Whenever I hit a roadblock in productivity, I find myself revisiting all of the many ways I try to be productive. During this process, I install a bunch of new productivity apps and uninstall any apps I deem to be a waste of time. I’m looking at you, Twitter & Reddit.

Soon after, I realize and think:

I could’ve spent that time actually being productive. I always go back to my old apps and workflows anyways.

Instead of continuing with this never-ending and unproductive cycle, I want to create a stricter workflow and outline use cases for each specific tool.

My goal is to minimize the amount of time I spend mulling over how to be productive, and actually being productive.

The real struggle

I have many things I want to do, to work towards, and to remember. Unfortunately, I can’t do it all. With so limited time, I need to find ways to do, work towards, and remember the most important things.

I’ve narrowed down what I need to organize my life to five points.

  1. Tracking, prioritizing, and breaking down tasks
    • Publish my first blog post
    • Distinguishing important long-term tasks vs. just urgent tasks
  2. Remembering future events
    • My friend is having a birthday party on April 27
  3. Recalling past experiences
    • How frantic was I when I broke production during my first internship?
  4. Maintaining habits
    • Read a book for at least 15 minutes everyday
  5. Jotting down arbitrary thoughts
    • Blog post ideas, The best start-up idea ever

The current solutions

As this was my first post on my redesigned website, I wanted to go into more detail about my workflow and how I specifically use these tools, but those separate sections ended up becoming much larger than I’d anticipated. I’ll go into more details in separate posts about each one.

In summary, I use the following:

  1. A to-do list app, Things 3, to solve 1 & 4
    • With a new twist, following my simplification of the GTD methodology
  2. A calendar app, Fantastical, to solve 2
  3. A journal app, Day One, to solve 3
  4. A note app, Bear, to solve 5

For now, I’ll mark my task write first blog post as completed. Success!