Fast Guide for Dealing With Productivity Chaos

Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash

Productivity is what we all are hoping to achieve at the end of the day. You want to go to bed at night feeling productive, that you spent your day well. We are human beings. After all, we tend to slack off. Some days we feel a little productive. Other days we feel like complete losers. There is a physiological reason behind this. No matter who we are, what we do, or how hard we are working, we all tend to expect that we are obligated to take advantage of time.

Although this is great, unfortunately, this could lead to some serious issues. Being cautious about our tasks and the way we need to work every day can be stressful. If you have a task sitting on your to-do list and you are always delaying it and pushing it ahead of the calendar, you can harm yourself big time. Humans are built to work on tasks given to them, either that you are told to do a task, or you assign a task for yourself.

The issue with this is that you will push it ahead of time. Whenever you assign yourself a task with no “Real” deadline, this will make you think about that task. If things get to the point that you are thinking about a task and pushing it every day, you will eventually either give up or push it to the last day you have to deliver.

Try to focus on one thing at a time, and don’t set deadlines unless you start working on something. For example, you want to change your car tires, don’t set a deadline after 1 week. If you did not set a date to go and change the tiers, don’t keep an open date on the calendar with a deadline. This is one of the worst things you could do.

Tim Ferriss explained that working on tasks near the deadline will make you more productive and focused on that task. Although I might agree, I'm not too fond of the act of assigning a task way ahead of the deadline. If you know that you will not work on it until the deadline, then don’t assign it to yourself before that date.

The worst mental challenge you could put yourself into is the stress of looking and thinking about the task every day, moving it ahead every day, and worrying that the deadline is getting closer and closer every day.

So, what is productivity chaos?

Productivity chaos is when you have many productivity systems all over the place and using them for disconnected reasons. For example…

Ali and James are two students, and they both use systems to make them more productive. Ali uses the following services:

• Notion: for creating databases of the courses he takes and take notes while he studies for exams.
• Evernote: for taking class notes. Then he syncs them to Notion.
• Google Calendar app.
• Habitify: for habits tracking.
• Apple Notes: for taking random notes like grocery lists, shopping needs, and stuff that he needs to save for quick access.
• Trello: for creating study cards and review for his exams. He manually adds the cards after copy/pasting them from Notion.

And James uses the following:

• Notion: for class note taking, courses’ timeline, exams, classes, and book notes. He created a database for storing everything that he needs to access before the exam.
• TickTick: for quick notes, tasks, calendar events, and tracking habits.

While Ali is using more options and more systems than James, he is creating chaos. A second brain is what these systems represent. It would be best to have a second brain to hold the stuff you don't need to memorize, keeping your brain free for the more important stuff. Having a system that organizes and stores your work, notes, tasks, emails, journals, etc.

James uses all-in-one systems to combine more features that he regularly uses in one service. In Ali’s case, using 3 separate services — Google Calendar, Habitify, and Apple Notes — can be replaced with a single service — TickTick.

Reducing the systems you use will make you more focused on what is important and less stressed for keeping the systems updated and sync across all systems. Reduce the systems you use a much as possible, allowing for less clutter in your daily work.

Key takeaways:

1. Set deadlines for the tasks you will work on now.
2. Focus on the one thing.
3. Use a second brain.
4. Use an all-in-one system.
5. Reduce clutter from your daily work.
6. Productivity is using less as more, don’t use a lot of services and systems.

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed it.
If you did, it would be great to share it.
You can reach me at @alounpro on Twitter.
Have a lovely day!

— Ahmad Aloun