Productivity

I've been working on productivity a lot this year - step by step, incremental improvements to the way I run my life, with the aim of becoming more productive. I've been actually considering setting up a separate blog about it - it's been a big thing for me this year. Over the last few years - since starting my PhD, and even before that, I've been trying to work out ways around my laziness and torpor. I'm not one of those people who feel a natural urge to be doing productive things all the time - I'm happiest in front of a TV and computer, playing games, reading, and/or watching comedies and shonky horror films. Planning has never been my forte, nor has systematically working towards a goal.

This all needs to change. After various experiments over the years, I've found some things that work:

1. Remember The Milk. It's just a to-do list, really, but it's got a number of features that make it more effective than any other to-do list I've used. It was good web and mobile clients, so it's everywhere I am. It lets me set dates and categorize things. So, everything in my to-do list is set to happen at a certain time, so each day, I know I can't really rest until I've done everything I need to. I'm using it for work, study, and in my personal life, and in all three, I feel my productivity has significantly increased.
2. Weekly PhD planning - each week, I schedule what work I need to do each day - whether it's software development, reading, data analysis, etc. I set a minimum standard for what comprises a successfully completed task. This means I no longer have the luxury of thinking "hmmm, PhD night or TV night?" when I've put the kids to bed and dealt with everything - if there's something on my list, it needs to be done. Remember the Milk is where this to-do list lives.
3. "Leads to follow up" - a PhD involves gathering vast amounts of information about a subject area, and trying to ingest it. You're learning a huge pile of new skills and concepts. Every day, you hear about new things that you ought to look into to see if they're relevant. Early on, I would try to remember them, and hope they didn't slip away. I didn't remember, and they did slip away. My solution is Evernote - a folder called "Leads to follow up" contains anything that might be important. Also, a repeating task in RTM to follow up a lead every few days. Currently there are 70 items sitting in my leads to follow up notebook, and 41 in my "Leads - followed" list. It's really handy, and also helps prevent distraction - if I find something useful thread of info while working on something else, I can just pop it into the Leads notebook, and get back to what I'm doing.
4. Evernote in general - I set up my Evernote account a couple of years ago, but I'm finding it more and more useful as I go along. Recently I started using the "todo" system in there - If I make a note that requires a followup action, I put that little checkbox in there. I can then run a search, for "todo:false", and find all the things in evernote that need doing, and follow up on them. Fantastic for ensuring I do things I've promised in meetings.
5. Triaging. I schedule in several sessions each week, to make sure things are in the right lists. The "leads to follow up" notebook is one example, but there are more - I schedule in a weekly session of searching through evernote for todos, and put them into RTM, so they get done. I also go through my email, to move things into RTM and other places.

That's where I'm at now, but after years of failed efforts to improve productivity,  I now have some velocity, and want to keep improving. The aim is to get to a point where

• The things I say I'll do, I actually get done
• I don't have a backlog of things that are overdue, but instead am tackling things in advance
• When I'm not working on things on my list, I don't feel guilty about that nebulous pile of stuff to do

That last one was a doozy in my undergrad degree - during those years, I always felt bad when I wasn't studying. It wasn't until three or four years after I graduated that I read a fiction book, so ingrained was that feeling that I ought to be working on something serious. I wasn't productive at all; I just spent all my time feeling bad about it, and not properly enjoying my leisure time. This time around, I'm changing things.

There are a bunch of next steps in this. Firstly, some longer term planning, especially around the PhD. Currently I'm only planning out each week. I've got a few tasks set to recur after four weeks or six weeks, but the bulk of my planning is short term. I'll be putting together a multi-month plan, probably through to the end of the year, so I can see where I'm going, and give some larger structure to my work. I want to play around with the pomodoro technique - especially once I start writing. I've heard good reports from many smart, productive people. I need to find a way to get a big picture of my literature review - mind mapping, maybe? Mind maps irritate the hell out of me, but I need to find some way of getting that high-level view and drilling down. There's a lot more room for improvement, but the great thing is that I'm making progress.