, Tactile
• Perfect for people who: Have a tendency to start a lot of projects but finish very few of them
• Helps you visualize progress on all of your projects
• Separate projects into three categories: To Do, Doing, and Done

The Medium Method

Takes the best of analog and digital and melds them into one seamless productivity system.

• You’ll need: 1 main notebook, 1 travel notebook, post-it notes, a pen or pencil, a task management app, an online calendar, a note app

Systemist

Keeps track of everything you need to get done in the simplest way possible

• Take it everywhere
• Capture everything
• Break it up into small tasks and make them actionable
• Prioritize
• Accept that you will not get everything done and move on to the next task
• Get consistent feedback
• Review what you’ve accomplished

Must, Should, Want

Identify what’s critical today and what can wait

• Must tasks are non-negotiable
• Should tasks are something you need to do today
• Want tasks can wait to be put off for the future
• MoSCoW is a variation on this method

Agile Results

Focuses on outcomes and prioritization while keeping diligent watch over scope of projects

• Align day-to-day activities with larger goals
• Use the vision of the finished product as a motivator
• Build in time to reflect and make better choices in the future

The SMART Method

A way to take a big, pie-in-the-sky idea and figure out how to make it work in the real world by asking yourself a series of questions

• Specific: What is this project and what, specifically, do you want to accomplish?
• Measurable: These are the individual tasks and steps that add up to a complete project.
• Assignable: Who is going to do which step? Yes, this is another method that can work for teams, but don’t toss out this step if you’re working on a solo project
• Realistic: This is the Debbie Downer of SMART
• Timely: Deadlines are an important part of nearly every successful strategy

How to Get the Most Out of This Guide

Break down the time commitment needed to get started with each method, rated with a simple Low, Medium, or High.

• If you know which learning/work style you lean toward, you can skim through and jump to the methods that align best with your natural approach.

Abstract

If you organize projects simply by writing it down or you strategize easily in your head with no physical representation, abstract methods are most useful.

Productivity Methods Hub

The right productivity method can make a huge difference in your work

• A friction-less workflow can take you from feeling overwhelmed, unfocused, and unproductive to feeling calm, in control, and prepared to take on even the biggest projects
• There are new methods being developed and tweaked all the time
• This post will give you a brief overview of the most popular and useful productivity methods

Pomodoro/Sprints

Helps you maintain focus for longer by splitting your work into short bursts.

• Work for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and repeat until you’ve completed four sprints, after which you take a longer break.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Identifies which tasks are priorities and which are just distractions

• Draw an X and a Y axis, with the lowest importance at the bottom, highest at the top
• Urgent and Important
• Less Urgent but still Important, Less Important but Urgent, and Less important and less Urgent
• Place all your tasks on a continuum within the boxes to see what really needs to be done now and what can (and should) wait

The Action Method

Best for people who: Need to turn creative brainstorming into an actionable to-do list

• Tidies up the messier aspects of creative work
• Break down ideas into three key categories: Action Items, Backburner Items, Reference Items
• Action Items are the steps you take to get the project done. Action Items can be interesting ideas that don’t directly fit into your plan for this project.
• Reference Items are resources and information you’ll need to complete the project.

Time Blocking

Holds you accountable to your daily plan by allocating specific periods of time for specific types of work

• Researchers have found that bite-size tasks and interruptions can disrupt concentration for up to half an hour
• To start, just split up your day into blocks of time with specific tasks assigned to each one

A few things to keep in mind:

The goal is to get stuff done.

• If sticking to a certain productivity method is taking up a significant amount of time, energy, and mental bandwidth, it’s probably not for you. Be flexible and don’t be afraid to make a change.

The To-Done List and the To-Don’t List

To-done list: Flips the traditional to-do list on its head

• Keep track of what you’ve accomplished throughout the day
• Review at the end of the day to make sure you’re on track with your goals

Biological Prime Time

Tracks your biological rhythms to find the best times for different kinds of productivity

• Requires a lot of research on yourself and a big time commitment up front, but the personal productivity insights you’ll get out of it can pay off in the long-run
• The basic idea here is to track your energy, motivation and focus to get a sense of when, where, and how you’re the most productive

Getting Things Done

Best for people who: Have a lot of loose ends rattling around in the brain and need a way to organize them all

• Get your thoughts, worries, and to-dos all out on paper and organize them into small, bite-sized tasks
• Basic stages of the GTD method
• Capture
• Clarify
• Organize
• Reflect
• Engage

Don’t Break the Chain

Encourages consistency in daily habits or tasks

• Time commitment to get started: Low Type: Visual
• Perfect for people who: Want to adopt new daily habits
• Jerry Seinfeld writes a joke every day
• Holds himself accountable to keeping this commitment with an X on the calendar
• Non Zero Days: A variation of this is non zero days where you endeavor to make progress toward a goal each and every day

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