This is a never finished, self-guide on how I organize my work and thoughts to be as productive as possible. The goal is to be able to do as much of focus work as possible in the less time that I can.

Start of the day

I have a TODO list on Nption which has at the top the things I plan to do that day. If it’s personal things I just do them in order if possible and go and remove it.

Work

In this category of work I don’t have things that I consider as hobby. The idea is to be as productive as possible so that I can go on and spend as much as possible doing leisure things. This is the main reason I try to be productive. I could end up working on a pet project but in that case I don’t set it in my TODO list.

So at this point I set my time tracker and try and do as much as possible in 30 minutes. I follow a pomodoro schedule where the 5 minutes break allow me to take a deep breath and avoid feeling exhausted. If possible I snooze the notifications and alarms (can’t do this when on call and when on work usually I need to have slack opened which is clearly hurting my focus time).

Along all this, I might have quick thoughts. To avoid my brain from swapping to other tasks (which is not productive at all) I just write them down. If it’s something I learned or random thoughts, it goes to my second brain or just scribble them on my notebook. If it’s a task, I’ll write on the todo list (Notion).

Hopefully (this is a work in progress), I’m able to do everything I set out to do.

End of the day

With the work done, I write them my focus time, go over my todo list and schedule the next day. During the day I might have added new items to my backlog and I prioritize it and add it to the “next-day work”. Usually in this part I break down the tasks to be as atomic as possible (30 minute tasks would be perfect, but 1 hour tasks are the next best thing).

Things I’d like to try

• Add a note for each focus block of time with what I did and a grade on the focus