Tag Archives: Productivity

Simplicity Is the Precursor to Productivity

There’s a principle in computer programming called KISS. It stands for “keep it simple, stupid.”

KISS is also a productivity principle. The more complicated a process is, the less productive it is.

“Complexity is the enemy of execution.” Tony Robbins

Creating and following complex processes give some people a false sense of hard work. Complex processes result in hard work but not in satisfactory results.

If you aren’t satisfied with your results in your private and professional life, take a look at your day-to-day execution.

How simple is your day-to-day execution?

I prefer the Ivy Lee Method for my day-to-day execution.

  • Determine six tasks to be completed on a given day.
  • Prioritize those tasks.
  • Start with the most important task.
  • Don’t move to the next task before a task is complete.
  • At the end of the day, move the unfinished tasks to the list of the next day.

It’s a simple yet effective method. It helps you apply the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who realized that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. We can recognize the same ratio in various fields.

  • 20% of the salespeople make 80% of the sales.
  • 20% of the work produces 80% of the results.
  • 20% of the workers make the 80% of the mistakes.

And the list goes on.

If you can determine the task that produces 80% of your results, you can schedule it as the first task to be completed on a given day.

When that task is complete, you will have produced 80% of the value of a working day within a few hours.

After that, you can continue with the remainder of your list in peace, knowing that your working day is more or less over. You can even take a free afternoon once in a while if you need some rest.

Do you have a daily routine?

To keep my working day simple, I follow a daily and weekly routine. I have a checklist of tasks to be completed every day and every Sunday. Those tasks serve my long-term goals. They are sorted according to priority and recorded in my Evernote.

I also have checklists for each month, quarter, and year.

Having a routine for each day, week, month, quarter, and year has two main benefits.

  • I don’t need to think and decide about what to do next. I start working immediately on the most essential task.
  • Forgetting a task is impossible.

If you don’t have a daily routine, I recommend you come up with one.

How Simple Is Your Daily Routine?

Take a look at the actions in your daily routine and answer the following questions.

  • Which actions are essential?
  • Which actions are nice-to-dos?
  • Which actions produce the most value?
  • Which actions produce only marginal value?

Once you answer those questions, it’s time to rearrange your daily routine. Schedule the essential and high-value tasks earlier in the day and nice-to-dos later in the day.

A year ago, I used to start the day with an hour of fitness workout. Back then, I wasn’t satisfied with my results. Working out is a nice-to-do for me. I moved it later in the day, just before dinner. Now, I’m more satisfied with my results.

When working on my blog, the first task I complete is to write and publish a blog post. That is at least 80% of the value I produce with my blog. Reading and responding to comments and emails and participating in social media come after that.

Let Go of the Inessential

If a task doesn’t add any significant value to your life or work, let it go. Don’t waste your precious time with it.

I realized that reading news, scrolling the Facebook feed, and checking my email multiple times a day don’t add any value to my life. I avoid those actions as much as possible. As a result, I have more time to produce real value and enjoy my life.

Back in the day, I’d invest in a variety of investment vehicles with a variety of hypotheses. That sounds complicated, and it is. As a result, I had to follow the price movements of each investment and check whether they satisfy my hypotheses.

At a certain moment, I realized that my investing practice was just a waste of time. It didn’t produce the results that justified the amount of time I invested in it.

Throughout the time, I wound down that portfolio. Now, I’m investing in only two instruments. I check two prices once a week and don’t think about it much, because I believe in the long-term profitability of both instruments.

Conclusion

Complicating our work and life gives us a false sense of hard work. It makes us feel smart. The reality is the complete opposite.

Complex procedures produce poor results. Inexperienced and foolish people complicate their work and life. Experienced and intelligent people simplify every aspect of their work and life.

The first step in simplifying your work and life is to come up with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly routines.

When drafting your routines, take into account the Pareto Principle and prioritize the tasks that produce the most value.

When executing your daily routine, work on a single task at hand and don’t move to the next task before completing the current one. In other words, apply the Ivy Lee Method.

Once you establish a daily routine, scrutinize it and eliminate the inessential and low-value actions from your daily routine.

If you do all of that, you’ll end up with a lot of time and resources to enjoy your life.

5 Secrets of Worry-Free Productivity

Do you want a successful life?

Or do you want a peaceful life?

What if you can have both?

How?

Today, I’ll share five ideas about worry-free productivity from a variety of sources. These ideas are effective enough by themselves. But in combination, they become powerful.

Let’s go over each of them.

The Ivy Lee Method

Forget about the latest gadgets and apps. Instead of increasing your productivity, they distract you. Our first idea comes from a productivity consultant from 100 years ago.

The Ivy Lee Method is simple.

  1. Determine the six most important tasks on a given day.
  2. Prioritize them according to their importance.
  3. Work on the most important task on your list until it’s complete. Don’t switch to another task.
  4. When the task at hand is complete, start the next task on your priority list.
  5. Repeat the steps 3 and 4 until all tasks on your list are complete or your working day is over.
  6. At the end of the day, move the incomplete tasks to the next day and prepare a list for the next day.

This is such a simple yet effective method.

Having only six tasks on your list gives you peace of mind and confidence that you can complete them.

If you have more than six tasks on a given day, try to batch them together, so that you have only six batches per day.

You avoid losing time by not switching between tasks. Having a single task completed at the end of the day is much better than having six tasks started but none of them finished.

How to decide on the six tasks of the day?

Read my posts on analyzing, prioritizing, and scheduling your tasks to answer that question.

Day-Tight Compartments

The second idea comes from a 70-year-old book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. Don’t let the age of this book and its simple title mislead you. This book is full of wisdom and useful ideas. My favorite idea in this book is day-tight compartments.

Suppose that you determined your most important six tasks for a given day. Does it make sense to think and worry about the days after today? No, it doesn’t. That’s what the day-tight compartments are all about.

You focus on what you have to do today and don’t worry about what comes after today. You take it one day at a time.

If ideas and problems pop up during the day, just write them down and move on, unless they are emergencies. I use Evernote for this purpose. I write down ideas and problems on a backlog note.

I go over my backlog once a week to prepare the plan for the next week. Once the weekly plan is made, I don’t need to worry about future anymore.

Peace of Mind Comes from Doing What Needs to Get Done

Peace of mind doesn’t come from recklessness. It doesn’t come from ignoring your responsibilities. It doesn’t come from indulging in distraction or entertainment. They’ll only increase your worries.

If you want to reach a peaceful mental state, you need to develop your willpower to do what needs to get done. How to do that? I recommend reading the following posts to improve the execution of your plans.

Letting Go

Let’s say you determine and complete your most important six tasks every day and you’re still worried. In that case, I recommend the letting go exercise from the book Letting Go by David Hawkins.

I quoted Hawkins’s original explanation in the post Using Emotional Intelligence to Overcome Your Dysfunctional Patterns.

It comes down to staying with the emotions without trying to suppress them, escape from them, change them, or invest more mental energy into them.

Emotions will come and go, but if you resist them or invest more mental energy into them, you’ll reinforce them. If you don’t do that, their power will decrease over time.

The Power of Now

Eckhart Tolle and his book the Power of Now became popular a decade ago for a good reason.

The Power of Now can be misunderstood. It can be interpreted as avoiding your responsibilities and indulging in pleasure. I don’t think this is what Eckhart Tolle meant in his book.

The ideas in Tolle’s book are more in line with the views in the book Letting Go. If you let go of all the distracting emotions like worries, you can be 100% present in the moment.

Imagine what you can achieve if you can concentrate that kind of presence on the task at hand. Imagine how your relationships would be like if you were 100% present with your loved ones. Imagine how fulfilling your life would be if you savored every moment of your life.

That is what I understand from the Power of Now. In this context, it can be a significant boost to your productivity.

Conclusion

Being at peace and productive aren’t mutually exclusive. On the contrary, peace of mind increases your productivity, and productivity increases your peace of mind.

Time management methods like the Ivy Method increase your productivity. Ideas like day-tight compartments, letting go, and being present in the moment increase your peace of mind.

If you apply these ideas in combination, they create synergy and amplify the effects of each other. As a result, you boost your productivity and peace of mind at the same time.

A Simple Mind Hack to Stay Focused

My strategy for a meaningful life involves five steps.

Continuous Improvement

All of the steps above are ongoing tasks. None of them are complete as long as I’m alive.

The goals on the higher levels change rarely. A life goal takes several years to accomplish at best. But once it’s complete, a new life goal replaces it.

The steps on the lower levels are updated more often. I use new ways of optimizing the execution of my plans as I come across them.

Critical Points in Execution

As I explained in a previous post, there are some critical points in my execution. I’m susceptible to deviate from my schedule around those points.

For example, after the breakfast and lunch, I experience a dip in my concentration. After a break, I can’t get into flow immediately. At those moments, I’m susceptible to distraction.

Overcoming Distractions

An abundance of free distraction on the Internet is one of the drawbacks of our times.

At a critical moment, when my concentration is low, I’m tempted to distract myself with news sites and YouTube.

I know that if I relax for fifteen minutes working on a task, I’ll get back into flow and work for an hour or more.

The trick is to go through those first fifteen minutes when the temptation is at its highest.

Going through Energy Dips throughout the Day

Working at a standup desk helps me go through that low energy period.

Recently, I came across another trick to overcome the temptations to distract myself.

Virtual Vision Boards

I’m a highly visual person. Nowadays, most of us are. My recent mind hack takes advantage of that.

I download inspiring pictures from the Internet to a folder in my computer. Those are the pictures that remind me my life goals.

Going through those pictures during the critical moments inspires and motivates me to focus on the work at hand.

Some photos resonate with me more. I spend more time looking at those photos and imagine myself in those situations.

Preparation

This practice doesn’t take much time, because I search pictures to use in my blog posts anyway.

All I have to do is to bookmark some images to download them later when I have time.

I add new pictures to this folder as I come across inspiring ones. Some images don’t resonate with me anymore, and I delete them.

Adding Life Goals and Inspirational Quotes to the Mix

I plan to prepare some slides that combine these pictures with my life goals.

I also plan to create slides that include inspiring, motivating quotes from my own posts as well as other sources.

Going over those pictures and slides a few times every day inspires and motivates me more than just writing down and reading my life goals. They make the experience more tangible.

Impact on Deeper Levels

This practice not only affects me on an intellectual level, but it changes my programming on a deeper level.

When the movie Secret came out more than a decade ago, vision boards became popular. The practice in this post is a virtual, practical version of that.

Conclusion

I’m always looking for ways of optimizing the execution of my plans. The first fifteen minutes of a work session is the time when I’m most susceptible to distraction.

To overcome the temptation to distract myself, I go through an album of inspiring pictures that remind me of my life goals.

These pictures act as a virtual vision board. I plan to add an overview of my life goals and inspirational quotes to that album.

This practice is much more effective than just writing down and reading my life goals.

Your Turn

Which mind hacks do you use to stay concentrated and maximize your performance?

The Overlooked Variable of Time Management

When we think about time management, the first thing that comes to mind is planning. Planning is a critical part of time management, but not the only component.

The other component of time management is the willpower to follow up with your plans. You might analyze and prioritize your projects and plan them in your to-do lists. If you don’t complete the tasks on your to-do lists, all of that work means nothing.

Execution is as important as planning. I shared how you can audit and improve your execution in yesterday’s post. Today’s post will be about practical, yet effective mind hacks that you can apply right away.

The Optimal Emotional State for Maximum Performance

There is an optimal emotional state for maximum performance. It’s neither being too happy nor being too depressed. It’s neither being too optimistic nor being too pessimistic. It’s a sweet spot between those extremes.

Acknowledge Your Accomplishments

As humans, we tend to downplay positives and exaggerate negatives. As a result, we end up being too pessimistic and get depressed.

To overcome that pitfall, acknowledge your accomplishments, and be grateful for what you have. That doesn’t mean to ignore your mistakes or weaknesses. Acknowledge them too and convert them to points of improvement (POI).

The golden ratio between accomplishments and POI’s seems to be around 5 to 1. At the end of each day, write down five achievements and one POI. This practice boosts your self-esteem and keeps you motivated to achieve more.

Build Momentum

Once you have momentum, you’re unstoppable. You’re driven to create more, deliver more, and accomplish more.

You build momentum by completing a series of tasks, no matter how small those tasks are. The secret to creating momentum is to divide your big tasks into smaller tasks.

Ideally, your tasks should take somewhere between 20 minutes and one hour. That way, you can complete them in a single sitting.

Work through a Checklist of Bitesize Tasks

Before starting a work session, come up with a checklist of bitesize tasks. That way, you don’t need to think about what to do next. You have clarity.

You won’t lose time between steps. You won’t miss a step. You won’t have to deal with massive, hard challenges. All you have to do is to finish those tasks one by one.

You can even convert creative activities to checklists of bitesize tasks. For an example, check the post A Creativity Exercise to Come Up with Counterintuitive Blog Post Titles that Get Clicked.

The more you accomplish, the more motivated you get to accomplish more.

As you complete the tasks on your list one by one, you feel a sense of accomplishment. You feel like a machine.

Focus on a Single Task at Hand

You can start ten tasks and feel like you’re working hard. Or you can complete one task and make actual progress toward your goals.

Starting ten tasks won’t make any difference in your life. Completing a task will. Focus on a single task until its completion. Check it on your to-do list. And then, proceed with the next one.

Gamify the Process

Assign a duration to the next task on your to-do list. Set the timer and try to complete the task within the duration you set.

Create micro-challenges for yourself. Those micro-challenges have to be attainable, but slightly outside of your comfort zone. That way, you’ll push yourself to perform a little better each time.

Adopt the Optimization Mindset

Small improvements add up over time. If you improve your life 1% a day, you’ll improve it 38 times over a year. That is 3800% improvement.

Ask Yourself Motivating Questions

Work toward Weekly Goals

To-do lists consist of action items that are entirely under your control. It’s up to you to get them done or not. For example, it’s under your control to publish a post every day for the next thirty days.

Goals aren’t completely under your control. They involve events that are outside of your control. That’s what makes them exciting.

Focusing on short-term goals such as weekly goals can make you obsessive about your work. That’s the type of motivation to achieve enormous feats.

Your weekly goals have to be related to your long-term goals. Ideally, you start with a meaningful long-term goal and break it down into smaller goals until you come up with a weekly goal. Check how I came up with my weekly goal.

Find Accountability Partners

Find a person or a group of people that will hold you accountable. Report the completion rate of your to-do list and your progress toward your goals, ideally once a week. You can find an accountability partner or build an online mastermind group.

Create a Failproof Identity and Environment

Most of the time, we focus on our actions to accomplish our goals. There are two other ingredients of success. They are more fundamental than our actions because they influence our actions directly. These two ingredients are our identity and our environment.

Building an identity might take some time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start working on it right away.

Creating an environment is easier if you have the means. To start with, get rid of everything that distracts you and get the best equipment that would improve your performance.

Sustainability

Even though we can improve our performance, we all have limitations. Failure and dry spells are inevitable in any meaningful endeavor.

When I fail at a specific goal, I look at the big picture of my life and my long-term goals. That motivates me to keep going.

Your long-term goals could take longer than you expect. You need to survive those long stretches of dry spells. You can do that by focusing on essentials and letting go of everything else.

Reward Yourself

Last but not least, promise yourself some downtime and rewards. If your life looks like one big stretch of hard work, you might get discouraged and give up. To avoid that, schedule some quality time for yourself and for your loved ones.

Conclusion

There are a lot of little tricks you can use to improve your motivation and performance. I don’t expect you to learn, internalize, and apply all of these tips in a single week.

Pick one of the tips, and apply it for a week. Bookmark this post and come back one week later. Pick another tip and repeat the process.

Make continuous improvement in your life. Never stop improving your life and processes.

Your Turn

  • Which tip is your favorite?
  • Which tip will you apply this week?
  • Do you have any tips that I haven’t mentioned here?

Optimize the Execution of Your Plans with This Simple Exercise

We can divide time management into two parts.

Time Management = Planning + Willpower

We can handle the planning part in three steps.

  1. Analysis
  2. Prioritization
  3. Scheduling

I explained each step of the planning part in the previous two posts of this series.

Willpower

Planning is a critical part of time management, but not sufficient by itself.

If you don’t have the willpower to follow up on your plans, no amount of planning will save you.

Today, I’m going to share an exercise to measure and improve your willpower to execute your plans.

Face Reality. Establish a Baseline.

The first step of improving your willpower is to determine where you are right now.

What gets measured gets improved.

Come Up with a Weekly Plan

The first step of establishing a baseline is to come up with a weekly plan. If you’ve done the exercises in the first two posts, you have your weekly plan. If you haven’t done the exercises, come up with a weekly plan now.

Measure Your Time Usage for a Week

For a week, write down what you have done at the end of each hour on a piece of paper. This sounds like overkill, but do it for a week. Do it only for the hours when you’re awake.

I heard this practice from Dan Peña, an American businessman and business coach. I tried it for a few days, and it was an eye-opener. I do this exercise from time to time when I feel distracted.

Interpret the Results

Bookmark this post and mark your calendar to reread it one week later. Studying the same material multiple times with set intervals in between is called the spaced repetition method. It’s an effective learning method.

At the end of the week, compare your results against your plan.

  • What is the percentage of the action items that you have completed?
  • How many hours did you spend productive?
  • How many hours did you waste?

Interpret the Percentages

  • If you completed more than 80% of your action items, your plan was in your comfort zone.
  • If you completed less than 80% of your action items, either you have willpower challenges, or you are overestimating your performance.
  • If you completed around 80% of your action items, congratulations. You have the ideal task completion rate.

It’s also important to calculate the percentages accurately. If you came up with four easy and one hard action items and completed the four easy action items, this doesn’t mean that you have completed 80% of your plan. Be honest when evaluating your results.

Improve Your Execution

In the previous step, we established a baseline for the execution of our plan. In this step, we are going to improve it. The first step in improving our execution is to analyze it.

Find the Critical Points in Your Execution

In this step, we’ll go over our activity log and look for critical points in our execution. These are the points when we deviate from our plans. Think about those points as dropout points. You drop out from your plans in those critical moments.

Find the Root Cause of the Dropout Points

If we can find the root cause of the dropout points, we can eliminate them from our execution. Let me go over a few examples from my experience so that you have an idea how to carry out this step.

Vague Task Descriptions

I deviate from my plans when my tasks aren’t defined clearly. When I don’t know what to do precisely at a certain moment, I get confused and become prone to distraction.

The solution to vague task descriptions is to define them precisely. For more about this, read the post What Gets Scheduled Gets Measured.

Overwhelming Tasks

When the task at hand is too big, overwhelming, or unattainable, I feel discouraged. My motivation suffers, and my productivity follows suit.

The solution is to divide big tasks into smaller tasks that can be completed in a single sitting. The ideal duration of a task is between 20 minutes and 1 hour.

As I explained in the post How Do I Publish a Post Every Day, I don’t aim to write a post in a single sitting. I first come up with an outline. Then, I write each section separately. That way, I have a feeling of accomplishment when I complete each step and section.

The Fallacy of Minimum Marginal Costs

  • What is the marginal cost of watching another YouTube video? 5 minutes?
  • What is the marginal cost of reading another tweet? 15 seconds?
  • What is the marginal cost of scrolling your Facebook feed once more? 30 seconds?

The marginal costs of those actions look negligible, but those numbers add up. That’s why the activity log is crucial. You’ll see how much time you’re wasting on a given day.

If you waste an hour a day, you lose 15 complete days in a year, and an entire year in 24 years. Think about it! What could you do with those days and years?

If wasting time is a problem for you, I recommend you read the posts The Fallacy of Minimum Marginal Costs and The Ultimate Self-Motivation Guide.

Low Energy Levels

We usually look at our problems on the level of our mind. Sometimes, the issue is on the level of our physiology. Low energy levels are one of those problems.

When I look at my activity log, I see that I deviate from my plan after the breakfast or lunch. Once that digression happens, I get distracted for the rest of the day. For that reason, it’s critical to avoid it.

My solution for the after breakfast or lunch dips is physical activity. I either walk around a little or work for an hour standing up after the breakfast and lunch. I didn’t invest in a standing desk. I use my kitchen counter for this purpose.

Conclusion

Planning is the first half of the time management equation. The other half is the willpower to follow up on your plans. You probably aren’t aware of your level of willpower at the moment. Your productivity and performance might suffer as a result.

To become aware of your level of willpower and to optimize it, follow the steps below for a week.

  1. Come up with a weekly plan.
  2. Measure your time usage for a week.
  3. Measure your task completion ratio.
  4. Find the dropout points in your execution.
  5. Find the root causes of those dropout points.
  6. Eliminate the root causes of your dropout points.

If you think one week isn’t enough to optimize your execution, repeat this exercise as much as you want.

Coming Soon

There are some mind hacks that I use to improve my productivity. They are easy and simple tricks that you can use right away. Yet, they make a big difference in my performance.

I’m going to publish a post about those mind hacks soon, so stay tuned and sign up to the email newsletter for weekly roundups of my latest posts.

Your Turn

  • How did the activity log exercise work for you? Are you surprised by the results?
  • What are your dropout points?
  • What’s your plan to deal with them?

What Gets Scheduled Gets Done

In yesterday’s post, I shared the simple formula of time management.

Time Management = Planning + Willpower

I split planning into three steps.

  1. Analysis
  2. Prioritization
  3. Scheduling

I explained the analysis and prioritization steps in yesterday’s post. Today’s post will be about the third step, scheduling.

What Is Scheduling?

By scheduling, I mean the planning of day-to-day activities. Technically, scheduling is assigning a date and time to an activity. Sometimes, I assign a specific time to an activity, for example, in case of an appointment.

In other times, I indicate the order of the action items, without indicating specific start and end times. This order usually matches the priority of the action item, but not necessarily so.

In some cases, I might have an appointment early in the morning and a more important task in the afternoon.

The Level of Detail

It’s up to you how much detail you want to include in your scheduling. I prefer to plan only critical and important tasks in my day-to-day schedule. Check yesterday’s post for what I mean by critical and important tasks.

By including only critical and important tasks, my daily plan doesn’t get crowded. I can quickly see the top 4-5 essential actions I have to take on that day. On some days, I go over 5, but 4-5 essential tasks seem ideal to me.

The Pitfall of To-Do List Apps

In the past, I used a to-do list app. I added every idea that crossed my mind as a to-do item to that list. As a result, I ended up with thousands of action items. The critical and important action items got lost among the “nice to-do’s” and “one day, I’ll do’s.”

I stopped mixing my casual ideas and high-priority tasks. I add my casual ideas to a separate note in Evernote.

The Tool that I Use for Scheduling

The app that I use the most is Evernote. I use it for scheduling as well.

I like the flexibility of a note. I can structure and format it any way I want. I can combine several notes together with the internal link functionality. Here are some of the features that make Evernote an excellent scheduling tool for me.

  • Shortcuts
  • Duplicate a note
  • Checkboxes in notes
  • Copy internal link to a note
  • Format a note

How Do I Schedule?

The goal of scheduling is to plan predetermined activities over days. If you wonder how I identify and prioritize my activities, you can check yesterday’s post.

I make a distinction between two types of activities.

  • Repetitive
  • One-off

Repetitive activities repeat themselves one or multiple times every week, every month, every quarter, and every year. I use templates to plan my repetitive activities.

Templates

I have three templates.

  • Yearly
  • Monthly
  • Weekly

I include the quarterly activities in the monthly template.

A template is a simple note that contains the repetitive activities to be carried out in a given time frame. For example, a yearly template includes the following items.

  • Birthdays
  • Anniversaries
  • Tax and insurance administration and payments
  • Car maintenance
  • And so on…

Those are the events and actions that happen once a year. I divide the yearly template into twelve months. The formatting functionality of Evernote is perfect for doing that. Similarly, I divide the weekly template into seven weekdays.

Fig. 1. Weekly Template

Creating an Actual Schedule

I create an actual schedule before the related period starts. I create a note for the next year, the next month, and next week, before they start. That is really simple with the “duplicate a note” functionality.

The “duplicate a note” functionality creates a copy of the note, in this case, our template note. Then, I adjust the title of the note to the related year, month, or week, and that’s it. For the week, I use the start and end date of the week as the title.

Once I duplicate a template note, I have the repetitive tasks in my note. Then, I add the one-off tasks to the period note.

How Long Does It Take?

Once you have the analysis, prioritization, and templates ready, it takes around 10-15 minutes to create a weekly plan.

It takes more time to prepare the analysis, prioritization, and templates. Those tasks are never complete.

As time passes, your life evolves, and your priorities change.

Your analysis, prioritization, and templates change with your priorities. You need to invest time in those activities to keep up with the priorities of your life.

How do I Create an Actual Schedule?

I work on scheduling once a week on Sunday. I complete all the scheduling work in 10-15 minutes.

  • If the next year is approaching, I create a note for the next year.
  • If the next month is approaching, I create a note for the next month.
  • In either case, I create a note for the next week.

Once those notes are ready, I move specific action items from the year note to the month note, and from the month note to the week note. Then, I add one-off activities to the week note. After that step, my weekly schedule is complete.

I only include specific action items on my schedule. I don’t add vague plans.

For example, “bring the car to maintenance” is a specific action item. “Think about buying a new car” isn’t. Vague plans have to be analyzed, made concrete, and prioritized in the analysis and prioritization phases.

Long Term Note

In addition to my year, month, and week notes, I have a long-term note. Don’t confuse the long-term note with a long-term vision or any other abstract idea. Those ideas go to the analysis document.

The long-term note contains the action items that have a deadline that’s after the end of the next year. For example, I have to renew my password and id every five to ten years.

Putting It All Together

There aren’t many options to order notes in Evernote. As a result, you end up with a bunch of notes without any logical order. I create an index note to overcome that problem.

Fig. 2. The Index Note

Every time, I create a new year, month, or week note, I add that note to my index note. This is really easy in Evernote with the “copy internal link” functionality. Then, I paste the link to the index note.

Quick Access to Important Notes

The index note and the template notes are important notes. I add a shortcut to them on the left panel.

Fig. 3. Shortcuts

The Order of Tasks in a Day

As I mentioned before, I don’t assign timeslots to tasks in a day. The only exception to that is the appointments with set start and end times.

I plan the tasks without set start times according to their priority. The higher priority a task has, the earlier it is scheduled.

Having a set order of tasks has several benefits.

  • Minimizes the time wasted on thinking what to do next.
  • Minimizes decision fatigue by avoiding deciding on what to do next.
  • The tasks with higher priority get done first.

The Impact of Planning on Your Life

“Every minute spent in planning saves as many as ten minutes in execution.” Brian Tracy

I included the quote above because I like the idea behind it. I don’t agree with it 100%.

In some cases, planning could be a massive waste of time.

In the past, I got lost in details and kept planning. As a result, I lost a lot of time planning without getting much work done.

As the years past, I learned to focus on the most critical and important tasks and let go of the rest when planning.

Focus on the most critical and important and let go of the rest. If you do that, planning has more benefits than 10x time savings. It makes impossible possible.

Conclusion

Time management involves planning and willpower. Planning requires analysis, prioritization, and scheduling.

I discussed the analysis and prioritization in yesterday’s post and scheduling in today’s post.

Scheduling involves two steps.

  1. Having yearly, monthly, weekly templates that include repetitive tasks.
  2. Creating actual period schedules based on the templates by adding the one-off tasks.

When scheduling, I focus only on the most essential, specific tasks. I order my tasks according to their priorities if they don’t have set start times, like appointments.

I use Evernote to create my day-to-day schedules. It has several features that make creating and using a day-to-day plan efficient.

When it comes to scheduling, the proof is in the pudding.

You have to go through the steps explained in yesterday’s and today’s post to see what it does for you and your life. Work on setting it up for a month and use it for a month. See the effects yourself.

Coming Soon

Most of us make the mistake of equating time management to planning. Planning is only half of the equation. The other half is willpower.

If you don’t have the willpower to follow up on your plans, no amount of planning will save you.

Stay tuned for a post on the willpower aspect of time management. That post won’t be the average motivational post shouting at you to get things done. I’ll back it up with some mind hacks that you can use right away.

Your Turn

Do you have any questions or feedback over the system explained in yesterday’s and today’s posts? Let me know in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer your questions and write a follow-up post if necessary.

The Simple Formula of Time Management

Do you have time management challenges? Do you read a lot about time management, but don’t make much progress?

If you answer yes to those questions, you’re not alone. I was exactly at the same point until I came up with my own system.

Time Management Is a Complex Problem

We treat time management as a simple problem. It isn’t. It’s a combination of several problems. Let’s divide time management into two problems. Then, we’re going to divide each problem into smaller parts.

Time Management = Planning + Willpower

If you have a time management problem, you either have a planning problem, a willpower problem, or both. Don’t worry if you have both. I’ve been there as well.

Now that we have the formula, we can work on each component separately. In this post, I’m going to discuss the first two parts of the planning component. I’m going to discuss the third part of planning and willpower in future posts.

Divide and Conquer

Dividing a complex problem into smaller problems and solving each part separately is called divide and conquer. It’s an effective problem-solving method.

Solving its small parts separately is much easier than aiming at the big problem. When you solve the small parts, the big problem is solved automatically. Let’s start with the planning part.

Planning

I’m going to divide the planning problem into three parts.

Planning = Analysis + Prioritization + Scheduling

In this post, I’m going to discuss the analysis and prioritization parts. I’m going to discuss the scheduling part in future posts.

Analysis

The analysis part involves dividing a big project into smaller tasks. You can consider your life as one big project and divide it into life areas.

  • Family
  • Work
  • Finances
  • Social Life
  • And so on…

The list above is to give you an idea. Everybody has a different list. Some people have a few items on their lists, others a lot.

I’m not here to tell you how to divide your life into its components. It’s a decision you have to make. But I recommend dividing your life into areas and focusing on each area separately.

Divide Each Life Area into Projects

Once you have the main areas of your life, it’s time to divide them into projects. For example, your job might involve more than one project. Again, work on those projects separately.

Now, go over each project and break it down into tasks. Some of those tasks will be one-off tasks. Others will be repeating tasks.

Ideally, you should divide each project to a point where you can complete a task in a single sitting.

That’s a Lot of Work!

I can hear you screaming “that’s a lot of work!” Yes, it is! But you don’t have to do all of it in a single sitting. Moreover, you don’t have to go into detail for each area, for each project, or for each task.

Simply focus on the most urgent and important areas, projects, and tasks. That already involves some prioritization.

If you can’t divide a life area, project, or task to the point of single sitting activities, you won’t be able to schedule them in a specific timeslot on a given day.

If you can’t schedule a task, you won’t be able to complete it. As a result, your time management challenges will perpetuate.

What gets scheduled, gets done.

Which Tool Should I Use?

There are a lot of planning, scheduling, and to-do list tools out there. For the analysis part, keep things simple. Use MS Word.

MS Word has some less known features that make it more than enough to do an analysis like this.

  • Use heading styles to divide your plan into its parts.
  • Collapse and expand headings to focus on the sections you’re working.
  • Use the navigation pane to have an overview of the headings.
  • Use bullet points to jot down tasks.
  • Insert page breaks between life areas and projects if necessary.

In the navigation pane, you can use the following functionalities.

  • Click on a heading for quick access to it in the text editor.
  • Drag and drop headings.
  • Promote or demote headings.
  • Add a new heading or subheading.
  • Expand or collapse a heading or a subheading.
  • Adjust the level of headings to be shown.
  • Adjust the width of the navigation pane.
  • Move the navigation pane.

MS Word Life Plan Template

Adjust the Width of the Navigation Pane

The overview of your planning is as important as the details of it. For that reason, you can increase the size of the navigation page up to 50% of the screen.

Move the Navigation Pane

I prefer the working space to be on the left and the navigation space to be on the right of the screen. You can move the navigation pane if you want to try a different setting than the default one.

Prioritization

This step is a critical part of scheduling. Which tasks are more important than others in your analysis? Which tasks are less important?

In a previous post, I explained the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix is a method to categorize tasks. It has two dimensions, importance and urgency.

Prioritization means categorizing your tasks according to their importance. The Eisenhower Matrix has two categories in the importance dimension, important and not important.

The ABCDE Method

Today, I want to introduce the ABCDE method. As the name suggests, the ABCDE method has five categories. Each letter stands for a category.

  • A. Critical task. Serious implications if not addressed timely.
  • B. Important task. This task has significant benefits in the long run.
  • C. Nice to do.
  • D. Delegate. Someone else can do this cheaper, faster, better than you.
  • E. Eliminate. No benefits. Even harmful.

Now, you have to go over your plan and assign a letter to each task.

Resources

I first read about the ABCDE method from the book Focal Point by Brian Tracy. I came across the Eisenhower Matrix for the first time in the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

The ABCDE method focuses on the prioritization of tasks. The Eisenhower Matrix also branches out into scheduling with the urgency dimension.

Delegate

Don’t underestimate the letter D. It is the most avoided letter in this system. There are two counterarguments against delegation.

  1. Lack of money
  2. Lack of trust

Lack of Money

In some cases, lack of money is a legitimate argument, but not always. Think about it from another perspective.

  • What’s your hourly rate, your hourly income?
  • What’s the hourly rate of the person that you’re going to delegate the task at hand?

If your hourly rate is higher than the person you’re going to hire, then it’s only logical to delegate.

Moreover, some people complete a task faster and better than you. There’s a person who helps me with household once a week. They complete the task in half the time that I do. They do a much better job than me. I’m grateful for their work.

Lack of Trust

Some people want to do everything themselves. You can’t scale your life and business by doing everything yourself.

As I explained in the post, A Buddhist Monk’s Take on Business, employees are one of the four stakeholders of a business. If you want to get to the next level in your life and business, you have to start delegating some tasks.

If you have a difficult time trusting others, start slowly. Start delegating small tasks to freelancers.

Come up with clear requirements in advance and verify the work against those requirements. Once you build trust with your freelancers, you can increase the amount of work you delegate.

Conclusion

Time management is a complex problem. It can be divided into two parts, planning and willpower. Planning can be broken down into analysis, prioritization, and scheduling.

In the analysis part, we come up with an overview of all the areas of our lives. Then we divide each area into projects, tasks, and action items. In prioritization, we assign different priorities to each task.

Delegation is a critical yet avoided part of time management. If you avoid it because of lack of money, compare your hourly rate with the hourly rate of a freelancer.

If you avoid delegation because of lack of trust, you can build trust by delegating small tasks and following up on them.

Stay tuned for my posts on scheduling and willpower. They are also critical parts of time management.

How Do I Publish a Post Every Day?

A few days ago, I was checking my Google Analytics stats. I came across several search queries by my visitors. One of those queries was “how to write every day.” That was a great topic to write a post about.

If you wonder whether I have written on a topic or not, you can use the search box on any page of my blog. You can also reach out to me directly with a comment or using the contact page.

I published a blog post per day for the last five months. That was quite a feat, if you consider that I have a full time job. I’ll go over the details of how I did it in this post.

Commitment

If you want to publish a post per day, you have to commit to it. You put this goal high in your priorities list. Only few things are more important than publishing a post per day.

If you make a commitment, you’ll find a way to publish a post per day, no matter what.

Maybe your post might not be exceptional on some days, but you will hit the publish button in either case.

2+ Hours of Uninterrupted Work Time Every Single Day

I dedicate 2+ hours exclusively to writing every single day. I don’t include interacting with readers, participating on social media, checking my stats, or improving the design of my blog in those 2+ hours.

When I say “every single day,” I mean “every single day,” including weekends and holidays.

Actually, I work longer in weekends and on holidays. I work on extra tasks such as stats, design, and email newsletters on those days.

I know that I have lost 80% of my readers at this moment, but I’m going to be honest. I’m not going to lie about my process in order to get new followers and email newsletter subscribers.

How Fast Do You Want to Reach Your Goals?

First of all, you don’t have to publish every day. I publish every day, because I want to reach my goals as fast as possible. You can publish as much as you want.

My research showed me that posts published on Monday receive twice as many views compared to the posts published on other days. That means you have to publish on Mondays. You can take a few days off in the rest of the week.

Publishing Every Day Builds Momentum

By publishing every day, you build a momentum with yourself and with your readers.

You keep your mind sharp and focused on writing. Writing becomes a fundamental part of your life. Your mind works on your posts even if you don’t think about them. You won’t get that benefit from publishing a few days a week.

Your readers know that they’ll find a new post in your blog every day. That means they can visit your blog whenever they’re bored and want something new to read. And people get bored. After a while, this becomes a habit. They visit your blog even if they aren’t bored.

You become a part of their life. They tell themselves “let me check what Burak wrote today,” because they know that you wrote something that day. This is why people check news every day.

If you take into account the momentum factor, the blogger who publishes every day has a greater advantage than just the extra few posts they publish. If they publish twice as much as the average blogger, they reach their goal faster than twice as the average blogger.

Prioritization

If your blog is up and running, don’t do anything else for your blog before publishing your post.

  • Don’t read comments.
  • Don’t read emails.
  • Don’t participate on social media.
  • Don’t improve the design of your website.
  • Don’t check your stats.

In essence, do nothing for your blog before publishing your post.

Perfect Is the Enemy of Good

I know that my blog posts aren’t perfect. I can write a good blog post in two hours. I can easily spend another two hours on improving my post and it still wouldn’t be perfect.

  • I can check my post with Grammarly, the Hemingway app, and other automated grammar and style checking tools.
  • I can read my post ten times and still find points of improvement.
  • I can google synonyms of some words.
  • I can reformat my post for greater readability.
  • I can come up with a dozen titles, run them through the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, and decide on the best one.
  • I can write my post on one day and edit the next day.

All of these tips and others would increase the quality of my posts, but they would also increase the time it takes to publish a post. And I don’t have that much time to spend on each post.

Make no mistake, I read my posts at least three times. I use the spelling and grammar checker of MS Word. I use Grammarly, the Hemingway app, and CoSchedule Headline Analyzer once in a while to learn some lessons, but I don’t use them on a daily basis.

Keep a Backlog of Post Ideas

I wouldn’t be able to publish a post per day if I didn’t keep a backlog of ideas to write about. It would be impossible for me to come up with an idea on the spot, write a post about it, publish it, and repeat that every day.

If you have a difficult time to come up with post ideas, I strongly recommend that you read my post 8 Ways to Create Content on a Consistent Basis.

Pick an Idea and Stick to It

When you start writing a post about an idea, stick to it until you hit the publish button. Don’t go back and forth between different ideas. If you do that, you might work more than two hours and end up without a blog post.

Outline First, Write Later

When I start writing a post, I’m bombarded with ideas to include in that post. Human mind doesn’t work in a linear fashion.

My mind doesn’t come up with a single idea, wait for me to write a paragraph about that idea, and then come up with the next one.

When an idea comes up, at least half a dozen come up with it. If I start writing a paragraph about an idea, I’m going to forget about the other five or six ideas that came together with it.

Ideas don’t come in a logical sequence. They come in a bunch of tangled mess. It’s up to me to process them and organize them in a logical sequence.

First, I write down all the ideas without going into detail. That way, I don’t forget any of them. Then, I organize them in an outline.

I’m not going into details of which tools I use to outline. For details about that, you can check my post The Tools I Use to Capture and Organize Ideas, and to Outline, Write, and Edit Blog Posts.

Writing down an idea doesn’t mean that I’m going to use it in the post. Sometimes, I leave out some ideas. I keep some of those ideas to be used for future posts. I delete some of them forever.

Points of Improvement

Even though I publish a post every day, I don’t claim that my process is perfect. I have some challenges in my process. I plan to discuss my challenges and points of improvement in a future post.

If you don’t want to miss my post on my challenges and other posts on writing, blogging, startups, and life lessons, sign up to my email newsletter. I send a roundup of my latest posts in an email newsletter every week.

Conclusion

Publishing a post per day has its advantages. It builds momentum for yourself and your readers.

It all starts with a commitment to hit that target. Then, you have to prioritize it over other blogging activities.

You need to learn how to stop at good enough. If you aim for perfection, you might never publish a post, let alone once a day.

Keeping a backlog of ideas is crucial, because coming up with an idea in the last minute is not always feasible.

In order to avoid wasting time, stick with an idea when you start writing a post. Don’t switch back and forth between ideas.

Don’t try to write a post in one pass. Write down your ideas first, outline them, and write the post as the last step. That way, you won’t forget any ideas. Your posts will also have a logical sequence.

How to Learn Something for Life and Make It a Part of Your Functional Knowledge

Do you remember the last time you had an aha moment when you read a blog post? You probably do. We all have those moments, when we come across exceptional, insightful content. Sometimes, it’s a blog post. Sometimes, it’s a book. Sometimes, it’s a video.

However, do you remember what it was that gave you that aha moment? You probably don’t, because it’s normal to forget something after a while if we are exposed to it only once.

I’m sure, you don’t want to forget all the insights that you come across. You probably want to learn them for life and make it a part of your functional knowledge. The question is how are you going to do it?

The Secret to Long Term Learning

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this discussion. The answer is hidden in the challenge and the solution is already figured out by experts. However, in this post, I’ll share a modern tool to apply that solution efficiently.

The answer is hidden in the challenge. What is our challenge? We forget information that we are exposed to only once. What is the solution? In order to learn something for the long term, we need to get exposed to it more than once.

That sounds easy, right? “Just read the same blog post ten times and you have learned the information for life.” Not so fast! Consuming the same information repetitively is required, but there has to be some time in between each repetition.

The Spaced Repetition Method

You need to reread that blog post after a week, after a month, after a quarter, and after a year. These intervals are just examples. Different intervals are necessary for different people, for different information, and for different purposes.

For example, if you’re a college student, you might want to review the material after the first day, after the second day, after the first week, after the third week, and before the exam. So, you have to come up with your own repetition schedule, according to the topic, the purpose, and your learning patterns.

This method is called the spaced repetition method. I first came across it when learning a foreign language as an adult. The language learning version is developed by Paul Pimsleur and it is called the Pimsleur Method.

The Spaced Repetition Method in the 21st Century

Now, that we have the theoretical background, let’s think about how we can apply the spaced repetition method efficiently in the 21st Century. You can find some tools online for this purpose, but I like to use Evernote for this purpose.

Evernote is a free note taking software. I have been using it for five years, in my private life as well as in my professional life, with two separate accounts. I use it for multiple purposes, including the following.

  • Maintaining a knowledge base,
  • As a forum to discuss technical issues with colleagues,
  • Personal calendar,
  • To-do list,
  • Writing down ideas,
  • Organizing ideas.

I have already written posts about how I use Evernote in detail and how it helps me publish a blog post every day. So, why not use it as a tool for spaced repetition method?

How to Use Evernote as a Tool for the Spaced Repetition Method

The first step is to create a note for everything you want to learn for the long term. This is really easy if you have the Evernote app installed on your smartphone. You can easily send a webpage to Evernote with the shortcut. If it’s an idea that you came up with, simply write it down as a note in the app.

Once you have created the note, tag it. You can use the topic of the note, such as “blogging,” and/or you can use general terms, such as “insight” or “to learn.”

Schedule Weekly Reviews

Now, you need to schedule an hour or two every week to review the notes you created last week, one month ago, a quarter ago, and a year or multiple years ago. In order to find those notes, you can use queries like the following: created:20180101 -created:20180108 tag:insight in the search box.

That query will give you the notes created between 2018, January 1 and January 7, tagged with “insight.” Now, you can go through those notes and review the content. This will help you commit that information to the long term memory.

Moreover, you can use the keywords, day, week, month, and year. For example, you can use created:week-1 -created:week, to find the notes that were created between two weeks ago and a week ago.

You can save those queries as saved search and you can access them easily in your weekly review hour. If you aren’t that enthusiastic about a note anymore, you can remove that note.

Consuming New Content or Reviewing Old Content

Curiosity is a strong motivator for us, humans. Therefore, we tend to consume new content all the time. The problem with that approach is that we don’t learn something by consuming it once unless it reinforces what we have already consumed before.

Therefore, consuming new content is not enough in itself to improve our functional knowledge. We have to save insightful content in a knowledge base and review that knowledge base periodically. Otherwise, consuming new content has a little more value than pure entertainment.

Building knowledge is similar to developing new skills. Learning a new skill has four levels. You climb those levels by repetition. It’s the same with building knowledge, but in this case, those repetitions need to have some space in between them.

Conclusion

It’s human nature to forget new information after a while. Experts have found a solution to this problem. The solution is called the spaced repetition method. It is based on repeating the material after certain intervals, such as a day, a week, a month, and a year.

Modern tools such as Evernote make it easy to build a knowledge base with all the insights that you come across. You can use the same tool to review the material periodically with its search functionality.

In order to make sure that you review your knowledge base periodically, schedule at least an hour or more every week in your calendar.

Now, that I’m thinking about it, you can do the same with a blog and search for the posts between certain dates and tagged with certain terms.

Do you have other tools or tips to improve the learning process? Let us know in the comments.

How to Deal with an Overwhelming To-Do List and Overcome Procrastination

I have an LLC, which adds a bunch of administrative tasks on top of my already busy schedule at the start of each quarter. Sometimes, the workload in this period is overwhelming and I am tempted to procrastinate. Today, I want to share how I deal with those feelings of overwhelm and temptations to procrastinate.

The first step to managing a huge to-do list is to divide it into the Eisenhower matrix. In the top left, we have the important and urgent tasks. In the top right, important but not urgent tasks. In the bottom left, urgent but not important. In the bottom right, neither urgent nor important.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Start with the Important and Urgent

Obviously, the administrative tasks are important and urgent at this moment. They receive the highest priority. Since, I publish a blog post every day, that also goes to top left. There are also other tasks and some of them are important, but administrative tasks and writing a blog post have priority over the rest.

I write down every task that I have to do in Evernote. That way, I’m sure that I won’t forget them. However, my focus will be on my important and urgent list until that list is completed. I know that I’ll get back to the rest of the tasks and therefore, I don’t need to worry about them.

Whenever, I feel like doing a task outside of my important and urgent list, I let that urge go. In these busy times, letting go is an important skill I need to exercise.

Avoid the Urges to Procrastinate and Multitasking

Another pitfall during busy times is to start as many tasks as you can. We feel scared when we see all the tasks in our to-do list. In order to deal with that feeling, we start as many tasks as we can. Needless to say, neither starting multiple tasks at a time, nor multitasking improves our productivity. On the contrary, they hurt our productivity.

It doesn’t matter how many tasks you start, neither how many tasks you carry out in parallel. What counts is how many tasks you finish.

Dealing with a huge to-do list is simple. You simply select the most important and urgent task in your to-do list and work on it until it is complete. The best way to finish a task is to work on it exclusively until it is complete.

It is simple, but not easy, because you’ll feel worried about the rest of the tasks. As a result, you might be tempted to jump from task to task without finishing any of them.

Five Tips to Deal with Long To-Do Lists

Whenever you feel those worries and temptations, let them go. First, write all of your tasks down. That gives you the assurance that you’ll return to them later. Second, remind yourself that the best way to complete your to-do list is to focus on a single task at a time.

Assign a duration to your task at hand. Aim to complete the task you are working on within the assigned duration. That way, you’ll know that you’ll have sufficient time for the rest of your to-do list. Moreover, having a deadline for your task will motivate you with a micro-challenge, just like the weekly goals motivate you.

Promise yourself some downtime. If you have a to-do list that looks endless to you, it’s hard to get motivated to start it. As a result, you might end up procrastinating. In order to overcome that feeling, promise yourself some downtime, either in the evening or in the weekend.

Build momentum by completing a task, no matter how small. This might sound contradictory to starting with the most important and urgent task, but it’s a small trick that helps you break the pattern of procrastination. Once you complete a task, you feel motivated to complete even more. The more you accomplish, the more motivated you get to accomplish more.

Conclusion

Sometimes, we are overwhelmed by our long to-do lists. In order to deal with that feeling, we either procrastinate or jump from task to task without completing any of them. There are a few things you can do to overcome the feelings of overwhelm and procrastination.

  • Write down all the tasks that need to be completed.
  • Start with the most important and urgent task at hand.
  • Focus on a single task at a time.
  • Assign a duration to the task and challenge yourself to complete it within that duration.
  • Promise yourself some downtime.
  • If you feel like procrastinating, break that feeling by completing a small task.