Archive for ‘Task Management’ Category
Paper Doll Suggests What to Watch to Get More Organized and Productive
You may have heard that for the first time in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America has gone on strike. What they’re asking for is reasonable, especially in light of all that’s changed in the television industry (including streaming services). Meanwhile, you may find yourself with a shortage of your favorite shows to watch.
You’ve got lots of options to fill your time. You could read a book (or several), in which case, you might seek guidance from 12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 1 (When, Where, What, With Whom) and 12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 2 (Reading Lists, Challenges & Ice Cream Samples) Or you could get out in the sunshine or hang out with friends.
But what can you do if you really like to sit in a comfy chair and watch things on a glossy screen? Well, if you’ve already exhausted every English-language comedy and drama on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+, Disney+, and YaddaYadda+, you could try watching one of the many Korean-language dramas on Netflix. (I recommend Extraordinary Attorney Woo — it’s charming and delightful.)
Or you could try something completely different. Today’s post offers up a mix of webinars and actual TV programming designed to help you live a better, more productive, more organized life.
DAILY DOSE MINI CHALLENGES
Could you use a little support in reaching your goals? My cool friend Georgia Homsany runs Daily Dose, a wellness company celebrating its 3-year anniversary! How do you celebrate three years of supporting people’s health and wellness needs through corporate and individual endeavors? With three really cool weeks of 5-day mini-challenges! And I get to be part of one of them!
- 5-Day Positivity Challenge (May 8-12) — Learn how to conquer stress and negativity with simple reminders and healthy habits to transform your mindset. (It starts today!)
- How to Overcome Perfectionism (May 15-19) — Learn how recognize the signs of perfectionist tendencies, understand the negative effects of it, and gain skills to minimize the idea of perfection in your workplace and personal life.
- Declutter Your Space and Schedule (May 22-26) — Receive actionable advice to help you get motivated, make progress, and gain control over the life and work clutter that weighs you down. From chaotic mornings to cluttered desks and screens to procrastination and wonky schedules, I’ll be telling you how to make it all better.
Yup, that last one is my mini-challenge. And you KNOW how much I pack into whatever I deliver.
For each mini-challenge, you get:
- Video content delivered daily over the course of five days. Videos are designed to be short and to the point so you can learn and get on with your day to incorporate the advice.
- Email and/or text reminder notifications — and you get to set your reminder preference!
- An interactive platform to ask questions and chat with other participants.
Plus, there’s a BONUS: Each participant will also be entered in a raffle to win one of three wellness prizes! (One (1) winner per challenge.)
The cost is $25 per challenge, or $65 for all three! (And remember, the first challenge starts today, Monday, May 8th!) So go ahead and register before it falls to the bottom of your to-do list!
Declutter Your Space and Schedule
If you have questions or want to sign register for all three, email Daily Dose with “5 Day Mini Courses” in the subject line. And say hi from me!
HOW TO FIX MEETINGS
Graham Allcott of Think Productive is the author of How to be a Productivity Ninja: Worry Less, Achieve More and Love What You Do, which has a prominent place on my bookshelf.
He’s also written How to be a Study Ninja: Study Smarter. Focus Better. Achieve More (for students), Work Fuel: The Productivity Ninja Guide to Nutrition, and more.
Graham and Hayley Watts, his writing partner on their book, How to Fix Meetings: Meet Less, Focus on Outcomes and Get Stuff Done, are offering a free Zoom-based webinar this week, on Tuesday, May 9, 2023. (Note that Graham and Hayley are in the UK, and the start time listed is 2 p.m. GMT, which is 9 a.m. Eastern Time, so please synchronize your watches accordingly.)
If you struggle with attending (or scheduling) meetings that should have been emails, if you have no planned itinerary for meetings, if your meetings tend to go on forever, and especially if your meetings don’t seem to ever achieve anything, this should be a good webinar to help you find your way forward. In Graham’s own words,
“Our approach to meetings in the book is much like Think Productive’s entire approach to productivity: it’s all about making space for what matters. That means eliminating so many of the unnecessary and unproductive meetings we have, but then in that space that we’ve created, we are able to focus in on the meetings that make a difference. The ones where collaboration and consensus generate the magic and momentum.”
They practice what they preach, so the webinar is only 45 minutes…and unlike broadcast TV, there are no commercials!
If you like what you see, you might want to sign up for their other upcoming free webinars (Human, Not Superhero on May 17, 2023, and Getting Comfortable with Mistakes and Imperfection on June 7, 2023), as well as their YouTube channel and paid public workshops.
Not only is the material great for building productivity, but everything is delivered in posh UK accents!
THE GENTLE ART OF SWEDISH DEATH CLEANING
Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books about organizing and decluttering, and am often conflicted. If you read my post, The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing, you know how I feel about celebrity organizers (and non-professionals) offering up advice that’s one-size-fits-all and doesn’t take into account individual’s personal situations, mental health, family and work obligations, home sizes, and comfort levels. In short, such an approach does not please me!
But that doesn’t mean I eschew all books on the topic, either by celebrities or non-professionals. Five years ago, I read The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter with curiosity but few expectations.
The author, Margareta Magnusson, wasn’t a professional organizer; she hadn’t even been previously published. Was this going to be another “hygge” kind of movement where everyone and his brother would take a cultural phenomenon and profit off of it? Was “death cleaning” even actually a thing in Sweden? And would the advice be any good?
First, I got a little taste of Magnusson’s style by watching this interview clip.
Eventually, I sprinted through the book. Here’s an excerpt from the Goodreads review I wrote at the time:
“Gentle” in this book’s title is the key to guiding your expectations. If you’re looking for a detailed how-to book on decluttering, this is not your resource. It’s something else, and as a professional organizer, I’m inclined to say it’s something better. Swedish artist Margareta Magnusson, self-reportedly somewhere between eighty and one hundred years old, is experienced at döstädning, translated as “death cleaning,” but meaning the essential downsizing one should do in one’s 60s, 70s, and beyond so that one’s children and friends are not left with the sad labor of separating the wheat from the chaff and risking missing gems among the clutter.
Magnusson is like a worldly but sweet elderly aunt, writing lightly amusing, firm-but-gentle, philosophical guidance for her friends and age cohorts. If you’re in your 40s or younger, you may roll your eyes at this book, thinking, “Oh, I know that!” but as a professional, I can tell you that the difference between knowing you should dramatically reduce your clutter (or not acquire it in the first place) and doing it represent a chasm as vast as the ocean that separates us from Sweden. […]
Some of Magnusson’s tips are about dealing with what you keep, rather than about letting go of items. My favorite, and one that I think we all need to hear every so often, came after her story of boating with friends and the constant loss of the boat keys, and how a small hook for the key inside the cabin door might have improved upon the crankiness of the participants. She said, simply, “Sometimes, the smallest changes can have amazing effects. If you find yourself repeatedly having the same problem, fix it! Obvious.” Perhaps, but do you always follow that obvious advice?
Magnusson seems uncertain about my own profession, noting that she thinks it’s important, when death cleaning, to seek out advice on things like the best charities to which to donate certain items, how to deal with beautiful items with no monetary value, and the wisdom/safety of gifting or donating potentially dangerous items. Elsewhere, she expresses the notion that she sees the value in professional organizers but worries about the cost (of many hours of help) if one is reluctant to actually let go of things. I can’t disagree with her. This is why she slyly uses her book to (again) gently encourage people to work toward understanding the wisdom of really looking at their possessions and considering what they really need and want as they age.
Again, her philosophy rather than her step-by-step advice is the value of the book. In one section, Magnusson offers some conversation starters for younger adults to help their elderly parents and grandparents (or those approaching their dotage) consider the very issues that she raises in the book. In another, she lays out how possessions can yield strong memories, but that one shouldn’t be sad if one’s children don’t want/need the unusable possessions just to remain attached to the memories.
At no time is Magnusson harsh; she’s wistful.[…] She says, “You can always hope and wait for someone to want something in your home, but you cannot wait forever, and sometimes you must just give cherished things away with the wish that they end up with someone who will create new memories of their own.” Lovely, and true, and yet so hard for so many people to accept.
There were two small areas of the book I particularly liked. First, Magnusson very briefly speaks of how death cleaning has traditionally been a woman’s job — women have historically been the caregivers, they live longer, they want to avoid causing trouble for the kids, etc. But although she is a woman of advanced years, she doesn’t give in. She notes that women of her generation were brought up not to be in the way, and to fear being a nuisance, and then notes, “Men don’t think like I do, but they should. They, too, can be in the way.” Death cleaning must be an equal-opportunity endeavor.
The other parts of the book I especially liked involved her focus on “private” and “personal” things. I won’t spoil the paragraph on “private” things except to say that what caused a few reviewers to call Magnusson “dirty” for one small paragraph in an entire book causes me to declare her refreshing. (I laughed out loud, joyfully.) This is not a prim old biddy, but a woman who has lived, and who understands that leaving behind one’s truly “private” items is not quite fair to those you predecease. The “personal” section that I enjoyed was the notion, towards the end of one’s time on the planet, of having a small box, about the size of a shoebox, for things that are yours alone. Think: love letters or a small whatnot that gives you pleasure but that will mean nothing to anyone after you’re gone, and which you can easily advise others to toss if you so choose.
As no translator is listed, I believe that Magnusson, herself, wrote the English version of this book. (Perhaps it was written for an English-speaking audience and Swedes have no need for what may seem like common sense to them?) This gave the text a warm, quaint feeling, as Magnusson’s English is excellent, but perhaps a tad formal. Yet she is not old-fashioned, nor are her ideas, and her recognition of the importance of technology will set at ease the minds of potential readers who might feel this book is too behind the times for them.
[…]If you are overwhelmed by clutter, certainly you can read this book, but don’t expect a primer on decluttering and creating new systems. (Better yet, call a professional organizer!) But do read this book to immerse yourself in the mindset that Magnusson puts forth, and you will likely find yourself more at ease with the notion of letting go of excess as you go through life.
I even liked the book enough to read her follow-up, mostly a memoir of her fascinating life, The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You.
So, I was surprised and delighted when my colleague Hazel Thornton told me that there was going to be a TV show based on the book, and then let me know it was launching before I’d even seen the trailer (below).
I’m generally dubious about reality shows, especially organizing-related reality shows. They can be exploitive or silly, reductionist or melodramatic. I haven’t made my way through all of the episodes yet, but many of my colleagues have praised the sense of hope the show puts forth, both for the individuals portrayed on the show and for the useful new lives of the possessions that have been “death cleaned” out of their homes.
A note about the tone of the show. While Magnusson’s writing is, indeed, gentle, the show is produced and narrated by comedic actress Amy Poehler, who has been known to be on the sarcastic side, and the show has some instances of adult language (including the words George Carlin once noted could not be said on television), so if you are sensitive or uncomfortable with such, or tend to watch programming around impressionable children or adults who are uncomfortable with such language, please proceed cautiously.
The team is made up of Ella, a professional organizer, Kat, a psychologist, and Johan, a designer, and the show is thematically similar to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, produced by the same company. Some of my colleagues have called attention to the fact that the team’s practitioners are Swedish, so some sensibilities are quite different from our attitudes and practices in North America.
As I haven’t had the opportunity to finish the entire series, I’m still formulating my thoughts, but I think only good things can come of looking at our time left and making the best use of it by not letting possessions weigh us (and those who live on after us) down.
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning is streaming on Peacock; there are eight episodes in the first season, each ranging from 46 to 56 minutes in length. If you have cable, you can likely watch it for free (with commercials); if you do not have cable, you can subscribe to the Premium version for $4.99/month or Premium Plus for $9.99/month, and access it directly on a variety of devices and through services you already have.
HOW TO GET RICH
Of my many complaints over the years about how organizing and productivity concerns are portrayed on television, the one that bothers me most has less to do with attitudes, performances, and advice, and more to do with what gets completely ignored.
Almost every organizing show I’ve ever seen has focused on decluttering residential spaces!
It’s not that this isn’t important; it’s just that it’s not the only important thing. I’ve yet to see a television program designed for mass viewership that covers procrastination, productivity, organizing one’s tasks and time, or anything that goes into organizing non-residential, non-storage space. Even office organizing gets ignored. (One minor except: Tabatha’s Salon Makeover included small segments of workspace organizing in a hair salons.)
I’ve also noticed that there have been very few shows for a mainstream audience on organizing personal finances, an important sub-speciality for NAPO financial organizers and daily money managers in the American Association of Daily Money Managers. Financial organizing — everything from budgeting to investment planning to decluttering bad financial habits — is definitely important for leading a healthy, productive life.
And yet, how many reality or educational shows have you seen about personal finance? Suze Orman used to have a weekly call-in advice show on CNBC, the reruns of which you can see on Amazon Prime using Freevee, but that was more like watching a radio show and you only got narrow slices of people’s lives.
I preferred Til Debt Do Us Part, a Canadian show with Gail Vaz-Oxlade, where she visited the homes of a few different individuals and families each episode and doled out applicable financial advice.
How to Get Rich, led by Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, reminds me of a louder, glitzier version of Vaz-Oxlade’s show.
Over the course of eight episodes in this first season, Sethi meets with couples and individuals and offers financial (and seemingly life-coaching) advice to help them reach their goals. Sethi has degrees from Stanford University: a BA in Information & Society (in Science, Technology & Society) with a minor in Psychology and an MA in sociology (Social Psychology and Interpersonal Processes, and he’s a writer and entrepreneur. As far as I can tell, though, he’s not an accountant or Certified Financial Planner; he’s a self-labeled financial expert, so before you implement his financial advice, speak to a licensed expert in your state or jurisdiction.
That said, the advice he provides to the guests on the show are generally common-sense on researchable topics. He comes out in favor of renting rather than buying when the cost of buying is excessive, and against multi-level marketing (MLM) in such a way that really makes clear how, mathematically, expectations of success are similar to middle school athletes expecting to be NBA All-Stars.
Like the majority of organizing shows, there’s not a lot of opportunity to provide in-depth financial organizing solutions or guidance. It’s TV, and TV is designed to entertain first and foremost, to keep hitting the dopamine centers in the brain in order to encourage viewers to keep watching.
That said, shows like How To Get Rich (and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, all those other organizing shows) do one great thing. They call attention to the fact that pain points can be soothed, that bad habits can be reversed, and that there is hope if you are willing to seek guidance and make behavioral changes.
The first season of How to Get Rich is on Netflix.
I’m not just a fan of good narrative television; my first career was as a television program director and I served on my network’s Program Advisory Council, giving network executives feedback on programming and scheduling. You can take the girl out of TV, but you can’t take TV out of the girl. As such, I hope the deep-pocket corporations come to the negotiating table with the WGA and work out a deal that is fair to the hardworking professional writers who create the comedies and dramas, the TV shows and movies, that entertain and enliven us.
Until then, whether it’s an educational webinar or a edutainment reality show, I encourage you to mix some organizing and productivity into your viewing habits. And please feel free to share in the comments any recent shows, webinars, or other programming that slakes your thirst for guidance toward living your best possible life.
Paper Doll Post:
Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done
ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR TACKLING YOUR TO-DOS
Getting things done takes a lot of moving parts.
- You need to know WHAT to do. (This is where a to-do list or a task app comes in.)
Our brains can hold about seven things in our short-term memory, plus-or-minus a few. I always think of it as plus-or-minus three, given that phone numbers in North America being seven digits plus a three-digit area code. However, a misinterpretation of a famous psychological paper from 1956 leads people to understand Miller’s Law as allowing us to remember 7 things, plus-or-minus two.
That said, we can certainly remember more things, as long as we don’t have to recite them in very quick sequence. After all, a neurosurgeon doesn’t consult a to-do list to remember all of the steps in a complicated surgery, and we can (usually) handle remembering to make dozens of turns to get from where we work to where we live without benefit of GPS, assuming we’ve driven the route several times.
The simplicity or sophistication of your list of tasks is immaterial. Whether it’s on a sticky note, a page of a legal pad, a digital note in Notes or Evernote or OneNote, or any of a variety of task apps, if it shows the things you need to accomplish, you’re golden.
- You need to know what to do first.
The delightfully weird comedian Stephen Wright used to say, “You can’t have everything, where would you put it?”
Prioritizing is a toughie. We often say, “Well, all things being equal…” but of course, things aren’t equal. Some things are naturally high-priority — if you’re dealing with smoke, fire, blood, a baby crying (or a grownup crying hysterically), you need to tend to that first.
Most tasks in life don’t come with such obvious signs of their priorities. Usually, things we want to do are high emotional priorities but may be low productivity priorities. If I gave you a choice between doing an expense report or going to brunch, and assured you my magic powers extended to bippity-boppity-boo-ing your expense report for you and taking all calories and carbs out of your meal, you’d pick the corner table on the patio, convivial conversation with friends, and bottomless mimosas over filling cells on a spreadsheet.
We must prioritize our tasks. As we discussed in Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity, the key is to identify two essential characteristics of tasks: importance and urgency.
The Eisenhower Matrix isn’t the only method for determining these two factors, but it illustrates that only once you’ve figured out what are the most important and urgent things to get done, can you can figure out what things you should do yourself now, what you can delay and schedule for later, what you can delegate or assign to someone else, and what you can delete (or schedule for that non-existent “someday”).
Some people like to eat the frog, per a quote originally ascribed to Mark Twain, “If the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you.”
This method encourages attacking the biggest, hairiest task first. Proponents of Eat the Frog, like Brian Tracy, who authored Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, believe will this prevent you from spending the day procrastinating.
Me? I’m not so sure. I mean, yes, if you do the thing that you’re most likely to avoid first, of course you’ll feel strong and mighty and start knocking everything out of the park.
But how will you get yourself to do that? Even armed with all of the advice in last week’s and today’s, some of us are just going to keep avoiding the BIG YUCKY, certainly at the start of the day. Personally, I’m more inclined to start with something easy, as I believe that small victories breed success.
So, prioritizing isn’t just about the relative measure of the tasks, but of your emotional relationship to doing them. In other words, you do you, boo!
- Sit down (or stand up) and do it!
Knowing what you have to do and in what order (or at least at what level of soon-itude) is great, but it won’t get your tushy in the chair. As Sir Isaac Newton reminded us in last week’s post, Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination, a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. If your particular body has been at rest for a bit too long, how are you going to get it to hunker down, in derriere-in-chair position, to get cracking?
Today’s post examines the methods, both popular and lesser-known, for proudly placing your posterior in position for productivity.
ONE HOT TOMATO: THE POMODORO TECHNIQUE
Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, and a popular form of kitchen timer in the 20th century was tomato-shaped.
In the 1980s, Francesco Cirillo developed the Pomodoro Technique as a method for circumventing procrastination. The steps are basic:
- Identify the task you’re going to work on.
- Set a (kitchen) timer for 25 minutes.
- Work on that task (without interruptions or distractions) for the entire 25 minutes.
- Stop after 25 minutes (and if you’re strictly following the technique, check the task off on your official “To Do Today” sheet).
- Take a short break of about five minutes.
After four completed pomodoros, take a longer break. Four pomodoros plus four short breaks would equal about two hours, so that’s an opportunity for quite a bit of focus each day.
Simple, eh? But there are a few caveats. If you get interrupted, you start over. If you get distracted, you start over. And no matter how well you enter the flow state when working, when the buzzer goes off after 25 minutes, you have to take the break.
You remember flow state, right? We talked about it extensively in Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake” and when our sense of self and our surroundings cease such that we hyper-focus on a task.
For some people, that last part is a real sticking point of the Pomodoro Technique, because the break in the flow at 25 minutes may lead to a break in inspiration and concentration. For others, it’s like stopping a movie just when it’s getting to the good part — you can’t wait to get back to it.
Does it have to be a tomato-shaped timer? No, although it may help some people feel they are doing the technique in an “official” way, and for rule followers, that may help them get into the right head space.
Does it have to be a physical timer? Not necessarily. But the mind-body connection is a powerful thing, and physically manipulating a handheld kitchen timer (tomato-shaped or otherwise) might be be the key for some people to feel their activation energy getting triggered.
If the physical sensation of turning on a timer helps you set your attention on using your time intentionally, then use that to increase your motivation. But if you’re just not that touch-feely, just give a shout to Siri or Alexa to set a timer for 25 minutes, or use some of the zillions of digital pomodoro sites and apps out there.
Does it have to ring like a kitchen timer? Once again, no. Some people may find the harsh and unyielding ring or buzz of a timer to be too jarring, not only ending the flow state, but setting them on edge. If you are neurodivergent or categorize yourself as a highly sensitive person, you may be overwhelmed by an intense buzz; consider a tangible timer with a more melodious sound or pick a digital timer or phone alarm with your favorite “ta da, I did it!” song to gently break you out of your reverie.
Again, only you know what’s going to help you surface from your underwater focus bubble vs. what’s going to make you feel like you’ve narrowly avoided fender bender.
TOCKS
Tick-tock goes the clock, and that 25-minute tomato-based technique is practiced world-wide. But a similar method was developed independently by Daniel Reeves, co-founder of the productivity app Beeminder. (It’s been years since we covered Beeminder, but it’s a data-driven, habit-tracking productivity app where you put your money where your mouth is, pledging that if you don’t hit your goals, Beeminder will charge your credit card!)
Back in 2004, Reeves (independently) developed a variant of the Pomodoro Technique based on the idea of working for 45 minutes and taking 15-minute breaks. Each 45-minute block is called a tock. Like the Pomodoro Technique, Tocks rely on specifying what you’ll be working on during the tock.
Those who practice these hourly tock/break blocks are encourage do start on the hour, making it easier to track how much you accomplish (and see when it’s time to get your tushy back to work). Reeves also urges users to take note of mental distractions so they don’t end up like the guy in the Distracted Boyfriend meme.
This reminds me of something I heard Alan Brown of ADD Crusher once say, that when one is being distracted by other possible tasks, it’s important to remember that there are “only three types of things.” There’s:
- What I’m working on now
- Important things that are not what I’m working on now, and
- BS things that are not what I’m working on now.
I see two advantages of noting your distracting thoughts. First, it will give you confidence that you won’t forget the (possibly) brilliant ideas that you had, and letting go of that fear will allow you to focus on what you’re doing. Second, it will yield a tangible list of other tasks to consider when you take your break, or later on when you’re deciding what is important or urgent to schedule.
Beeminder is bee-themed, and the original Tocks blog post sourced a bee-shaped timer that was later unavailable. However, I’ve found it, as well as a slightly less adorable alternative. If something like this would inspire you to be a busy (and productive) bee, go forth and create some buzz!
Etsy has the original version for $19.98 (plus shipping) for a set of two Spring Bumble Bee Design 60 Minute Kitchen Timers:
Less adorable and lacking actual deelyboppers, but available with Amazon Prime for $17.55, is this Kitchen Bee Timer:
THE 90-MINUTE FOCUS BLOCK
At first glance, this just seems like a super-sized Pomodoro. Instead 25 minutes of focus plus a break, you work for 90 minutes. But there’s scientific backing.
The field of sleep research has found that our bodies experience ultradian rhythms, recurrent 90-minute cycles throughout each 24-hour day. These are similar to the cycles of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, discovered by researcher Nathaniel Kleitman. (This is why sleep researchers advise sleeping in multiples of 90 minutes to ensure you don’t get awakened mid-cycle, and why 7 1/2 hours of sleep (five 90-minute cycles) may make you feel more refreshed than 8 hours (four 90-minute cycles but then being jarred awake partway through your fifth).
Kleitman found evidence that we have 90-minute periods of high-frequency brain activity alternating with 20-minute periods of low(er)-frequency brain activity. (There’s a whole science-y explanation of how the cycles are governed by how our brains use our potassium and sodium ions to conduct electrical signals, but this is a blog post about productivity, not neurobiology. Thank goodness.)
So, if our energy levels and cognitive functions are optimal during particular 90-minute periods when we’re awake, and we attack tasks during the 90-minute blocks when our high-frequency brain activity is running on all cylinders, we’re going to be more attentive, more creative, and more productive. Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
Our brains use more energy than any other organs in our bodies, and when our brains are in that high-frequency mode, we’re using up that energy and freaking out the sodium/potassium levels. We NEED that 20-minute break, but we’re too distracted to take it. So the brain says, “hold my beer,” and slows us down into the low(er) brain wave frequencies, making us distracted, tired, foggy, and cranky.
If we take that 20-minute break, the sodium-potassium partnership ramps back up and we’re ready to tackle our tasks in a focused way. If we ignore that break, we’re going to experience a diminishing return on our time-and-focus investment.
TimeTimer Plus 120-Minute Timer
So, using a 90-minute focus block is similar to the Pomodoro Technique, except that you’ll trade your 25-minute work sessions for 90-minute blocks, and extend your 5- or 10-minute breaks to 20.
That said, humans can be weird. Have you ever gotten hungry but instead of eating (which you knew you should do), you pushed yourself to keep going to the point that you pushed right through hunger and into queasiness? Those of us who get migraines know that when we first experience symptoms, we should take meds, hydrate, go to a dark room, etc., but many migraineurs will tell you that at least sometimes, they ignore the symptoms until it gets much worse. Again, humans are weird.
Alarms may not be enough. You might want to set the sleep mode on your computer monitor — or borrow from the accountability and body doubling lessons I’ve recently shared. For example, ask a friend to call or swing by your desk to remind you to stop after 90 minutes, then go for a refreshing walk outside.
THE 52/17 METHOD
Perhaps you feel that somewhere between 25 minutes and 90 minutes is your sweet spot? There’s an option that looks random, but anecdotal research may persuade you otherwise. As Julia Gifford wrote in a piece for The Muse, she identified another work-to-break ratio workflow that might help you focus more productively.
Gifford’s team studied the top 10% most productive employees using the time-tracking and productivity app DeskTime — and learned these folks rocked at taking productive breaks. (If you read my Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel, the efficacy of these breaks won’t surprise you.) In particular they found that, on average, these super-productive employees were working for 52 minutes and then taking 17 minute breaks before getting back into the thick of it.
Giffords’ theory is that these highly-productive employees treated their 52-minute blocks as sprints, a popular concept in the corporate world, particularly in technology fields. In a sprint, you work with “intense purpose” and dedication to the task, whatever it is, and then (as with the 90-minute focus block) let the brain rest and recuperate (and NOT think about work, or at least that work) before the next big sprint.
We aren’t robots. We just can’t sit and stare at a screen or make the widgets on a factory floor, or whatever, for 8-hours straight. Even robots can’t always work like robots!
“Repeating tasks causes cognitive boredom,” says Gifford, and whether we break it up with cake in the staff room (mmmm, cake) or a brisk walk or a convivial chat around the water cooler, we need a pause that refreshes.
So, the big drivers of 52/17 are purpose (backed, I’m sure, with a hearty dose of motivation), distraction-free worktime, and flow.
FLOWTIME
The Flowtime Technique, as developed by educator Zoe Read-Bivens (writing as Urgent Pigeon for Medium) in 2016, was designed to take a major drawback of The Pomodoro Technique — that it interrupted the flow state — and use performance analysis to improve productivity.
All of the above options count on working for a set time (25 minutes, 45 minutes, 52 minutes, 90 minutes), and then stopping at a pre-ordained time as prompted by an alarm. As noted, for some people who are neurodivergent, have ADHD, or are otherwise sensitive to loud noises or task transitions, this can be counterproductive.
As with all of the other methods, Read-Bivens’ Flowtime approach insists on uninterrupted work sessions, but instead of stopping when an external force (like an alarm) prompts you, you work until you start to feel distracted, or mentally or physically fatigued. Then you log how long your focused work session lasted — how long you stayed “in flow.”
- Pick a specific task from your to-do list.
- Write down your start time for each task.
- Work with focus as long as you can.
- Write down the distractions taking you out of your flow state as they happen.
- When you’re tired or hungry or muddled, stop.
- Write down your stop time, and then note the total elapsed time you focused on the task. Basically, it works like a time sheet; you can use an app like Taskade or create a spreadsheet with cells formatted for time, and create a formula to calculate the elapsed start/stop time.
- Take a break for however long you want.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
Without scheduled breaks, you’ll be less likely to anxiously await the “end” and be more likely to get into flow and stay there. Flowtime gives you flexibility to have productive sessions personalized to your work style, and it pushes you to be really clear on what’s interrupting your focus.
I can also imagine that if you get to know your cycles of productivity, it can help you block out your work time around meetings and other obligations so that you have adequate space in your schedule for your work without friction, and lead you to schedule your high-effort tasks when you’ve got the most mental energy.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of admin associated with this method, requiring planning beforehand and performance analysis afterward. It’s adding more work to your work. If you’re the kind of athlete who tracks your steps and reps and miles and measures performance to better know yourself, Flowtime might be ideal. However, if giving yourself no stopping time isn’t enough of a trade for all this admin, or if not having a limit on your break time might lead you to procrastinate on getting back to work, it may not be for you.
I suspect Flowtime might be best used when your work is creative in nature. I’d never encourage my clients who are artists to paint for 25 minutes and then take a break, and novelists probably shouldn’t be zapped out of flow by an alarm. If your entire job is creative, perhaps in the arts, or you’re needing to do brainstorming sessions for ad campaigns or client pitches, Flowtime might make sense. But if you’ve got lots of distinct (and perhaps not-entirely-creative) tasks to complete, one of the strict time-based methods seems like a better fit.
What methods to you use to get your activation energy, circumvent procrastination, and get your work done? Which methods might you try in the future?
Paper Doll Post:
Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. ~ William James
We all procrastinate. Everyone knows that it’s irrational to put off doing something until the quality of the work might suffer. It’s obvious that it doesn’t make sense to keep not doing something when the deadline is fast approaching. And yet, at least sometimes, everyone procrastinates.
WHAT IS PROCRASTINATION?
Contrary to what you might have been told in your childhood (or even more recently), procrastination is not about laziness. Rather, it’s a self-protective mechanism.
Research shows that we use procrastination as a technique to regulate our moods. More specifically, to regulate, manage, and prioritize a negative emotion in the present over the negative outcome of our procrastination in the future.
Instead of delving into the science and scaring you off with words like amygdala and prefrontal cortex, here’s a cartoon to ease you into what’s actually happening in your brain when you procrastinate.
WHAT TRIGGERS PROCRASTINATION?
The tippy-top expert on procrastination, Canadian professor of psychology Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University in Ottawa, is the author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.
According to Pychyl, there are seven triggers that cause people to procrastinate:
- Boredom — Whether a child is delaying doing homework because the assignment isn’t challenging or an adult is facing a stultifying task (vacuuming, I’m looking at you!), doing anything stimulating (even if it’s counterproductive) may feel better than doing the boring thing.
- Frustration — The task itself may be frustrating because it’s full of difficult, fiddly little steps, like putting together a spreadsheet from multiple sources of data or figuring out how to build an Ikea desk without any written instructions; or, you might be frustrated because the work involves dealing with annoying members of your team.
- Difficulty — When something seems like it’s going to be too mentally or physically taxing, it’s comforting to procrastinate. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we’re preparing, or doing pre-work, to set the stage for the difficult task, but there are only so many pencils your teen can sharpen before settling in on that calculus homework.
- Lack of Motivation — This may seem the same as boredom, but it’s actually more complex. Boredom is mostly about the task; some activities are just inherently lacking in stimulation. But motivation relates to internal drive. Even if you aren’t happy in your current role at work, you may not be that excited about applying for a new job (perhaps because of depression, anxiety, or fear of change). You have to see the benefit of working on your resume and prepping for an interview as steps toward a personal goal of being more professionally confident, rather than just items to be completed to “get a job,” which may not be inherently motivating.
- Lack of Focus — Mental focus depends on physical and emotional stimuli as well as external stimuli. A variety of emotional concerns related to the task at hand — fear of failure, being embarrassed in public, losing a scholarship or a job — as well as unrelated issues like family or relationship troubles, or health concerns, can detract from your focus. Similarly, working in a crowded or noisy space, or even in an environment with visually distracting elements, can dilute your focus. Some people need to turn down the radio while driving to find the address they’re seeking; others need a tidy desk in order to read, even if the desk is outside their line of sight. You can’t focus if you’re hungry or tired, either.
- Feeling Overwhelmed — Too much of too much will always keep you from taking clear action. In the professional organizing field, we talk about suffering from decision fatigue and often say, “The overwhelmed mind says ‘No’.” Have you ever stood in the toothpaste or shampoo aisle and been shocked by the ridiculous number of competing alternatives? Similarly, if there are many different ways to approach a talk (writing a blog, replying to an email, making a plan for a move), overwhelm may lead us to just physically or mentally wander away.
so much to do pic.twitter.com/fiSm7Y2Erg
— poorly drawn lines (@PDLComics) December 21, 2022
- Being Overworked — Burnout is definitely a trigger for procrastination. If you’ve ever worked day-in and day-out on a project such that by the time you got home, you had literally no mental space or physical energy to do anything, even to prepare food, that’s a sure sign of overwork. Alternative options might be more or less pleasant (think: socializing or housework), but you might choose to lay on your couch and mindlessly scroll through social media instead of either thing you were supposed to do. Overwork eliminates the energy necessary for doing anything in the now, so everything gets pushed to a theoretical later.
Of course, Pychyl is not the only one to define triggers for procrastination. Others have identified fear of failure, impulsiveness (sometimes associated with ADHD), and generalized anxiety. Various executive function disorders can make it difficult to sequence or prioritize tasks.
The point is, procrastination is not laziness, but a conscious or even subconscious need to not feel icky now, even if you’re going to feel doubly icky later.
Procrastination is not laziness, but a conscious or even subconscious need to not feel icky now, even if you're going to feel doubly icky later. Share on XPRACTICAL STRATEGIES TO COMBAT PROCRASTINATION
Obviously, once you identify your trigger to procrastinate, you can employ techniques to reverse the behavior. For example, if a task is boring, like housework or working out, you might pair it with music or a streaming TV show.
It also may be helpful to take away the temptations of more entertaining options. Lock your phone in a drawer — having to unlock it to play Candy Crush may give you the necessary pause to stick with your task. If you’re tempted by websites that are more entertaining than the work you’re supposed to be doing, lock yourself out of those websites (for whatever time period you set) by using a website-blocking program like:
Cold Turkey — works with Windows and MacOS
Focus — works with MacOS-only
Forest — designed for your phone, it works with Android, iOS, and in your Chrome browser
Freedom — works with Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, in as a plugin for Chrome
LeechBlock — works in various browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera (but not Safari)
Rescue Time — works with Windows, macOS, Android, iPhone, and iPad
Self-Control — works with acOS-only
There’s also Paw Block, which, while it only works as a Chrome or Firefox extension, has the benefit of showing you pictures of kittens from the around the internet when it prevents you from accessing distracting websites.
If you’re frustrated by the elements or situation of the task, you might bring in a friend or colleague to help you do it, someone who doesn’t have the emotional connection to the stressors that are throwing you off. They don’t necessarily need to perform the tasks, but just body double with you so you feel soothed and less frustrated.
You can break down difficult tasks into the tiniest possible elements, or seek a supervisor’s guidance, so the annoyances seem less annoying. (It’s tricky in the moment, but you might also try to reframe “difficult” tasks as challenges and contests with yourself.)
If you’re feeling unmotivated, see if you can find a short-term reward. (Cake? Cake is always good! But a refreshing walk outside after finishing the first of three elements of a task may help you get your head back in the game.) For a deeper lack of motivation, work with a therapist or coach to help you identify the meaningful benefits you can get from doing the things at which you tend to procrastinate, or possibly find a life path that eliminates those tasks. (If creating PowerPoint slide decks gives you a stomachache, maybe you need to consider becoming a lumberjack or a lighthouse keeper. Not everyone wants to be an knowledge worker, and that’s OK!)
If your procrastination is due to floundering focus, determine what’s contributing to the lack of focus. If it’s internal (troublesome thoughts and emotions), consider meditation, walking in nature, and talking through the excess thoughts with a friend and/or in therapy.
But if it’s external, if you’re feeling attacked from all sides by an overload of sensory stimuli, you may need to declutter and organize your space or move your workspace elsewhere (or invest in noise-canceling headphones). But it’s possible you’ll want to see if an ADHD or other diagnosis might help support your efforts to get assistance dealing with distractions.
Overwhelm may seem a lot like frustration. While you may be frustrated by just one (big) annoying thing, overwhelm feels like you’re getting pelted with dodge balls from all directions. It’s a good time to sit down with someone who can help you see the Big Picture and identify the priorities and sequences. Professional organizers and productivity specialists excel at helping you battle overwhelm and get clarity.
And if you’re overworked and experiencing burnout, it’s time to have a realistic discussion with your partner, therapist, boss, and anyone else who can help you achieve balance before you suffer health consequences more serious than just the emotional distress related to procrastination.
In the short term, some meditation and schedule modifications might work, but if you’re experiencing chronic overwork, more intense career and life changes might be necessary. Start by revisiting my series on toxic productivity, below, and pay special attention to post #3.
Toxic Productivity In the Workplace and What Comes Next
Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset
Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel
Toxic Productivity, Part 4: Find the Flip Side of Productivity Hacks
Toxic Productivity Part 5: Technology and a Hungry Ghost
You’re more than your job pic.twitter.com/qAHwtnT6Ux
— Junhan Chin | Illustrator (@junhanchin) August 31, 2022
EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL STRATEGIES TO COMBAT PROCRASTINATION
Making changes in your space and schedule, breaking your projects into smaller tasks, and giving yourself rewards are all smart practical solutions, but they’re external. Changing your external world can only eliminate some of the obstacles to your productivity. To truly conquer procrastination, experts advise making internal changes as well.
Admit it!
Denial is not just a river in Egypt. When you catch yourself procrastinating, acknowledge it. Once you call your own attention to the fact that you’re delaying doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing, you can look at that list of triggers and say, “Yikes! I’m avoiding writing this report. Why is that?” You can’t solve a problem if you don’t realize it exists. Admitting it gets you halfway to a solution.
Forgive yourself
This isn’t the same as letting yourself continue to procrastinate. And just like forgiving someone else isn’t the same as saying that the undesirable behavior never occurred, forgiving yourself gives you the opportunity to recognize that past behavior doesn’t have to dictate future performance.
A 2010 study by Michael J.A. Wohl, Timothy A. Pychyl, and Shannon H. Bennett entitled I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Study: How Self-Forgiveness for Procrastinating Can Reduce Future Procrastination found, as the title indicates, that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on preparing for exams earlier in the semester were far less likely to procrastinate on studying for the next exams.
You’re human; if you were a perfect person … well, you’d be the first one ever. Forgive yourself for having procrastinated in the past.
Practice self-compassion
Related to self-foriveness is self-compassion. Researchers found that people who procrastinate tend to have higher stress levels and lower levels of self-compassion, and theorized that compassion cushions some of the more negative, maladaptive responses that cause repeated procrastination.
Think of it as similar to overeating. If you cheat on your diet, low self-compassion might get you so down on yourself that you figure, “I’ll never lose this weight. I might as well just eat the whole ice cream carton!” But if you’re able to have self-compassion, you may tell yourself, “Yup, I did eat more than a half-cup serving of ice cream. But I understand why I did it. Next time, I’ll try drinking a glass of water and walking around the block first. Or maybe I’ll go out and eat the ice cream on the front porch, where the rest of the carton won’t be so accessible!”
(Seriously, whoever thought half a cup of ice cream was an adequate serving, anyway?)
Be intentional
All of the alternatives I described up above for seeking assistance and changing your environment (and the ones we’ll discuss next week) will only happen if you place your intention and attention on making changes.
Yes, this means a little extra labor on your part. If you know you procrastinate because you anticipate interruptions (from co-workers in the office or tiny humans when remote-working), you’re creating a problem before the problem exists, so you’re missing out on productivity before you need to and then again when the problem actually occurs. (And then you’ll spend the time after the interruptions being resentful about them, and that will lead to less productivity, too!)
Once you know what you’re up against and which triggers present a problem for you, build time into your schedule to plan your way around the obstacles and triggers. That might mean seeking out time with professionals who can help you, whether those are therapists, professional organizers, productivity specialists, or life or career coaches.
Embrace consistency
The various popular books on forming habits, like James Clear’s Atomic Habits, all agree that it starts with changing your identity, and seeing yourself as “the kind of person who” does things in a more agreeable, positive way.
Showing up daily is easier than showing up once in a while. pic.twitter.com/5CrOdIQjCu
— Sarah Arnold-Hall (@saraharnoldhall) February 6, 2023
One of the ways you can prod the formation of that kind of identity is to develop consistent actions and behaviors. In order to be the kind of person who goes to bed on time (and thus, can get up on time), you need to jettison the behavior of doom-scrolling for hours before bed. To consistently do that, you might set an alert on your phone for 8 p.m. to put the phone away, somewhere far from the couch or your bed. (Afraid you won’t get up on time if the phone isn’t near your sleeping area? Revisit my post from last summer, Do (Not) Be Alarmed: Paper Doll’s Wake-Up Advice for Productivity.)
Be a Self-Starter
You’ve heard me talk about activation energy before. In my post, Rhymes With Brain: Languishing, Flow, and Building a Better Routine, I wrote:
We also depend on activation energy. Because the hardest part of what we do is the getting started, we have to incentivize ourselves to get going. There are all sorts of ways we can trick ourselves (a little bit) with rewards, like pretty desk accessories or a coffee break, but the problem is that action precedes motivation. We’re not usually psyched to get going until we have already started!
Action precedes motivation. We're not usually psyched to get going until we have already started, whether it's a runner's high or Csikszentmihalyi's flow. Share on XA huge key to breaking the procrastination habit is getting started. After all, Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body at motion tends to stay in motion. (OK, it actually says, “a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force.” But this isn’t Physics 101.)
Did you watch the cartoon at the start of this post? (It’s OK if you skipped it; just scroll up and watch now and we’ll wait.) If you did watch, you know that you’re more likely to feel negative emotions about a task when you’re avoiding it, but when you’re actually doing the task, it doesn’t feel so bad.
So, get yourself in motion so that you can stay in motion! Get yourself past the hurdle of starting and that small victory of starting, and the realization that it wasn’t as bad as you feared, might make you less likely to procrastinate the next time you’re facing that same challenge.
GET STARTED AT GETTING STARTED
Once you’ve read all of the preceding advice, you still have to get your butt in the chair. (OK, yes, you could use a standing desk. Let’s not be pedantic!) There are two key ways to do that.
First, embrace accountability. As I’ve previously described in these various posts, borrowing willpower from others by getting support from “partners in crime” can be just the motivation you need to get started and stick with it, whatever the “it” is:
Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity
Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity
Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions
Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek
Second, even when you’ve got accountability support (and especially when you don’t), there are techniques for helping you get started on tasks in ways that feel hopeful, and that make finishing seem possible.
So, come back for next week’s post, Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done, where we’re going to be doing a deep dive into a variety of well-known and sleeper strategies for eliminating procrastination. We’ll be talking about tomatoes and frogs, blocks and tocks, and so many numbers that you’ll think we’re in math class. (But I promise, just in case you tended to procrastinate on math homework, there will be no trains leaving Chicago at 120 miles per hour.)
Until next time, read more about the nature and causes of procrastination:
Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing To Do With Self-Control) ~ The New York Times
Why People Procrastinate: The Psychology and Causes of Procrastination ~ Why People Procrastinate
6 Common Causes of Procrastination ~ Psychology Today
7 Triggers of Procrastination ~ ChrisBaily.com
Procrastination triggers: eight reasons why you procrastinate ~ Ness Labs
When you tend to procrastinate, what triggers tend to haunt you? What methods do you use to keep procrastination at bay?
Paper Doll Post:
Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit
In fields like science, medicine, and technology, surprising information comes out all the time, and with that, novel guidance and advice. In the world of organizing and productivity, however, there aren’t a lot of unexpected, planet-sized discoveries or wrecking balls to old beliefs.
Rather, in most aspects of organizing and productivity, we seek to find novel examples and tweaks to help people understand the best approaches for what they already know deep down. Today, I’d like to share three intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently, and an opportunity for you to discover more.
WORK AS HOBBY: OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION WITH A MINDSET SHIFT
The first concept comes from my friend and colleague Hazel Thornton. You may recall her from Paper Doll Interviews the Genealogy Organizers and when I profiled her new book, Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook, in Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources a few weeks ago.
I love Hazel’s blog, because she always offers practical yet warm insights. Earlier this month, she came up with an idea for a mindset shift for conquering procrastination, and it really got me thinking.
Usually, we approach procrastination from a practical perspective. For example, we look at how to use planning and scheduling, particularly time-blocking, to set expectations. Social science research, for example, has found that making a voting plan for when and where you will vote and how you will get there makes it more likely that you will cast a ballot.
We also look at tactical methods for getting ourselves into position to complete a task, such as using the Pomodoro Method, or enlisting accountability, as we discussed recently in Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity and Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity.
Hazel, however, piqued my interest in suggesting something I hadn’t seen before in her post entitled Think of Your Big Project as a New Hobby. Now, I don’t want to steal Hazel’s thunder, so you should read her post in its entirety. But the basic concept is that when you find yourself procrastinating on a big project — as I recently found myself doing — a shift in mindset could ramp up your enthusiasm and make the work more appealing.
Hazel notes that the more often you do something, the easier it gets. Typically, we choose to do something repeatedly — like a hobby — because it’s fun. So, Hazel suggests approaching a project, particularly one about which you’re procrastinating, as if you were embracing a new hobby.
She notes that new hobbies usually require the acquisition of new skills and new information — just like projects do — and setting aside time to work on them. Hazel even offers a list of practical solutions (and even pointed people back to my body doubling posts — neato!) for hobby-fying a project.
If we perceive something as drudge work, we’re more likely to procrastinate on it, not set aside time to do it, and think about it as something to be avoided. We don’t get particularly excited about doing expense reports or preparing our taxes. But if we reframe a project and consider it as something that benefits us, or the people we love, or our community, if we re-set our expectations regarding how to approach something not-that-fun, our avoidance might fade away to nothing.
I think Hazel was right on the money. Over the last month, I’ve had a number of projects that were out of the ordinary for me, and one in particular involved employing technological skills that aren’t in my wheelhouse. I had to create a video (of which, more later), and as the days ticked down, I remembered my misery at completing the project last year, even though I was excited about the content. Shockingly, the video editing skills I learned in 1989-1990 in my graduate program in television production and management have very little application in 2023!
This year, I was eager to do the research and prepare my presentation, but anticipating the video production and editing was wearing me down. However, with Hazel’s blog post in mind, I started exploring ways to learn about new approaches with what Zen practitioners call, shoshin or Beginner’s Mind. It’s supposed to encourage eagerness, dispel anxiety and frustration, and yes, make procrastination less likely.
I hate being a beginner, but I psyched myself into beginnerhood for the “hobby” of making a visually-appealing, non-talking-head video. The same day I read Hazel’s post, I spoke with my accountability partner and all-around cool kitten, Dr. Melissa Gratias (whom I’ve also interviewed on the blog, in Paper Doll Interviews Melissa Gratias, Author of Seraphina Does Everything!).
Melissa had some amazing ideas that let me drop-kick PowerPoint and edit video content directly in Canva, the same platform I use to make the blog post banners at the top of every Paper Doll post. (Melissa also came to my aid every time I was stymied by an aspect of Canva that Googling didn’t solve.)
Hazel may not have realized she was channeling a key idea in Zen Buddhism, but by inspiring me to transform a hyperventilation-inducing project into one that was more hobby-like, she changed my entire outlook. I enjoy researching. I love learning new concepts. I particularly like developing skills that I can make systematic so they’re easier and easier as I do them more often. Hobbies for the win!
If you’re having trouble getting your mojo going on a project (or can envision that happening in the future), give the ideas in Hazel’s post a try.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF BACKUP
If you’ve read the Paper Doll blog for a while, you’ve probably seen me promote the importance of backup. Usually, I’m touting computer backup, such as in Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan.
But I’ve also looked at backing up from the perspective of human backup, such as in Cross-Training for Families: Organize for All Eventualities. Those two posts reflect both a plan for backing up, and having a backup plan for life.
However, last week I heard about a different concept for backing up that’s worth discussing. At the start of the year, in Paper Doll’s 23 Ideas for a More Organized & Productive 2023, I mentioned that I was going to be doing Laura Vanderkam‘s annual 168 Hours Time Tracking Challenge. I enjoyed it so much that I also signed up for her Tranquility by Tuesday Challenge based on her book, Tranquility By Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. (I already knew I’d like it because she previewed the book at the 2022 Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. See below)
For each week of the challenge, Vanderkam sends emails encouraging participants to put one of her nine lessons into practice. Last week was Lesson #5: Create a Backup Slot. Here, Vanderkam talked about how even the best of intentions are not enough when we try to create a schedule that allows us to be productive and accomplish all of the things that are important to us. Most tellingly, she wrote:
I have learned that anyone can make a perfect schedule. True time management masters make a resilient schedule.
Yes! Resilience is essential! A schedule is a map of our time. With a road map, sometimes there’s a crash up ahead, or a road is washed out, or someone gets car sick. If we want to accomplish what’s important to us, we have to be prepare for unanticipated calamities.
To this end, Vanderkam advises that we not fill our schedules from morning to night (of course!) but instead designate more times in our schedules than we plan to use.
Borrowing from my cross-training approach for human backup, I might schedule Monday afternoons for writing, but cross-train Saturday so it knows how to handle the task. (OK, we’re anthropomorphizing the days of the week. Just go with it.) You might plan to do your bookkeeping on Wednesday mornings, but if an all-hands meeting gets called or you have to pick up a sick kid from school, and your Wednesday morning blows up, Thursday needs to step in as backup.
Rather than searching your schedule for places where you can either cancel something or squeeze in one more task, if you already have backup slots scheduled, you’re prepared in the eventuality of your life falling tush-over-teakettle.
Rather than searching your schedule to cancel something or squeezing in one more task, if you already have backup slots, you're prepared for when your life falls tush-over-teakettle. Share on XVanderkam’s approach is wise but too rarely practiced. We see blank spots in our calendars and jump to fill them, to do more, to accomplish more, to achieve more. This can be aspirational, or it can be stressful. If the latter, harken back to my posts on toxic productivity from last summer:
- Toxic Productivity In the Workplace and What Comes Next
- Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset
- Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel
- Toxic Productivity, Part 4: Find the Flip Side of Productivity Hacks
- Toxic Productivity Part 5: Technology and a Hungry Ghost
If the idea of too much empty space on your schedule makes you nervous, try just one or two slots, maybe an hour or ninety minutes, on Thursday or Friday, where you’ll be the most likely to catch up on tasks that got displaced from earlier in the week. Think about designating themed slots, like for marketing or accounting or personal development. That way, if you get to your backup slot and don’t need it, you can use it either for something within that theme, or for something fun and rejuvenating.
If you find that you’re drop-kicking things that matter to you because something blew up your schedule, adding backup slots could help you master your time and life. And Vanderkam asks, “If life went perfectly, what would you use your open time for?”
Good question. After all, why are you doing all this work in the first place?
THE WORK IS NOT ENOUGH
I read a lot of email newsletters. (Seriously. It may be an addiction.) So, to remember to read blog posts and newsletters of people whose work I’m not regularly seeing on social media, I use an RSS feed. My preferred platform is Feedly, and I can segment the blogs I read by category like entertainment, finances, productivity, tech, etc. and do a deep dive into all the posts I’ve missed over a week or month, keeping my inbox less crowded.
One of the authors I read is Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study. The essay that caught my eye was a fairly personal one, The Work Is Not Enough. (Note, there is one not-safe-for-work vocabulary word in the essay. Please do not click through if you are likely to be offended.)
Petersen’s post dovetailed with Vanderkam’s lesson, because, starting a few weeks ago, her life and schedule sort of blew up. Her partner was ill, her doggie was sick, it’s tax season, and there were work kerfuffles. Each thing caused the dominoes to fall:
Losing a day, an hour, an afternoon — if that was time used to put things in place to keep them rolling through the week, and that time is lost, then you find yourself in a 17-task pile-up. … and pretty soon you’re in laundry apocalypse, and the only thing that’s going to save you is […] the next weekend.
Can’t we all relate?
Petersen notes that all of the tasks, in their own version of a sort of life laundry apocalypse, could have been handled individually, but together, her mind was whirling trying to figure out which enjoyable things she should have culled to avoid the apocalypse, or could cull in the coming days to get back on track. But she recognized,
I don’t need to stop taking care of my friends’ kids, or stop running, or stop having dogs, or stop skiing in order to make this all [waves hands wildly] fall into place. I just need to be vigilant about not taking on more work than I can reconcile with the rest of my life. The work matters; the work is important; the work is wonderful. But the work is not enough.
Petersen is recognizing that often, when we have to choose what to toss from our busy schedules to get back on track, we throw ourselves overboard.
For most of us, the thing that’s easiest to jettison is the thing that’s most precious to you — because letting it go ostensibly affects you and you alone. A hobby, a personal goal, a book club, a walk, a nap, all so readily sacrificed. But those are the things that allow us to stand up straight as we carry the weight of everyday annoyances and tasks. They are the counter-balance. They are essential. We cannot mistake the ease with they can be put down with disposability.
Wow. Seriously, wow. I wish I’d had this essay to share back when I wrote the toxic productivity series, and I’m glad I can share Petersen’s wisdom here. Yes, we should develop our skills to manage our time and tasks well, but let’s not do it at the risk of what makes our lives worth living — our relationships, our joys, or our humanity.
THE 2023 TASK MANAGEMENT AND TIME BLOCKING VIRTUAL SUMMIT
For the fourth year in a row, I’m participating in Francis Wade‘s Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. Francis is a fellow Cornell University alum — we actually lived in the same international dorm — founder of 2Time Labs in Jamaica, and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity: How To Protect Your Mind As Time Demands Increase.
In last year’s preview to the 2022 summit, I covered a lot of the reasons behind productivity struggles in Struggling To Get Things Done? Paper Doll’s Advice & The Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2022, from external struggles like lack of structure and technology overwhelm to personal challenges and tool/user mismatches.
I recapped the gems from experts at the summit in Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022. So, if you missed all that, basically you’ve got a tons of wisdom (theirs, as well as mine) to review.
This year’s theme absolutely delights me: One-Size-Doesn’t-Fit-All. Now what? If you ever read my post, The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing, you know how how I feel about the inadequacy of one-size-fits-all approaches to organizing and productivity.
My own presentation by pre-recorded video (about which you’ve now heard) is Paper Shame — Embracing Analog Productivity Solutions in an Increasingly Digital World. (Pssst: Melissa Gratias helped inspire the title!) I’ll also be a panelist on Saturday afternoon (because Francis has his wife/co-founder Dale know I’m not a morning person). The topic? “Paper vs. Digital.”
That panel will be moderated by friend-of-the-blog and productivity dude extraordinaire Ray Sidney-Smith. We’ll be joined by Artificial Intelligence expert, Misha Maksin.
Each year, the summit is refined and improved. This year, 27+ experts are participating, and I’m excited that I know so many of them!
On each of the three days of the summit, attendees get 24-hour access to a selection of video recordings on topics with titles like:
- Handling Multiple Projects with Ease: How To Remove the Friction and Handle the Details
- Productivity and Neurodiversity: Should I Fit in Productivity’s World or the Other Way Around?
- Mastering Productivity with Mindfulness in 5 Steps
- Build Without Burnout: Setting a Schedule for Your Business and 9-5
- What’s Really Driving Your Distractions?
- From Micro to Macro: How to Make Time Blocking Work for You
- 3 Techniques to Level Up Your Time Blocking
- Get a Game Plan: Three Steps to Designing Your Winning Week
- Why You Aren’t Achieving Your Goals: Breaking the Cookie Cutter Approach to Goal Setting
- Your Ultimate Productivity Tool: You Already Have It and It’s Not Paper or Digital
And that’s barely a third of the video options this year!
On Friday, the live portion of the TMTB Virtual Summit begins with Francis opening the event, followed by a full day of live panels and interviews. Another slew of video presentations will also be released.
I’m looking forward to Dr. Frank Buck interviewing his sort-of namesake, Dave Buck, as well as a live episode of The Productivitycast, with the aforementioned Ray, Augusto Pinaud, Art Gelwicks, and Francis. (Read more about this gang in Paper Doll Picks: Organizing and Productivity Podcasts.) I’ve been a guest on that podcast many times, and am sure it’ll be a hoot.
I’m also really excited about the panel discussion, “How Does Time Management Work Across Cultures and Countries?” and the interview with Mike Vardy about The Productivity Diet.
On Saturday, there will be more video presentations released (including mine!) as well as another spate of live interviews and panels. (You’ll enjoy everything, but if you want to see my panel, it’s from 1:45 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Saturday.)
There are also oodles of bonus offers and “swag bag” items.
The whole event takes place on a very cool interactive platform called Airmeet, allowing us to interact at digital “tables” in a sort of cloud-based ballroom and attend Zoom-like lecture rooms for official events. As with previous summits, there’s time for networking with attendees and these great speakers and geeking out on productivity.
When you register for a free e-ticket to the event, you get 24-hour access to each “chunk” of videos, plus all of the live interviews, panels, and networking events in the Airmeet Lounge.
Again, attendance is free, but you’ll have to carve out time in your schedule to watch the videos — it helps that Thursday is a video-only day! — and attend the live events, which run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
If you want more time to absorb everything, you can purchase an All-Access Pass, which is basically a smörgåsbord of summit offerings and bonus extras, including:
- recordings of all of the pre-recorded video presentations (including mine!)
- recordings of all of the live panels, interviews, and events
- an audio or PDF copy of Francis’ book
- a 50% discount on Francis’s My Time Design Rapid Assessment program
(Be sure to pay attention to the resulting screen post-purchase so you know how to access your goodies.)
The full price for the All-Access pass is $249. But because I love you, I’ve got a super-nifty coupon link good up until the start of the summit that takes the price down to $99!
What project might you approach as if it were a hobby?
Where can you create a backup slot in your schedule?
How will you protect the elements of your schedule that give your life meaning?
Will I see you at the 2023 Task Management and Time Blocking Summit?
Paper Doll Post:
Paper Doll’s Guide to Picking the Right Paper Planner
With two weeks until the new year, you’ve probably already started planning for 2023. But if you’re agitated about next year not being any more orderly than this one, you might be hesitating about committing to a planning system. Today’s post is designed to put you more at ease, and give you some guiding principles.
WHY USE A PAPER PLANNER?
There’s nothing wrong with using a digital calendar. I use one myself, though not for scheduling. I use my digital calendar so that when I get an email with Zoom logins, or have a telephone consultation with a prospective client, I don’t have to go looking for the emails to find the links or phone numbers.
In Outlook, I can create an appointment or task directly from an email, and the system will prompt me at a pre-set time with all the key details. It’s like having my own personal Jeeves pop his head into the room to let me know the countess and duchess have arrived to join me for tea.
But honestly, I never use my digital calendar to plan my life. I’m a Paper Doll, so it stands to reason, I prefer a paper planner. But how do you know what’s best for you?
Let’s start with the mindset, and the different advantages and disadvantages of paper planners vs. digital calendars.
Learning Curve
If you are over the age of eight, you already know how to use a paper planner. On the monthly view, there are boxes for the days of the month to put major events, deadlines, and vacations. On the weekly and/or daily views, you can time block for tasks and list appointments.
Digital calendars aren’t complicated, per se, but they are not always intuitive. There might be a generational schism at play, but I’ve had clients try once, twice, even three times to input an appointment, only to have some technical or user kerfuffle lead them astray.
Why does this matter? Digital fatigue creates friction, and friction prevents people from completing a task, whether it’s removing the lid to the laundry hamper to toss clothes in, or schedule an appointment when the system isn’t working.
Woman With Planner Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash
Digital fatigue creates friction, and friction prevents people from completing a task, whether it's removing the lid to the laundry hamper to toss clothes in, or schedule an appointment when the system isn't working. Share on XControl vs. Convenience
At first, the ease of clicking to accept a meeting invitation would seem like an advantage for digital calendars. But is it?
When I train clients to improve their productivity, we focus on identifying priorities so that we can protect boundaries around them. On a digital calendar in your phone, you generally see the month with blobby dots signifying appointments on particular days.
You have to click through to look at the individual date to schedule the meeting, but then you’re losing the surrounding context because you’re just seeing one appointed after another another in a list. Again, you can’t see time.
When we brainstorm ideas, schedule appointments, break projects into tasks and plan when we’ll do them, we’re thinking about context. When we see a whole month of appointments on the printed page, we instinctually know we have to give ourselves (and our brains) some recovery time. That’s less obvious when we only see the one time slot and the computer merely tells us if there’s a conflict. (Also, on the digital calendar, it’s less clear that you haven’t scheduled time for a potty break or commute.)
Many people — children, college students, people with ADHD, overwhelmed professionals —often suffer from a lack of ability to visualize the passage of time. An analog planner involves more tactile interaction with the appointments and tasks we schedule. As we deal with finding a reasonable time for each time, we gain mastery, not only over our schedules, but our comprehension of time.
Cost
Basic digital calendars are built-in to our phone and computer systems, and most apps are inexpensive. Conversely, paper planners may run you from $20-$50. But when it comes to our planning tools, cost does not necessarily equal value.
Yes, there’s a dollar value to the purchase price of an app vs. a paper planner. But there’s a time value related to mastering a new calendaring system. Are you prepared to commit yourself to learning the intricacies of a new app or the same app every time it updates?
Privacy vs. Searchability
This is another close call. Your paper planner is completely private, as long as you don’t leave it unattended; a digital planner generally syncs across all of your digital devices, which means that while it should be private, there’s never a 100% certainty that there are no prying, hacking eyes.
Conversely, your digital calendar is usually searchable. You can type a keyword or person’s name to find a scheduled appointment or task. Your planner can only be searched by trailing your gaze across each page, and the less careful you are with entering data, the more you risk losing the information when you need it.
Visual vs. Visual+Tactile
When you drive, do you think in terms of linear directions, or are you more inclined to recall what to do when you reach landmarks? If you prefer linearity, go digital; if you like touchpoints and landmarks, paper will likely resonate more.
Hand in Water Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash
Does digital time “feel” real to you? On a digital calendar, every item appears in the same font and size. You can often color-code items, but digital entries have a vague sameness about them.
If you write something down, you can stop thinking of it, per se, and start thinking more robustly and contextually about it. Somehow, dragging an email into Outlook to set a meeting, or typing an appointment into your phone, leads to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation for many. But with a tangible paper planner, every time you eyeball your month or your week, you are speedily, comfortingly reminded of the important aspects your life.
Similarly, your fine motor skills applied to the task tend to be the same; you could be typing a grocery list or the key points for an interview (then buried into the notes section of a calendar event). With a paper planner, your tendency to print some things and handwrite others, your ability to use a particular color pen, to draw arrows and circles and adjust the size to shout or whisper on the page, yields a unique temporal language that makes sense to you.
Will a weighty paper planner “feel” more real to you vs. that free app (among dozens) on your phone?
Only you know for sure. For me, it’s a paper planner, all the way. But not all paper planners are created equal.
WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN PICKING A PAPER PLANNER
Anxiety over making the wrong planner choice is common; it’s one of the reasons people give up one planner and buy another mid-year. You don’t want to plunk $30 or $45 on a pile of paper that will sit like a lump on your desk because you’re afraid to “mess up” a pretty planner. This keeps people from committing to their planners and being successful at scheduling events and tasks.
Some users want simplicity; others desire flexibility. Some clients want aesthetically pleasing planners to inspire them, while others seek a serious, “professional” look. There’s no one perfect planner for everyone, but there are clues in how you feel about potential features.
Page Design
- Adequate space — to show appointments and key information, especially on the monthly view. If you’ve got loopy handwriting, will small monthly view boxes cramp your style?
- Layout for monthly/weekly/daily views — Understand how you “see” time. Also, depending on your life and lifestyle, consider whether you need an academic or full-year calendar, or a planner with lots of extra space for weekend and night activities.
- Creative fields — Modern planners may give you spaces for more than just appointments and tasks. Do you want bubbles or fields or pages for note-taking, brainstorming, mind-mapping, or gratitude journaling?
- Practical fields for tracking metrics — On the flip side of those creative attributes, there are planners with spaces for habit tracking, budgets, meals/nutritional logging, goal-setting, and other countable, observable elements.
- Bonus features — Are you drawn to daily motivational quotes, religious references, or cartoons? I never loved my Franklin Planner so much as the year I was able to get one with a New Yorker cartoon each day. I’ve enjoyed my colorfully-tabbed Emily Ley planner for the last few years, but miss daily quotes and bits of wisdom.
Planner Quote Photo by Bich Tran
Planner Design
In addition to features on the page, you might care about the design specifics of the planner itself:
- Size — Do you think you’d like an executive, classic, or condensed planner? The largest sized planner may not fit in your bag, or may take up too much real estate on your desk, but the tradeoff of picking the smallest option will be losing writing space.
- Weight — Does a hefty paper planner give you a greater sense of gravitas so that you’ll take your schedule seriously? Or will the bulk make it inconvenient for you to carry around?
- Binding — There are ring binders (usually with 7 rings), which let you choose how many pages you want to carry with you at any given time. (I like all the monthly pages, but prefer only last month, this month, and next month for weekly/daily pages.) Coil binding won’t let you remove or add pages, but tends to be more condensed. Both ring and coil binders assure your planner will stay open and lay flat; stitched binding may flop closed when the planner is new, and “perfect” binding (glued, like with a paperback book) can deteriorate with rough handling.
- Cover Style — Do your want your planner to have a leather (or “vegan leather”) cover for a fashion statement? What about a zipper? Are you good with a plastic or stiff paper cover? Will a simple planner cover help you take your planning more seriously or bore you? (Or are you willing to upgrade a staid cover with artwork or washi tape?)
Also remember that your planner is mostly about knowing what you have to do and when. If you need help with project management at the more granular level, take a peek at last year’s Checklists, Gantt Charts, and Kanban Boards – Organize Your Tasks.
PLANNER FORMATS: FOR WHOM ARE THEY REALLY DESIGNED?
As I research planners each year, I find that most planners fall into one of a few general categories:
Basic Planners
Think back to before the computer era, when you’d go to the dentist. Before leaving your appointment, the receptionist would consult a big, black-covered planner with neat columns, flip forward in the book, and write your name for a particular date (column) and time (row). That’s the what you’ll get when you seek various office supply store-branded calendars: columns and rows and not much else.
Basic planners offer a variety of the planner design elements above, but relatively few extra page design options. Popular examples:
At-A-Glance — is the most like that dental office planner in the days of yore. It’s efficient and practical. If you’re easily distracted by colorful design elements, this style should keep you on the straight and narrow.
Franklin-Covey planners in the ring format are customizable. You not only get to pick your planner size, but also choose from a variety of themes. There are spaces for appointments, tasks, and notes on the same page; others have little boxes for tracking expenses. You can also purchase pages for contacts, more notes, budgeting, and a number of other extras.
Levenger Circa SmartPlanners come in junior and letter sizes and some DIY customization. They use ring-like discs, such as we discussed in Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 4): Modular, Customizable, Disc-Based Notebooks.
Moleskine planners comes in a wide variety of sizes, colors, bindings and styles for monthly, weekly, daily, and combination views. Much like Moleskine notebooks, these are well made, with curved corners and elastic closures. These are often suited to creative souls who still want to stick to a simpler style and format.
Planner Pads are the planners I recommend the most often to the widest variety of clients. There are monthly calendar pages, but the heart of the system is the weekly pages divided into three sections (projects/tasks, daily scheduled tasks, and daily appointments), which “funnel” the overall projects and tasks to where they belong each day. However, cover choice is limited to black and a sort of seafoam green. I’ve said it for years, but Planner Pads is missing a great marketing opportunity; they already have the best basic planners — why not make them a little more attractive?
Passion Planners are still pretty straightforward, with columns for each date and sections for work and personal tasks and for notes, but they add weekly sidebars for focus areas and a place to jot down the “good things that happened” that week. The covers are faux leather and come in a variety of sumptuous colors; choose cover design, pick one of three sizes, and decide whether you want your week to start on Sunday or Monday.
Basic planners are the best for time blocking. (For more on this, see my Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity from last year.) They tend to be promoted as gender-neutral options, with rare prompts for life goals or touchy-feely stuff.
“Fancy” Planners
For want of a better term, these are a step up from the basics. It’s worth noting that fancy planners marketed to women tend to focus on aesthetics and tracking emotional/psychological factors; planners marketed to men tend to include more tracking of quantifiable action-based metrics.
There are a handful of smaller sub-categories I’ve noticed in this realm.
The Animal Planners
Panda Planner — In addition to scheduling tasks and appointments, it covers inspiration and goals in sections labeled “Today’s Priorities,” “Morning Review,” and “Things I Will Do to Make This Week Great.”
There are also sections for weekly reviews and weekly planning and focus on a daily habit. You can get three-month or yearly versions in a few different sizes, and there’s a cute panda embossed on the faux leather cover.
Clever Fox aims for the person shopping for a planner by personal aesthetic. Planners come in a rainbow of colors and have spaces for scheduling, identifying goals (broken down by health, career, family, finances, personal development, etc.), listing priorities, and tasks/to-dos. There are lots of “feelings” pages for gratitude, daily affirmations and creating vision boards. And, there’s something that appeals to everyone who fondly remembers seventh grade, stickers!
Simple Elephant Planner is similar in style and approach to Clever Fox, though in fewer colors. It comes with a mind map and vision board pages, but is undated. It’s my belief that undated planners lead users to avoid to fully committing to their planners, leading to system breakdown. Your milage may vary.
Life Coach/Celebrity Planners
Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map Planner is full of “truth bombs, sacred pauses, gratitude, body & wellness, and “core desired feelings.” If you are a fan of life coach LaPorte and these words delight, you may be inspired by the year-at-a-glance, monthly calendars with goal prompts, vision board, goal mapping sheet with monthly action plan pages, and journaling pages for “notes and insights.”
Michael Hyatt’s Focus Planner leans more toward the tone of “basic” planners with some of the attributes of “fancy” ones. The top of each page helps you track whether you’ve done your morning/evening/workday startup/workday shutdown rituals. Larger sections focus on “Big 3” goals for the day, schedule, and a task/note column reminiscent of a bullet journal with a key to tracking how to mark each item to track what you’ve done, delegated, and deferred, as well as important aspects, questions, and items awaiting replies. You can get the planners with linen or leather covers in solid, mostly dark neutral colors, in pocket or portfolio sizes. Although the content is gender-neutral, it has a very masculine tone.
Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Planner is a combination planner and journal Burchard developed based on the study of how high performers plan. The planner’s features include mindset journaling prompts, daily goal boxes, evening scorecards based on the day’s results, weekly habit assessments, monthly project planning, and what he calls “whole life balance sheets.” It comes in six cheery colors, but is another with a very professional, serious feel. Unsurprisingly, there are no fun stickers.
The fancy planners, whether animal based (seriously, what is it with the animals?) or celebrity coach-driven, are better suited for those seeking to capture their entire lives in one place. That’s orderly, but it’s a lot of pressure to “get it right” and fill in lots of blanks.
Do you want your planner to feel like homework?
DO IT YOURSELF PLANNERS
DIY planners offer the best (or worst) of both worlds because you can make it whatever you want. The problem? The structure, as well as the execution, depends on you.
Bullet Journals still confuse me and cause anxiety. They have their fans and their detractors. All I can say is that no matter how many times I’m told I don’t have to make one look artistic or cool, any attempt on my part feels both too unstructured and too “uncool.”
James Clear’s Clear Habit Journal via Baron Fig is a combination daily journal, dot grid notebook, and habit tracker, but it’s not really a planner. Use it in conjunction with what you learn reading Atomic Habits, but I encourage you to embrace a planner that gives more structure to know when you do should things and not only track what you’ve already done.
Agendio deserves a blog post all its own. Basically, though, you use a digital platform for customizing the exact paper planner you need, controlling for everything from section categories to line spacing!
DIY planners may be best for the most advanced planner, not for the most creative one. While they may seem ideal for the Sally Albright (“I’ll have it on the side”) character in When Harry Met Sally, too many planning options can cause overwhelm, leading to avoidance and guilt.
Specialty Planners
Again, this could be an entire blog post for each of the fields and personalities that need unique planning options. What I will tell you is that if you are (or have) a student, I’ve seen nothing better than my colleague Leslie Josel’s Academic Planner, about which I’ve written many times.
WHAT ABOUT A HYBRID PLANNING SYSTEM?
As I mentioned in the beginning, I use a paper planner, but I also have a digital calendar. Yes, I’m using my Outlook calendar to keep me aware of the passage of time (with alerts) and prompt me when it’s time to make a transition between tasks.
The main problem with having a hybrid system is that you may get in the habit of putting information in one place and not both, creating a conflict. If you want to use a hybrid system, incorporate a weekly, if not daily, check-in to review both schedules and catch any conflicts.
HOW CAN YOU MAKE A PAPER PLANNER WORK FOR YOU?
Planners won’t make you do the work any more than buying exercise videos or cute new outfits will make you work out. But having a paper planner assures you that there’s a “home” for your activities and makes time feel more tangible.
Improve your planner use by time blocking, scheduling “executive time” each day to review your schedule for the next day — set an alarm until it becomes a habit — and having an accountability partner provide support.
In the end, the best system is the one in which you can feel confident, because the key to the success of any system is commitment, and nobody fully commits to a system in which they have shaky confidence.
Are you digital, paper, or hybrid planner? What planning system will you use in 2023?
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