Productivity

31 05 2020

How to Create your Digital Brain

By Daniel Robledo| Last Updated May 31, 2020

Having two brains

For the last years, I have been experiencing the pleasure of having not one, but two brains.

Do you want to know how is that possible?

Picture an information warehouse in which you have clear, easy, and fast access to anything that you need for your work.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

You wouldn’t feel discouraged and lost anymore whenever you are working on an essay.

You wouldn’t be mad at yourself for forgetting that important meeting, data, research, article, etc, that you need right now.

These are just some of the incredible advantages that come when you have two brains, one for creating, one for storing.

You are human (or I guess so) so your creative brain is already inside you and you live in the information age so you can create your second brain.

Today, we are going to learn how to set up a note-taking and file-management system in which you will be able not only externalize everything that pops in your mind – which, is one of our main purposes here – but to store tons of useful information and an easy and non-resistance way.

Your Note-taking system

We are going to start by building your note-taking system, a system in which you can capture everything that gets in your mind and in which you can save all of the information you learn over time.

Why are notes important?

Before we start building up a system for your notes, let’s think about why notes are important in the first place.

Having a good organized and efficient note-taking system is important for two major reasons: it removes resistance on your productivity and frees your brain from storing information.

Starting with the first main benefit of having a note-taking system, a well-organized note system makes you less likely to either procrastinate or get confused when taking notes.

As we have talked before, removing resistance (the force that prevents you from doing what you want to do) is one of the most important goals of any productivity system, and having a note-taking system is one of the most impacting ways to decrease resistance.

Following with, the second main benefit of having a note-taking system, scientific researches has found that the human brain is wired to create ideas, not to store them.

Have you ever feel like your brain is at its full capacity? That you literally can not think of anything else?

That was you trying to use your brain for something it was not designed for, the more ideas, thoughts, and information you try to store, the more likely you are to forget about them and the less efficient you will be when trying to work with this material.

All of these means that you need to externalize as much as possible all of the information that pop-ups in your mind, and taking notes in the fastest and simplest way to do that.

Physical vs Digital

The very first step on taking notes is to decide where are you going to take them, here you have 3 options: Digital, Physical and Digital-Physical media.

Let’s first talk about the digital and physical media, they both have their advantages and disadvantages:

Digital: They are usually more convenient and clean but require a digital device and a fast typing speed.
Physical: They are more natural to us and are more flexible but they are so hard to well-storage.

I would suggest using both systems depending on the situation.

If you need to go through large chunks of information with no conceptual representation (like history, math’s theory, or language), go for a digital device.

If you need to visualize the information, draw or the information is harder than extensive, it will usually be better to for a physical note.

To finish with, let’s talk about the Digital-Physical notes, they are a combination of both systems and I think they are the most efficient note-taking system, usually presented in the form of a tablet device.

I think the best device to take notes on this form is the IPad so I’m going to give you an example on it:

System: IPad (+ keybord + pencil)
- Physical Advantages
  - You can draw to create flow notes and mindmaps
  - You can edit your notes as you may do with a pencil and eraser
  - Hand-made notes on digital devices are clearer than paper ones
  - You can make it feel like paper with a special screen-protector
- Digital Advantages
  - You can carry it wherever you want
  - It is easy to create large chunks of information due to the typing speed
  - Easy large storage
- Disadvantages
  - They are usually expensive

Now that you know all of the options you have for your note-taking system media, I would suggest going for a combination of all of them.

Take a look at your resources and needs and choose different media for different situations.

How to efficiently take notes

Let’s be clear, almost everybody knows how to take notes, but did you know all of the note-taking techniques?, do you use a specific system for a type of knowledge?, do you know that you may be turning your brain off while taking notes and not get a clue of what were you learning when you took those notes?

Creating notebooks

Before you start taking notes, you need a place to store them, you can not just simply put them all in one big hole.

Remember that you want to remove resistance as much as possible when creating and consulting your notes, and the best way to do that is by creating notebooks and stacks.

You have a lot of freedom on organizing your notebooks and stacks but I would suggest that you base your stacks on your life hot stops and your notebooks in your projects (if you don’t know what I am talking about, you should check out my time & attention management post).

The key here is to have a system in which your notebooks are representative of the project they belong to and that you can easily differentiate the different stacks from one another, i.e. you may have the following system:

Stack: Learning
- Notebooks: Piano, Web Development & Writing
Stack: Personal
- Notebooks: Journal, Finances & Fitness
Stack: College
- Notebooks: AI, CIS, SDP, FDDBB & OS (One per subject)

Taking notes

Now that you have your notebooks and stacks system set up, you need to start creating the notes within those notebooks.

There are tons of different note-taking techniques out there, I am going to show you the three that work best for me and that I think are the most useful:

1. The outline method

Let’s start with the simplest method, the outline method.

Taking notes on an outline method is pretty straightforward, you just write hierarchically.

You start having the main points up
- Then start writing child-points
  - And you can create as many depth-levels as you need
This is so meta
- I know right?

Outline notes are useful when you need to gather information without conceptual understanding, they are fast and don’t require much effort.

For example, I use the outline method when taking notes from my college classes, I found them useful since I can write them while I listen to my professors and I can easily transform them into flow notes, later on, I also use this method when creating posts’ outlines.

2. The mindmap method

Continuing with, a mindmap is a physical (or digital) representation of how your mind understands a concept, create a mind map is a really simple process:

You start with a very general concept in the middle.
Then you start to create related concepts to that general one around it, you connect the little ones to the big ones with lines.
Repeat step 2 on every concept until you have written down everything you need to know about the general concept.

Mindmaps are useful when you need to know a lot of things about a general concept without going dive into each one of those specific concepts.

I usually use mindmaps for some posts’ ideas, projects brainstorm, and big general college concepts.

3. The flow method

The final technique I want to show is the flow method.

Flow notes try to recreate the process that the human brain goes when learning new information, this means that these notes will only work for you since they will be a representation of how you brain understand the information

Taking flow notes is the hardest process to master among any note-taking technique because it variates to much from one person to another.

Although you may indeed find them useful to:

Write all over the paper, don’t go left to right and up to down, just write the information in wherever feels more clear to you
Try to draw little sketches of any concept you want to remember
Link on concept to another using arrows

I use flow notes when I am studying, I usually take my outline notes and develop a flow summary note of every unit that I need to study before I start studying it, this way I interact with the content and create a resource I can look for that I fully understand.

Note Apps, Tips & Examples

To finish with, I want to give you some Apps, tips, and examples that may be useful for you when you start creating your note-system.

Note-Taking Apps

The two most useful Apps I have found for note-taking are Evernote and Notion.

Evernote: In this Windows/MAC application you can create notebooks and stacks, templates, tags, and the free version is more than enough for a regular user.
Notion: This is an all-in productivity application, among all of its features, you can take notes and relate them with each other to create a fully responsive system.

These two applications are really good to create outline notes, if you want to create mindmaps I would recommend draw.io and for flow notes either the physical or digital-physical media we talked about before.

My note-taking system

Even tho I use both physical and digital media for taking notes, I store them all on Evernote (using the quick capture Evernote’s feature).

I have 8 different notebook stacks, within those stacks I have from 5 to 10 different notebooks that contain my notes:

Blog: I use this stack for my post ideas, scripts, and general blog notes.
Books: Here I write the notes I take from all of the books I read, each on its corresponding notebook.
Actual classes: I have one notebook for each subject I’m currently taking.
Classes: Here I store my past subjects in case I need to take a look at something.
Learning: I use this stack for anything I am learning, like Web Development or Psychology.
Personal: I keep here my finances, journals, and thoughts.
Projects: I store here the projects that are not so big that they need a full-stack.
Inbox & Templates: I use this stack for taking notes that I do not have the time to store, and to store the templates for other notes.

The process I follow when taking notes is different from one note to another but my most common and general process are:

Studies: I develop an outline based on my college’s material and my classes, then I create a flow note based on that outline, it usually contains one or more mindmaps.
Books: I usually highlight while I read and then write an outline based on those highlights.
Templates: When I feel like I’m writing the same structure more than once, I create a note to use as a template, i.e. my class notes or my post idea notes.

Hopefully, now you have your system set up and ready to start writing down everything you need, remember that it is important to maintain that organization over time, and now it is time to learn how to organize your non-notes files.

Your Files Organization

The second cornerstone of your information store are your files, both digital and physical.

You need to keep documentation about anything that will be useful to you in the future and you need to keep it in an organized and easy to access system.

Physical Files Organization: The 3 location system

Let’s start with your physicals files since you’ll probably have so much less than digital (or at least you should)

We are not going to spend so much time on this topic because physical files don’t present any advantage over digital ones and you should keep them to the minimum.

For those files that you need to store on a physical form, I’m going to summarize a system created by the content-creator Thomas Frank, “The 3-location system“.

The 3-location system

The 3-location system consists of having three main places in which you store your physical files, each with one purpose:

Main file box: Here you will keep everything that needs to be physically stored. I would suggest getting a multiple folder box for this location.
Inbox: You are going to use your inbox as a temporal store, you will place here the files that come up and you don’t have the time to organize them, you mainly use a simple folder as an inbox location.
Portable file folder: Finally, the portable file folder is a little version of your main file box in which you keep the files needed for a specific situation, for example, an interview.

If you want to dive deeper into this system, check out Thomas Frank’s Video about the 3-location system.

Digital Files Organization: The tree structure

If you are anything like me, you tend to keep more than you need when it comes to digital file storage.

This leads to a complete mess of archives, folders, and disks that makes no sense and in which navigating is as pleasurable as sitting on a college’s chair.

The Tree Structure

To get a digital file organization system that boosts your productivity and not the opposite, I’m going to recommend you to create a tree structure to your files.

Creating a tree structure is pretty simple:

Start with a general folder.
Create subfolders that represent more specific information.
Repeat step 2 until there aren’t two archives with different characteristics in the same folder.

Some useful tips when creating your digital files’ tree would be:

Separate the information that may cause trouble if it gets lost from what may not.
Be as specific as you need, it doesn’t matter if one archive is 10 clicks aways (we will solve this problem in just a bit).
Try to match your folders with your life’s hot stops.

If you take the time to organize your digital files, you will earn x4 hours in exchange for the value you have put in getting your files organized.

Remember that you will need to maintain that order when new files come so it doesn’t return to its natural state.

My Digital File Organization

To give you an example, I’m going to show how I organize my digital files so that I know exactly where is everything I need.

To start with, I divide my PC into two folders: Local & Google Drive

Then, I divide each one into more specific types of programs and archives that will be stored on them

Finally, I keep creating new folders until I reach the pure archives

Taking your file system to the next level

Now that you have your files organized, I’m sure that you notice some drawbacks that it may have.

It is pretty hard to insert new information into this super-organized system.
If I want to access a specific file, I have to come across multiple folders until I get what I’m looking for.
What if I suddenly lost my PC disk? All of my information would be lost.

Here is where out productive-master skills come to place, let’s review the 3 most important features to add to your files-organization system.

Quick Access

The very first thing you should do is identifying your most commonly use archives and folders and create a quick access menu to access them.

On pretty much any app and operative system, you have access to the quick access feature, link the files you use the most there to remove resistance.

Cloud Synchronization

The next thing you should do with some to your files is to upload them to some kind of cloud service.

This way you will make sure that they don’t get lost if something happens To your primary manipulation device and you will have access to all of them no matter in which device you are.

Some very good Apps for cloud synchronization are:

Google Drive: With the free 15GB they give you should have more than enough for your important files, you can buy more storage if you want.
Dropbox: Pretty much the same as Google Drive and it has so many integrations with other applications, but it is a little more expensive.

If you are a college student, you probably have unlimited storage on your student account, just make sure you will be able to retrieve your files once you are done with your career.

Quick Capture

To end with, I highly recommend that you use some kind of quick-capture service to easily get any though or information into your inbox, so that you can organize it later on.

Some good free services for quick capture are:

Evernote’s Capture Feature: You can make photos of your paper and create notes based on them.
Word’s recorder: You can create written notes based on what you are saying to your microphone.
Scanbot: An Android/IOS App that lets you scan documents and them send right into your google drive system.

I use Evernote for everything, I scan my flow notes for my exams and I record any idea I have when I can not write it (90% of my ideas occur in the shower or walking with my dog).

A Long Term Road

Developing a system that works for you is a long-term task, you need to first set up what you’ve already have and then keep improving that system over time, eventually, you will end up with a perfectly organized system in which externalizing a though or checking out a file is just a click away.

Let’s get moving

I want you to start this road right now:

Choose a service for your notes and the next time you are learning something take an outline or flow note.
Insert that note on your system and keep it organized.
Create your tree structure for your digital files and upload the most important ones to a cloud service.
Get rid of any non-essential physical files and build a 3-location system with the remaining.
Keep your system updated over time and enjoy your new life.

I hope you found this post useful and that you started building your second brain.

It would be amazing if you share this post and let me know what you think.

Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it. See you soon!

24 05 2020

The 1# Strategy To Defeat Procrastination

Daniel Robledo Procrastination, Productivity 0

By Daniel Robledo| Last Updated May 24, 2020

I will do it later

You just got another assignment to do, the deadline is far away and you think: “I will do it later for sure”

But then you don’t.

You sit down to get that work done and before you realize it has been 15 minutes and you haven’t even started.

You start to feel anxious and frustrated, “I should have started sooner”, you say, “What have I been doing all of this time?“, you ask.

If you are anything like me, this happens to you more than often, and we both know what we have been doing, we have been procrastinating.

We all dream of having more free time and one of the main things that prevent us from reaching that dream is procrastination.

Image if whenever you have to do something, you doing it right away. Can you imagine the tremendous amount of more free time you would have?

The solution you have been looking for

I have good news for you, even if procrastination is one of the biggest problems in human society, it can be solved.

You just need to know-how.

And that is exactly what we are going to do today.

We are going to learn what is procrastination, why does it appear in the first place, and how to completely overcome it.

I can promise you that if you work on all of the tips and strategies I am going to show you today, you are going to see results in no time, and those results won’t be small, I promise.

Every back and then I like to track my time to the minute for a week, to see how much I am improving and in which I spend the most time on.

Comparing the tracking I did before I knew these techniques with the last time I tracked my time (two weeks ago) my procrastination hours decreased from 22 hours to 8 hours per week, this techniques work, trust me.

Before we get right into the topic, I have to say that the fact that you are not accomplishing that much could be either because of bad time management or a lack of focus and self-discipline apart from the procrastination problem.

Today, we won’t focus on those topics, we are going to see how to stop delaying the things we have to do, not how to do them more efficiently once you have started, that will come in the future.

Procrastination

First of all, let’s define what is procrastination.

We all know when we procrastinate (or most of the time) but, to solve a problem we first need to fully understand the challenge we are facing and it’s causes before we start working on the solution.

What is procrastination?

The scientific definition of procrastination is the following:

“Procrastination has identified not just any delay but an irrational one—that is, when we voluntarily put off tasks despite believing ourselves to be worse off for doing so.”

In other words, whenever you are putting off something you know you should be doing, you are procrastinating.

This definition of procrastination does not help us much, so let’s take a look at the counterpart of procrastination, The Motivation Equation, a term created by the author Piers Steel in his book “The Procrastination Equation”.

The Motivation Equation

When we are talking about motivation, we are talking about that feeling that pushes you to do things, you do not necessarily need to be motivated to do something but motivation makes you less likely to procrastinate.

Let’s take a look at each term of the motivation equation:

Expectancy: Expectancy represents the expectations you are putting on the task’s reward.
Value: Value represents the actual value you are getting from this task.
Impulsiveness: Impulsiveness represents how likely you are to stop doing the task you are doing.
Delay: Delay represents the amount of time that you’ll have to wait to get the task’s reward.

As you can see, the higher the expectancy and value, and the lower the impulsiveness and delay, the higher our motivation will be.

So, to be less likely to procrastinate (remember that you don’t need to be motivated to do your tasks), we need to both increase and decrease the terms of this equation.

Some good and easy ways to do that would be:

Increase Expectancy: Have a strong “Why” on the things you are doing, you don’t need to make them fun, they just have to be high-impacting in your life.
Increase Value: Give yourself rewards for completing milestones of your tasks.
Decrease Impulsiveness: Eliminate all possible distractions, remove access to your phone, turn off notifications, and disconnect the internet when you are working.
Decrease Delay: This term is the hardest one to decrease and usually you won’t be able to since deadlines are pre-established but you may want to set self-milestones for you to make that big delay into little ones.

The 6 triggers of procrastination

Now that we know what we can do to be less likely to procrastinate, let’s see why does procrastination appear in the first place because even tho motivation is the counterpart of procrastination, the lack of motivation is not the trigger for the appearance of procrastination.

According with what Chris Bailey says in his book “The Productivity Project”, procrastination is a phenomenon that occurs whenever a task is one or more of these 6 characteristics, the higher the intensity and amount of them, the higher the chances of procrastinating:

Boring
Difficult
Frustrating
Unstructured
Lacking in personal meaning
Lacking in intrinsic rewards

We are going to see how you can counter each one of these triggers and let me tell you (based on personal experience) that it couldn’t be more simple and effective, you’ll see.

But to finish off with our understanding of what is procrastination, let’s dive into the scientific side of procrastination.

The science behind why we procrastinate

The science involving procrastination is pretty dense since it is a problem we humans have been struggling with over many years.

To understand better why we procrastinate, we need to understand that procrastination comes from three psychological phenomenons: The temporary motivation theory, the downward counterfactuals, and the problems with executive functioning.

The Temporary Motivation Theory

To start with, the temporary motivation theory is a theory that was created after so many researches and experiments in which chronic procrastinators were responsible for performing different tasks through a wide variety of circumstances.

After many years of research and experimentation, the temporary motivation theory was created:

“Procrastinators focus on how to make themselves feel better at the expense of drawing insight from what made them feel bad”

The Downward Counterfactuals

Related with the TMT, the most common reason why we tend to procrastinate is because of downward counterfactuals.

The downward counterfactuals are statements that reflect a desire to improve one’s mood in the short term.

For example, phrases like “I work better under pressure” or “I still have tons of time to finishing this assignment” are downward counterfactuals since they are statements that focus on getting us to feel better on the present moment even tho we are procrastinating, ignoring the long term consequences of being doing so.

The Executive Functioning Problems

To finish with, researches have shown that procrastination problems are very related to executive functioning problems, these last are problems that require high cognitive functions to control our behavior, such as reasoning and problem-solving.

This means that situations that involve solving an executive functioning problems are much more likely to be the ones that we procrastinate on.

There is no doubt now of why we all tend to procrastinate at work or school, right?

In case you want to know more about all of the reasons why we procrastinate, here you have all of the researches I have mentioned:

Temporal Motivation Theory: Temporal Motivation Theory: Formula or Folly?
Downward Counterfactuals: Procrastination and the Priority of Short‐Term Mood Regulation: Consequences for Future Self
The Association between Studies and Procrastination: Academic procrastination in college students: The role of self-reported executive function
The Executive Functioning Relationship with Procrastination: The Structural and Functional Signature of Action Control

Now that we clearly understand what is procrastination, why do we procrastinate and which are the main triggers that make it happen.

Let’s learn how to overcome it.

How to overcome procrastination

Overcoming procrastination is a process that goes through four different stages: the mental preparation, taking control or your environment, countering the procrastination triggers, and practicing.

We will see how to perform each of these stages and later on I will introduce you to the best strategy you can perform when you want to stop procrastinating, I guarantee you that the moment you start doing this technique, you will be amazed by how effective it is.

The Mental Preparation

The very first thing you need to do to avoid procrastination is to mentally prepare yourself to overcome it.

What is the first step to that? The first step is to forgive yourself.

If you are anything like me, you probably belong to the people who sometimes do not forgive their selves very often. We tend to base our identity on past actions both successes and failures and that couldn’t be more wrong.

Of course, it’s ok to be proud of your past successes and to learn from your mistakes but notice the difference between “learning” and “harassing”, even tho you have been a chronic procrastinator, that changes right now.

So, forgive yourself for all of those times you left an assignment to the last day, those times that you avoid doing the hard work or taking that difficult conversation because it’s ok, we are human, we are not perfect.

Identify the Causes of Procrastination

Continuing with the mental preparation, it is really important to identify the causes of your procrastination, because often they are not as clear as they may seem in the first place:

Maybe you procrastinate because you don’t like what you are doing
Maybe you procrastinate because you think it is a good thing, you perceive procrastination as a self-esteem boost.
Maybe you procrastinate because you live in an environment that encourages you to do so.

Whichever the cause, before you start working on solving the problem you need to know the source, because if you don’t solve the cause, the effect won’t disappear.

Having a “Why”

To finish with this very first step, as any other thing in life, you need a strong “Why” about stoping procrastinating because you won’t stick to the work you have to do in the long term if you do not have a strong reason to look at every day, at every moment of weakness.

The good news is that this “Why” could be anything, as long it is meaningful to you:

I want to stop procrastinating because I want to spend more time with my family, friends and couple.
I want to stop procrastinating because I want to start that personal project.
I want to stop procrastinating because I want to sleep more.

Take Control Of Your Environment

The second step in stopping procrastination is to take control of anything that involves the task that you are procrastinating on.

Taking control of your environment could be hard sometimes but let me tell you that it is the most impacting part of the process.

Usually, people work on an environment filled with distractions, that annoying coworker that won’t stop showing you puppy’s photos, that television next to your bedroom in which your parents are watching the new Game Of Thrones episode and that constant notification sound popping of your phone next to you.

All of these things do not help your chances of procrastinating decrease, they help them increase. That is why you need to take control of your environment.

Eliminate distractions: Get some noise-canceling headphones, go to a coffee shop or the library.
Eliminate choices: Turn off your phone, disconnect the internet if you don’t need it. Make not doing the task harder than actually doing it.
Avoid toxic people and situations: If you have specific persons whose presence makes you more likely to procrastinate, try to avoid contact with them while you are working.

Counter the procrastination triggers

We are almost done with our procrastination battle, the last piece of pre-work we need to do before we start building our workflow is to counter the six triggers of procrastination that we talked about before.

To illustrate this point let’s use an example.

Imagine that I want to stop procrastinating on writing for my blog.

I know that this task may be: boring, frustrating, difficult, unstructured, lacking in intrinsic rewards, or lacking in personal meaning. And that those characteristics are the cause of the procrastination.

What I’m going to do now is to counter each one of these triggers to be less likely to procrastinate:

Boring: I will go to my favorite coffee shop, listen to good music and get a nice looking drink so this activity is more fun
Frustrating: I will start by working just for 15 minutes on the outline of the post and continue only if I feel like to.
Difficult: I will write down all the things I would need to get help; other blog examples, my blogger friend contact…
Unstructured: I will develop a workflow to follow with different milestones of the process of creating a blog post and I will follow it step by step.
Lacking intrinsic rewards: I will allow myself to eat a yummy snack after I finish my work or I will take 30 minutes of breaks for every hour I work.
Lacking in personal meaning: I will both look at the long-term goal I am pursuing by performing this task and ask myself if this is really what I want to be doing.

Practice

Now that we know how to be prepared to avoid procrastinating, we have taken control of our environment and we have lowered as much as possible all of the procrastination triggers it is time to practice. And there is no secret here, as anything in life, the only way to get good at something is through practice.

Take the time to write down what you are going to do to avoid procrastination, what is working and what is not and develop a workflow that works for you, I guarantee you that over the long-term you will see tremendous results if you take the effort of working on a solution to your procrastination problem.

And, to make your practicing journey more efficient, I will share with you the most effective strategy against procrastination: The Pomodoro Technique.

The 1# technique to defeat procrastination: The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a technique developed by the student Francesco Cirillo in 1980 and it consists of breaking down your big task into little tasks, working on them for a specific amount of time, and then strategically taking breaks.

You can use the Pomodoro Technique for anything you want, from studying your next exam content, to writing that essay or for taking that course you want to take.

The Pomodoro Technique consists of four very simple steps:

Decide a task that you will be working on, this task need to be as specific as possible.
Work for 25 minutes only on that specific task and every time your mind wanders or you get distracted, write down what the distraction was about.
After those 25 minutes take a 5 minutes break, you can invest this time to reward yourself with the distractions you have written down.
Repeat the process 4 times and then take a longer break, after that long break you can perform the Pomodoro technique all over again if you want.

The main benefit of the Pomodoro technique is that it removes resistance on working on a task because the little task you have decided to perform is so specific and the time you are putting on it is so little that you are not likely to procrastinate on it.

Once you have started you have entered into “The Flow State”, that state in which you are 100% focus on a task, and time seems not to exist at all, and you are more likely to finish all of the tasks.

There are tons of experiments that have concluded the effectiveness of the Pomodoro technique, in case you want to know more about it:

I have been using the Pomodoro Technique on both my studies and personal projects for more than a year and it has been the most powerful improvement on my productivity levels. I achieve approximately 4x more than I did when I didn’t know about it.

All the time you need

To sum up, everything we have talked about today.

Remember that procrastination is the delay you put on a task that you know you should be doing and that the lack of motivation makes you more likely to procrastinate on a task, remember that procrastination a psychological phenomenon that is wired on the human brain, so forgive yourself and start solving it.

Keep in mind all of the triggers that produce procrastination and find ways to decrease their intensity. Try to increase your motivation as much as possible by modifying the motivation equation’s terms.

And try the Pomodoro technique, it has been a game-changer for many people, including myself, it may be it for you too.

Let’s kick out procrastination

As always, practicing is the way to go so let’s stop procrastinating right now:

Identify one task that you usually procrastinate on
Increase your motivation on that task as much as possible
Counter all of the triggers that appear with that task
Try the Pomodoro technique and check out the results

I hope this post was useful to you to procrastinate a little bit less, I’m sure that now you have a clearer understanding of what is procrastination and how to avoid it.

It would be amazing if you share this post and let me know what you think.

Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it. See you soon!

Books Credits:

Bailey, Chris. “The Triggers of Procrastination.” The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy, by Chris Bailey, Crown Business, 2017.

Steel, Piers. “The Motivation Equation.” The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things off and Start Getting Things Done, by Piers Steel, Pearson, 2012.

17 05 2020

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Days

Daniel Robledo Productivity, Systems, Time & Attention 0

By Daniel Robledo | Last Updated May 17, 2020

24 is not enough

Have you ever feel like 24 hours are not enough? That you just have not enough time on a day?

You’re not alone.

You just got another class assignment to do, added to the emails you have to write, and the articles you have to read. And all of that in just 24 hours!

You start feeling anxious and being frustrated while you see your days go by while not accomplishing what you would like to.

Does that sound familiar to you?

We all dream of days being as long as we need them to, to have infinite time to do everything we need to and to have more free time.

What would you think if I tell you that it is possible?

Some years ago I started building my Productivity System to have more free time for myself and I got so tremendous results that I want to share it with you so you can also get the most out of your little 24 daily hours.

The Productivity Equation

Before you start building your productivity system, you need to understand what is productivity.

The concept of productivity is so different nowadays from what it was 50 years ago.

Back then, people were in the industrial revolution, many people worked in factories. In that place, work was repetitive and not attention needed so productivity was measured on how much you Produced, that is why it is called “Productivity”.

But, now we don’t live in the industrial revolution anymore, so the concept of “Productivity” has changed and the equation “Hours of work = Productivity” is not true anymore.

Today, productivity is so much more about what you can accomplish that it is about how much you can produce.

This way, and as Chris Bailey states in his book The Productivity Project, the productivity equation has evolved to:

As you can see, time and attention are two of the terms of the productivity equation (we will talk another day about energy) and that is what we will be focusing on today.

Your Productivity System

Now that you know the productivity equation, you need to know what is a productivity system.

A productivity system is a set of tools that work altogether to help you boost your productivity, either by increasing your time, attention, or energy.

One thing you have to keep in mind when building a productivity system is that it should reduce Friction as much as possible

Friction: “A force that holds back the movement of a sliding object“. If we think about it in productivity-terms it would be the force that prevents you from accomplishing your work

Finally, and before we start getting to work, I need to tell you that the fact that you are not accomplishing what you want to could be because of other reasons, such as Procrastination, a lack of Focus, or a bad Self-Discipline.

We will discuss those problems in the future but for now on, let’s take care of your time and attention.

Your To Do List, your attention manager

First of all, we are going to start with your attention management, the best way to manage your attention is to manage what tasks are you focusing on, and the best tool to do that is a To Do List.

A to do list is a summary of anything you want to accomplish in a specific amount of time, it could be a day, a week, a year…

On that list, you should have easy access to:

What your current to do tasks are
What are your tasks’ due dates
The prioritization level of each task

Why to have a to do list?

The fact of having a to do list is founded in a really simple statement as Chris Bailey says in his book The Productivity Project:

“Not all tasks are created equal; there are certain tasks in your work that, for every minute you spend on them, let you accomplish more than your other tasks.” – Chris Bailey

This is true because in your life there are tasks that are making you unproductive either because they provoke a false sense of productivity or because they just consume a ridiculous amount of time compared to their value.

To illustrate this, I’m going to introduce you to a concept called “The Urgent-Important graph“, this is a concept created by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Urgent-Important Graph

The Urgent-Important graph is a method of dividing your tasks into four different categories, based on their urgency and importance.

Urgent & Important tasks: Here you will find the most unexpected tasks, these are things that need your attention as soon as possible and that will have a high-impact on your life.

Every unexpected problem belongs to this category.
Urgent & Non-Important tasks: These tasks are requests that are urgent and that may look important on the surface but, if you take a step back and reflect on the value you are getting from them, you realize how much time they consume that could be used on anything else, they are one of the main reasons of why you can not accomplish what you want to accomplish.
For example, a phone call, message or an email may seem important (and 1% of the times it will be) but if you think what you are getting from responding to that mundane email conversation or laughing at that puppy cat’s photo, you will understand that you should be doing something that gives more value to your life.
Non-Urgent & Non-Important tasks: Continuing with tasks that you should avoid, here you will find your least productive tasks. These tasks are the reason why you procrastinate so often that you feel like everybody else gets 24 hours a day but you.

The good news is that these tasks are so easy to identify. Watching Netflix (when you are not supposed to, we will talk later about that), scrolling down Twitter or Reddit to see what your favorite influencer is doing with her life or checking out your friend’s last Instagram story, among others, are things that if you are anything like me, spend more time doing that you would like to.
Non-Urgent & Important tasks: The non-urgent and important tasks are those that give your life a high value over the long term, these are things that if you do them consistently over the time, you will get a tremendous amount of value to your life.

Some non-urgent and important tasks on life are: working on your projects, exercising, building strong relationships, working on your self… The problem with these tasks is that we humans are not that aware of our mortality, we think “I will do these eventually” but that “eventually” never comes and we keep trapped onto a cycle of doing urgent and important things in our life while taking breaks on the non-important tasks.

What quadrants should you be focusing on?

Now that you understand which categories your tasks are divided into, you need to apply three very simple principles on time management:

Focus on the second quadrant as much as possible
Leave some buffer for the first quadrant
Only get into the third and fourth quadrant when you are taking breaks

How to manage your tasks

I see task management as an algorithm type action, if you follow the next 5 steps correctly, you will find yourself suddenly working on what is important in your life:

Set your goals
Select a system for your to do list
Create your life’s hot spots
Identify your most important daily tasks
Work on your high-impact tasks and leave the rest of the time for low-impact tasks

1 – Set your goals

The most important step in this process is knowing what your goals are.

Maybe you want to finish your career, maybe you want to run a marathon or maybe you want to start that project you’ve been putting apart for years. Either the case the key is that you know where your life is going so you can divide those goals into little and manageable tasks

2 – Select a system for your to do list

Before you start managing your tasks you need to select a system in which your to do list will go onto, you can either choose the good old “Pen & Paper” or go for some App.

If you choose the digital field, here you have some To Do List Apps I consider amazing:

Todoist: I use this App every single day and it is one of the most valuable parts of my productivity system
Windows To Do List: This App is pretty good if you are a Windows user because it synchronizes between other windows services, such as Outlook
Google Tasks: The fact that I like about this App is that you can integrate it into your calendar if you are using Google Calendar, which is pretty sweet

3 – Create your life’s hot spots

Now that you have your system, first of all you need to divide your life into “buckets” to know which aspect of your life needs more attention (or less).

I could write an entire post about this technique but for now on let’s start small and divide your life into categories, you can add any sub-categories that you want.

Personal: Here you will have your mental health, physical health, personal problems…
Career: Here you are going to manage your studies, work, and personal projects.
Relationships: Here you have to set your social circle.

Pro tip: Use different colors for each hot spot, this way you will easily see which color is the less frequent and needs more attention.

4- Identify your most important daily tasks

From this point on, you need to repeat this step and the next one every single day, I suggest creating a routine or a habit.

There are many different ways in which you can set your tasks but I’m going to suggest the brainstorming technique.

The brainstorming technique consists of adding any task that pops into your mind into your to do list, it could be for today, tomorrow or next week. Then focus on your day (or tomorrow if you decide to do this the night before) and identify the tasks that are important and focus on them, they usually are the ones that belong to the first or second quadrant.

You should not have more than three important tasks for your day.

5 – Work on your high-impact tasks and leave the rest of the time for low-impact tasks

The final step is to deliberate work on your high-impact tasks, this is where having no more than three daily tasks comes into place.

You may have a 10 item list for today but if you accomplish your 3 high-impact daily tasks and leave 7 low-impact items unchecked, you will earn so much more value than if you’d tried to do the 10 items and only get done 2 or 3 low-impact tasks, because those three main tasks belongs to the important half of the urgent-important graph.

Example of task management

I’m going to show you what my current task management workflow is, I’m using Todoist for this process:

First of all, I’ve my current goals written down and they are:

Write consistently on GLG
Study my career
Keep my friendships healthy
Workout every day

Now, I need my life hot spots, I created those a long time ago and I have so many of them but, to make this easier, I’m going to show only the ones that involve this example

Personal
Career
Relationships
Other Tasks

Finally, I perform the brainstorming technique, I usually do this at night because I like to divide my planning-mode from my acting-mode but you can do this in the mornings too:

I like to use Todoist’s priority system to divide my tasks into high, medium and low impact tasks

This way, I know that the 3 high-impact daily tasks that I should be willing to accomplish today are:

Write this script
Study my test
Check on my friend

Repeat this process until you find the best workflow for you and you build the habit of managing your tasks, I guarantee that you’ll enormous changes in no time.

Now that you have your tasks managed and you know what should you be focusing on, let’s learn how to manage your time to accomplish those tasks.

Your Calendar, your time manager

Managing your tasks is important, you have to know what you need to do regularly to develop changes in your life.

But I’m sure you will eventually come to the question “How do I organize those tasks? How do I manage my time?”. That’s when having a calendar manager is the way to go

Why to use a calendar?

First of all, let’s define what your calendar manager’s purposes are:

Manage your time, decide when will you be doing your tasks regularly
Remind you of important events

The main benefits of having a calendar manager are that it gives you a general look at what your day will look like and that it separates, even more, your planning-mode from your acting-mode.

This happens because when you use a calendar, you are managing your time, you are diving your life into little manageable chunks of time in which you will perform a single or series of tasks.

For example, let’s say that you are a 20-year-old college student with a time-partial job of 2 hours per day.

If you’d have to divide your life into 3 priority levels I think it would be something like:

Prio 1 -> Collegue & Work
Prio 2 -> Relationships & Health
Prio 3 -> Breaks

Now, you can use a calendar manager to set the time chunks corresponding to everything you do on the day and solve the overlap problems based on your life priorities.

This way, whenever you start a day you will know that you will be spending more time on your high-priority field, working on your high-impact tasks.

How to use a calendar

I see the time management similarly to the task management but with a little more of creativity involved, you need to follow these three steps:

Create “buckets” calendars
Set you recurrent and important events
Create time chunks regularly

1 – Create “buckets” calendars

Before you start setting up your calendar, you need to separate your life into different “buckets”.

You should combine your task manager’s hot spots with your calendar’s life buckets.

For example, you may have a life hot spot called “Career” that may go into two different calendars: “College” and “Work”.

Or you may have a life hot spot as “Personal” that diverges into “Workouts”, “Routines” and “Health Treatment”.

2 – Set your recurrent and important events

Now that you have your life calendars, I suggested putting your time first on two main types of events:

Recurrent events: These are events that occur on specific days at specific hours like classes or job journals.
Important events: Here you will find events that usually are long term events and that you need to be reminded of.

3 – Create time chunks

Finally you have to create those chunks we’ve been talking about.

Just again, there are many ways in which you can create your daily based calendar and I’m going to suggest doing it by the recurrent overlap technique and on Sundays, this way you manage the whole wee’s time ahead and you can focus the rest of the days on doing what you want to do.

To start with, take a look at your most important life buckets and find the corresponding life hot spot.

Then check what tasks you want to accomplish for the first day of the week and approximately how much time you’ll need to accomplish it.

The Buffer

Here you will need to apply the principle of buffering. This principle states that you need to create some space between what you think will take to do a task and the time you create to accomplish it.

For example, if you have to study two units for your maths exam and you think it would take you approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes to do it, then set 2 hours on your calendar to do it. This way you won’t feel anxious about the fact that you may run out of time because you’ve set extra time ahead.

This is dangerous because it is true that deadlines increase our productivity and that when you put extra non-sense time on a task, you will probably take all the time available but because we are just starting, let’s allow ourselves some space.
If you want to know more about this I suggest checking out information about “The Fudge Ratio”

Repeat this step for every day of the week and once you have all of your life chunks for your most important life bucket, get to the next most important bucket and repeat the process.

If you feel like two events are overlapping, prioritize the one that belongs to the most important life bucket or the one whose tasks belong to the high-impact category.

Now, you should have your week planned with:

Chunks of time in which you will work on one of your life buckets
A to-do list that tells you what you should be doing in each chunk
A clear vision, by using the colors, of what areas of your life need more or less time

Example of calendar management

For this personal example, I’m going to use Google Calendar. It is free and it synchronizes with my other App, I recommend using it.

First of all, I have set 7 different calendars:

Routines: White
Classes: Dark Blue
Studying: Dark Green
Workouts: Purple
Personal Projects: Pink
Important Events: Orange
Personal Stuff: Light green

Recurrent & Important Events

To start with, I know that my recurrent events are my college classes and my morning and night routines.

I also know that my important events are both my college test and my practices’ deadlines.

Some nice facts about Google Calendar is that you can set up a rule for an event so it automatically sets up the days you want on the time you want, this is especially useful in recurrent events since it reduces friction even more.

High-impact “buckets”

Continuing with, my most important life calendars are Studying and Workouts, and I know that the tasks I want to accomplish for each calendar take about 1 hour and 30 minutes for the study and 1 hour for a workout so I’m going to create the corresponding chunks of time, including the buffers.

You may notice that I have removed some classes, this is because certain classes give me less value that I would earn by studying by myself, so I’ve decided not to attend to them. I don’t promote class-skipping, this works for me but may not work for you.

Low-Impact “buckets”

Lastly, I just need to add everything that is left into the free time between my most important chunks of time.

Here I will add my projects, hobbies, health insurance, and some long term tasks that I eventually want to do.

One thing I recommend working on is building up as many routines as you can, try to do the same thing at the same time over and over again until it becomes a habit. This way you are freeing your brain from thinking when will you be doing something, allowing your creativity to skyrocket.

After doing this, I can take a look at my calendar and my to do list and now that I will be working on today:

As I’ve told you, I usually develop my whole week plan on Sundays and every night I take a look at both my calendar and to do list and polish what I want to do, this way I’m only on planning-mode on Sundays and I can spend the whole week on acting-mode.

Developing a workflow that works for you takes time and practice but I can assure you that if you consistently try this process over time, you will start to feel a lot more in control of your life and you will notice that you both start to accomplish so much more and ironically you start having so much more free time, that is the magic of productivity.

24 is enough

Now that you have built your task and time managers, I’m sure you are starting to understand how some people accomplish so much more than others, they understand how productivity works, and now you do too.

Start right now

The last thing I want to tell you today is to start right now, get into work, and experiment on what works better for you.

Separate your life into hot spots and buckets
Set up your 3 daily tasks for tomorrow
Add their chunks of time to your calendar
Get into work

I hope I’ve helped you to get the most out of your days, let me know what you think on the comments section or hit me up on Contact and Twitter to show me your new productivity system, I will be glad to take a look at it.

If you liked this post, it would be amazing if you share it with your friends.

Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it and see you next time!

Books Credits:

Bailey, Chris. “A New Definition Of Productivity.” The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy, by Chris Bailey, Crown Business, 2017, pp. 12–15.

Bailey, Chris. “Not All Tasks Are Created Equal.” The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy, by Chris Bailey, Crown Business, 2017, pp. 21–25.

Covey, Stephen R. “The Urgent-Important Graph.” The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, by Stephen R. Covey and James C. Collins, Simon & Schuster, 2020.