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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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.

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

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:

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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:

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

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.

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

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.

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

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

Low-Impact “buckets”

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

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.