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My Productivity Systems

How I manage to do so many things

People often ask me how I can do so many different things, and be so productive... some even tell me that I am very disciplined. But yet, when I think about myself I don't consider myself to be very disciplined at all.

My willpower to resist things is often zero, and I procrastinate everything forever if I get the chance to. Yet I somehow have read 200+ books over the last 5 years (and wrote booknotes and summaries for nearly all of them). I also learned how to code, learned a bunch of stuff about AI, improved my diet, wrote a newsletter consistently every 2 weeks for 2+ years, built this website and all the content within it, did a bunch of cool 1-month projects, traveled many different countries, all while earning enough money to live a pretty comfortable life with minimal effort. What I want to show is that this system works.

But here is the thing, just like with any system, mine isn't perfect, and I could still do much more. There are lots of improvements to add, little tweaks, and adjustments to be made. But for now, this is how I do it and it is good enough.

Serious disclaimer: Sometimes meta-work can become a real problem and you can endlessly procrastinate by reading more about how to become productive without ever doing anything in the end. I have been there before. In the end, you have to keep this in mind:

Doing is more important than reading about how to do better.

Instead of procrastinating about which productivity system to use: just pick one, try it out, stick with it for some time, and get shit done. Tweak what doesn't work, keep what does, and then repeat.

I feel like my system has served me well so far, and therefore I want to share it with others, which is why this post exists. My friend Marc has also written about his own version on his website.

The System

Here's my system in a nutshell.

Planning Sessions:

  • yearly.
  • monthly.
  • weekly.
  • daily.

Hacks:

  • habit tracking.
  • environmental design.
  • Wikipedia pacts.
  • No-Procrastination Days.
  • time tracking.
  • task lists.

Planning and reflection sessions are designed to uncover exactly what it is that I want to be working on. They wrap into one another: Dailies are guided by the goals of the weeklies. Weeklies in turn are guided by the broader goals of the month, which in turn are guided by the even broader goals of the year, which ultimately are an expression of my values and principles.

Hacks on the other hand are there to make it more likely that I follow through with what I want to be doing.

Most importantly, for any of this to work is this:

I have friends who keep me accountable.

People who love me and whom I trust. People that have my best interest at heart and who will keep me accountable, so that I can strive towards the best self that I can become. I am in turn doing the same for them.

This social support network is holding all of this together. Other people reading my reflections and plans is a tremendously powerful tool because they often provide insights that I otherwise wouldn't have had. They can cover my blindspots, can see when I get stuck, and provide critical feedback, and different viewpoints to my reflection process.

Before going on, let me repeat:

Other people are crucial for this to work.

Without them, accountability goes out of the window.

Yearlies 🎆

I started doing yearlies with the Year Compass in 2019. It consists of a set of questions and writing prompts that guide you through reflecting on what has happened over the last year and then planning out what you want to be doing the next year.

I did the year compass a couple of times, until my friend built mental.garden: a Notion template for facilitating this sort of yearly review. Now I am using his template because it is better than the Yearly Compass.

Usually, I do Yearlies around New Year's Eve and they are a great source of pleasure. It feels like going into yourself, coming back to your core values–who you are and want to be–and then comparing how you have lived with how you would have liked to have lived.

Monthlies 📖

Monthlies are a continuation of the yearlies. During a yearly, I usually define some goals: things that I want to do as the year progresses. Monthlies are a way of subdividing and then working on those goals. I always do monthlies together with Marc. In the beginning, we do a short session of the Moby Flower challenge to get pumped up.

We start with what has happened in the last month–what we have learned, how we have felt, and what we got done overall. Comparing our progress to the goals that we made at the beginning of the month. While one of us talks, the other takes notes in a shared Notion document for later reference.

Once done with the reflection part, we talk about what we want to do going into the next month: what we want to accomplish, and how to go about achieving this. We discuss possible roadblocks, what the metrics are that show success vs. failure, and sub-steps of getting to our goals. We also often ask ourselves: Why this goal in particular? Is there something better that we could spend our time with? This helps in clarifying what it is that we want to be mainly doing this month.

After one person is done, we usually take a short break and then switch roles. These meetings are very intense and long, usually around 2 hours per person. But this time once a month is so worth it. ✌️

It feels like connecting to one of my best friends for a really good call while helping them to have clarity and purpose in their lives, and then have them help me achieve the same.

Weeklies 📅

I write weeklies on my own every Sunday. Once done, I send them to my friends so they can leave comments. A weekly is broken down like this:

  • a one-sentence summary
  • a list of highlights and things that I felt grateful for
  • a list of negative things that happened
  • a list of learnings
  • a timesheet
  • a list of goals that I have worked towards
  • a section with goals for the next week

The goals section is guided by the monthly and therefore tied to the overarching ideas of the yearly as well. My newsletter for example would be in here, when it's time to write it. So would be ideas for blog posts or progress on sub-goals of a 1-month project that I am working on. But it can also be miscellaneous tasks, things like going to the dentist, preparing for an upcoming travel adventure, or wanting to meet friends more often.

Dailies 🌅

Dailies are written to our WhatsApp group. They include what we did the day before and what we want to be doing the next day. They are usually short and to the point and should take less than 1 minute to read and less than 5 to write. It's a short check-in with one another. Where we can see what the others want to be doing, and also what they actually did. When somebody has written that they want to do this thing for the last 3 days in a row, yet haven't done it, we can give them a little nudge. It's a way of keeping each other accountable for the things that we tend to procrastinate too easily or struggle with. It is a daily ritual that counteracts some of the fundamental problems.

Miscellaneous Hacks

There are other strategies that I employ that help me to stay on track with whatever it is that I want to be doing. I call these "miscellaneous hacks". Many of these hacks are heavily inspired by books like Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Habit Tracking 🔁

I keep track of habits that I want to have in my life via a simple streak counting habit tracking app. It's free, there are no ads, and you can export your tracked behaviors to a CSV file for backups. There is something powerful and motivating about keeping a streak up and running. Currently, my setup is quite easy: I have assembled habits into a routine that I can follow every day. First, do this, then this, then that. I want there to be no question about which behavior comes next on the list. When I have doubts about what to do next, there is room for procrastination and slacking off and then that's exactly what I end up doing.

Here's the routine I do at the moment:

  • Morning Walk
  • Yoga Flow
  • Supplements
  • Writing
  • Learning time (while eating usually)

Then about half of the day is over and I end my routine and feel free to do whatever. I am thinking of making this more strict but right now I don't feel that I have to. I also keep track of a bunch of other things:

  • did I write my daily?
  • did I turn off the screen before 22:00?
  • did I read a book before going to bed?

Finally, I track that I didn't do anything bad for me, things that I want to avoid or at least know the frequency of doing them. Those include:

All in all, this helps me to stay on track and see what I am doing over time.

Environmental Design

Another hack I employ is to remove distractions from my surroundings and make certain behaviors harder or easier depending on whether I want to do them or not.

I strive for minimalism in my home. If there is only one choice I can make, and that choice is heavily rigged towards good behavior, the likelihood of making this good choice is much higher. This is about things like not buying shitty food in the supermarket, about not having a TV in your living room, about not having a computer in your bedroom, and many other ideas like this. It's about making bad choices harder by default. Having Chrome extensions to block Instagram, long phone passwords, surrounding myself with a bunch of books at all times, a post-it note on my computer telling me to be mindful, etc.

This helps me to do more of the things that I want to be doing.

Wikipedia Pacts 💸

I also use forms of punishment to get myself to do (or don't do) things that I particularly struggle with.

The original idea is from a book called Indistractable by Nir Eyal. Originally his idea was about burning a 100€ bill when you don't do something that you set out to do. We changed it a little bit and came up with what we call Wikipedia pacts. Instead of burning the money, we donate it to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia pacts are like making a promise to yourself and then attaching a very real cost to failure or non-compliance with the promise. To me it's always surprising how well this idea works, both to curb bad behaviors as well as to encourage good ones. I used to struggle with the consistency of my newsletter a lot. Once I had a Wikipedia pact for it, I stopped struggling with it, and now it's habitual. I can tell a similar story about spending way too much time playing computer games.

The important part of Wikipedia pacts is that they don't leave holes in their definition to weasel out of the consequences. I am too good at finding loopholes, especially for addictive behaviors, when I am in a state of craving. Anything even slightly off in the phrasing can be used to rationalize lapsing into the wrong behavior as "ok". It is never ok to break a Wikipedia pact because it means that I am actively going against my values. It still happens from time to time though, because changing behavior permanently is just freaking difficult. But life with Wikipedia pacts is better than without.

Time Tracking

I track the time that I am working on things because it helps me to see how much I really work on what matters to me. To time track easily, I use the Clockify chrome extension, because it does exactly what I need it to do. Whenever I start a task I assign it to a project, give the task a good description of what I am working on, and then start the clock. Once I am done, I stop the clock. Easy.

Clockify can generate all the reports that I would ever want. I have weekly overviews:

Or overviews of the total time spent on projects for, say this year:

I find this data visualization extremely enjoyable to look at. It's inspiring to see how much effort I put into projects, and how much time things take up. To me, the biggest learning from this is that I could spend more time working on things important to me. There is still room to grow.

At the same time, I am very aware that time alone is not the sole metric to watch out for. Hours worked are not equal to output produced, but it's a good enough proxy and not a target yet (I am aware of Goodhardt's Law) and hence I keep time tracking.

Task Lists 📋

I don't know why, but somehow having a clearly defined list of this, then this, and then this, really helps me to get things done. There is something magical about ticking off boxes that represent meaningful progress. It feels good to me and motivates me to work more while keeping me accountable for what exactly I need to work on next. So for many things, I create to-do lists to help me remember what to work on. Sometimes I think of them a little bit like Jira tickets, only that they are much simpler to set up because they live in Notion and don't have many different states and stuff. It's dead simple. A typical task list might look something like this:

Just on/off, yes no. Get things done and don't spend more time than necessary on creating and maintaining the task lists themselves.

No-Procrastination Days 🚧

There are things that I am notoriously bad at organizing, which are still necessary to do though. Usually, these activities sit in Quadrant Two, of the Eisenhower Matrix, they are important but often not urgent. Tasks here include miscellaneous "grunt work", things like going to the doctor, changing my phone provider, replying to some letter from the tax office, and so on. Tasks like these are often mildly annoying to me and I don't want to do them but once I get going they are not all that bad.

That's why I batch them all into a long task list, and then do them all at once, one after another on the same day. That's what a No-Procrastination Day boils down to.

For me, historically, No-Procrastination Days have been No-Procrastination Tuesdays 😄. For some reason, it stuck. So whenever I feel that there are a bunch of miscellaneous tasks piling up because I am procrastinating them, I have a No-Procrastination Tuesday and clean up all the accumulated tasks. The idea is to get as many things done in as little time as possible because that way I minimize the pain of doing them. And it works surprisingly well for me.

Summary 📝

All in all, this is what I do to be more productive and so far this system of hacks and planning sessions has been working pretty well for me.

To summarize: I plan yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily to know exactly what I want to be doing and plan the next steps as well as measure progress towards my goals. I have friends who keep me accountable and employ hacks such as Wikipedia pacts and environmental design to keep myself on track more easily. All of this results in me knowing what to work on, how I am progressing on my goals and having accountability to myself and others. It makes me work on the things that I want to work on, which feels great!

In the end, productivity systems are important because there are simply too many things to do and without a productivity system, it's easy not to do any of it. This would make me regret looking back at my life because I haven't strived to be the best version of myself.