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Apps and Processes

How Apps and Processes Keep Me Productive and Organised

I find personal productivity as an interesting subject and it’s also a common topic in digital nomadism and entrepreneurship related forums. I don’t have numbers to prove this, but I’d estimate the work digital nomads do leans towards getting paid for results instead of hours spent. We have our own businesses, services or products we provide and the payment may not depend solely on the amount of hours we put into work. That motivates us to do what we do efficiently so that with the saved time we can either push our business even further or spend more time traveling, being in interesting places and having new experiences. We have clear incentives to really put effort in improving our personal working habits and finding effective ways to work. Getting Things DonePomodoro Technique and Wunderlist todo apps form the core of my time management practices and I’ll tell you a little bit more about those in the following chapters.

 

Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done is a time-management method – and book – originally published 2001 by David Allen. The GTD describes a process to handle tasks and todos efficiently forward and one important aspect of it is tracking and scheduling the tasks in a single place/calendar/app so that you don’t need to spend energy and time in trying to remember them. I think I read about GTD already few years ago, but I didn’t try it out back then. I won’t go into details here, since there are many good resources in internet to learn more about it, but below is a description of the overall process.
Getting Things Done process
Getting Things Done process

Pomodoro

Pomodoro Technique is a time management method like GTD and it also provides a big picture process to manage work. For the moment I’m utilizing Pomodoro only for working effectively with the task at hand, but at some point I might try out the complete Pomodoro technique with all the core principles.

The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility and short bursts of work reduce the impact of internal and external interruptions on focus and flow. Following process image – from elvindantes.com – describes the basic process quite nicely.

Pomodoro method

I’ve been trying out Pomodoro a while now and I have troubles to stop when the timer rings when I’m in the zone and actually doing productive work. In some cases I might skip one break and continue what I’m doing, but I’m still trying out what works best for me. When doing mentally taxing tasks those small breaks help a lot and they allow me to stay focused also in the late afternoon hours.

Earlier I mentioned the Marinatimer web site as a one way to track the time, but I recently changed into TomatoTimer which in its simplicity works very well. It could be quite handy to have a timer also in the smart watch – like Polar M600 – but I haven’t tried such apps yet.

Todo app

For the moment Wunderlist is my main application for Getting Things Done, since the basic todo functionality with the desktop app, Android app and Android Wear app works really well.

Todo app helps me to focus on the matter at hand since I don’t have to keep many things in my mind anymore. If a thing worth doing pops into my mind I try to do it immediately or write it down into the mobile app as a todo.

I have quite a few categories for todos from shopping list to project work and I also have a set of general daily todos to help me follow certain routines and remind about healthy lifestyle. I’m still playing around with these, but for the moment I have following daily todos:

  • Check newsletters and social media – Just to remind me to check Inderes newsletter, news and my social media accounts each morning
  • Physical exercise – I try to do a physical exercise six times a week. Usually I run or go to gym, but walking and trekking are also fine as long as my daily activity target is reached.
  • Stretch / body maintenance – Office work and physical exercise makes muscles stiff and stretching keeps me feeling better
  • Read 1 hour – Just to remind me to find time for reading and reduce time spend watching video streams
  • Headspace session – I’m still trying out Headspace mindfulness / mediation app and I try to remember to take a 10-15 min session every day
  • At least one healthy meal – It would be nice to eat steaks every day, but I’ve heard the vitamins are supposed to be good for health so I’ll try to eat at least one salad or otherwise healthy meal per day
  • Check tomorrows todo list – This item has been very beneficial for me. It’s a small thing to do, but when you make sure the agenda for tomorrow is up-to-date and realistic to reach it’s easy to sleep the night through.
Burger with salad
Qualified healthy meal @ Hamburgueria do Mercado 😉

Getting rid of distractions

To be able to focus on a task for the 25 min at a time I did some fine tunings for my applications:

  • I unsubscribed from most of the commercial emails I received. I might subscribe again in some of those in the future, but most of the emails I received didn’t have any value for me in my current life situation.
  • I moved webmail browser tabs into another space (Virtual Desktop in Windows) so that I can access them quickly during the short breaks for example, but I can finish my pomodoros without distractions. I also keep the related desktop notifications disabled.
  • I set my social media apps so that I won’t get any unwanted distracting notifications from them via laptop, phone or smart watch.

Targets

Motivation is in a big role in keeping focus on the right things and making you to stick with effective habits and processes. I’ve learned that targets are the thing that gives me the motivation to keep going.

However targets won’t give you the motivation if you never reach them. The targets have to be realistic. These days I rarely commit to anything long term if it doesn’t have a clear realistic target and solid enough plan to get there. Committing to a daydream project is usually a waste of time and time is a premium not worth wasting.

Setting targets

In general the targets should be set so that they are reachable and in best case scenario it should be possible to even surpass them. It is very easy to set the targets based on the happy case scenarios – yep, I’ve done that many times – and not estimate enough time for possible ad hoc happenings and challenges and for the possibility for surpassing the target.

In addition for setting realistic targets for big endeavours it is important to set realistic targets also for each day. If the targets are constantly set in a way that there are leftovers for the next day the daily plans lose their purpose; in these cases it is better to do some rescheduling and take more time for the planned tasks.

For long term plans I try to leave some leeway for handling unexpected events like changes in project schedules, unexpected computer issues or ad hoc invitation for afterwork. With good planning even few sick days won’t make the long term plans to fail. This is one of the challenge with Wunderlist for me; I understand things best in visual format and I haven’t found a way to get a good visual overview of the whole week/month so that I’d have an idea how much stuff I have planned for the near future.

Big picture

From software development work I’ve learned it’s important for me to understand why the project is being planned or started and how the project I’m working in fits into the big picture of company strategy and priorities. How about our private life then, what is the big picture there? Well, these are very personal things and there are no right answers to this, but my big picture is a combination of wishes, dreams, concrete goals and stepping stones and it keeps changing with the world we live in.

Few years back I read an article about annual personal retrospectives and it kinda got me interested about long term personal development – and tracking – and the big picture of our private lifes. In case the retrospective term is new to you here is a quote from wikipedia:

..retrospective is a meeting held by a project team at the end of a project or process (often after an iteration) to discuss what was successful about the project or time period covered by that retrospective, what could be improved, and how to incorporate the successes and improvements in future iterations or projects.

I have mixed feelings towards personal retrospectives. As an experienced software engineer I clearly understand its benefits, but on the other hand it feels like…too much? Do we really need to go this far to succeed in life? Couldn’t we just do our best in daily basis and see where it takes us?

Well, the engineer in me seems to be winning and – surprise surprise – I have a task scheduled regarding this to design a framework for personal objectives and retrospective for 2017 ;). To be honest I’ve already followed more or less consciously certain things in my life – like financials – annually, but I’d like to know how my businesses, professional skills and other aspects of my life have improved – or not – during the year and have I reached the targets or otherwise changed as a person.

Anyways, it motivates me, keeps me productive and pushes me to get things done when I know the small tasks I’m doing takes me towards a project target or personal goal and I know the project or personal endeavour serve a purpose in the big picture.

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