Every single one of us at some point in our life will start to feel like things are just getting messy.  We are just not on top of life the way we want to be.

When that happens – we need to press the reset button.  But – how do you actually do that?

We are now 3 weeks into January.  Perhaps you have realised that you are not as organised as you would like to be.  Be honest…..it all feels like a total mess and you are drowning underneath it all!

If that is you, then you need a productivity RESET!

Maybe it is not that bad but still your system feels messy and unwieldy and you need to sort it all out.

Welcome to Effective Faith…..

This is episode 37 of the Effective Podcast – How to do a productivity reset.  My name is Chris Wood and I run Effective Faith – helping you to be more than just productive.  At Effective Faith our aim is to intentionally focus on what matters most, to resist the ‘productivity’ idol and to help Christians live effectively for Christ in their everyday work

Every single one of us at some point in our life will start to feel like things are just getting messy.  We are just not on top of life the way we want to be.

When that happens – we need to press the reset button.  But – how do you actually do that?

The first thing is that this will take some time.  Maybe a whole day or perhaps even more than that.

You probably think that you don’t have time for this!

So ask yourself….what is worse….losing a day to get things tidy or losing an hour a day, every day for months to come as you try and navigate the mess.

We often think that taking time out to get organised is time wasted, time we cannot afford.  BUT in reality the opposite is true.  NOT doing this is time that we cannot afford.

So, the first thing to do is to block of time for this exercise and then you need to do two things – Kill the Bloat and Prune the Branches….

Part 1 – Kill the bloat

Anyone who wants to be productive will train themselves to do two things – Capture everything and organise it well.  It is therefore inevitable that your ‘productivity system’ will become bloated.  Some ways of organising your work some productivity systems, will suffer from this far more than others – worth noting this.  Therefore, it will become necessary to develop a process to deal with this problem.  So, let’s consider how to do a productivity reset.  Part 1 – Kill the bloat.

Before we actually think the about the system itself, we need to to start with all those things we have captured and organised into our systems.

Projects

I have just completed a review of my project list.  Current, active, future and someday/hopeful.  What I found is that many of these ‘projects’ didn’t need to be there.  It is likely that the same is true for you as well so go through the list.  Look for the following:

1. Projects that you no longer care about
2. Projects that aren’t really projects at all – they are basically just big tasks or a process to follow.
3. Projects that are not defined as projects.  One of mine was ‘Study History’.  This is not well defined enough to be of any use.
4. Projects that are basically complete or have been super-ceded by other things. 
5. Projects that are basically duplicates of others.  I found a few that whilst worded differently were basically the same. 

This will trim your project list down significantly.

I have also decided to move my Someday/Maybe list to a separate note in my notes app.  These are not projects but things I hope to do in the future.

Tasks

This is next up for me.  There are a few things I want to think about here:

1. Routine and Recurring tasks – are these all still relevant and are they needed?
2. Tasks that I created a long time ago but are just sitting there.  I think I will look for tasks created more than 8 months ago.  Then ask if I still care and if it is still relevant.
3. I plan to look over all the other tasks as well and ask the same question.  The difference will be that for tasks older than 8 months, the default will be to remove them unless I can think of a good reason not to.

Calendar

Most of the things that go on my calendar get entered as and when they are needed but I have a several recurring events to cover fixed things as well time i have scheduled for specific recurring work.  I)f you have similar, it’s worth checking that the these events are still relevant and accurate and for scheduled work that they are scheduled for the best time.  Life changes, and with those changes, our needs change.  The calendar is a place that you can reflect these changing needs.

Files

This might be a bigger thing and need more time.  But, I find it helpful, maybe once, maybe twice a year, to go through my files and filing system.  This helps me to keep on top of archiving, backing things up and making sure that nothing needs moving or removing if it is no longer helpful to keep it.

How to do a productivity reset.  Part 1 – Kill the bloat.  Part 1 of removing the bloat, is all to do with the content of your productivity system.  Part 2 is removing the bloat from the system itself.

Part 2 – Prune the Branches

Now we move on to How to do a productivity reset | Part 2 – Prune the branches.  This is where we move to cut back any parts of our system itself that are not needed, slowing us down and causing us to waste yet more precious time.

Let me tell you about my old SatNav.  At times in the past I used to find myself often driving north on the A1 in England.  If you don’t know it that A1 goes right up the spine of the country connecting London with Edinburgh.  There comes a point where you come off the A1 headed north and drive west on the M18.  My old SatNav used to tell me to do just that.  It would tell me to come off the A1, drive 6.1 miles west on the M18, come off it, round a roundabout and then drive 6.1 miles east back on the M18, to the exact point I left the A1, to rejoin the A1 and continue my journey north.  So, what can we learn about productivity & my old SatNav?  Don’t do things just for the sake of it!

It is very easy for your productivity, organisation and information management system to become overloaded with useless branches.  VERY easy.  All of that this is in fact a complete waste of time.  Worse, it actually makes organising yourself far more unwieldy, slows you down and will increase the stress of maintaining your system. 

Prune the Branches – The Apps you Use

This is an essential part of keeping your productivity system efficient and tidy.  There are so many reasons why we might end up with more apps than we need and this can be a killer for our efficiency and productivity.

Some people are absolute purists when it comes to their app stacks.  You are only allowed one notes app, one cloud storage service, one task manager etc etc.  I am not such a purist but I do think there needs to be a very good reason to have more than one app in each type category.

Let me give you some examples of the ways the app branches get overgrown:

1. You’ve always used Apple calendar.  You’ve joined a sports team that organises everything in Google Calendar and your new job insists everyone uses outlook.  You now events in 3 different calendar services which you use.
2. You used Evernote for a long time but have decided to switch.  You ported some notes across to Notion and did some stuff in there for a few months but didn’t like it so now you use Obsidian but you have an archive in Evernote and a few live projects still in Notion.
3. You use UpNote for your notes but you’ve been using ClickUp Docs for projects.
4. Most of your files are in Google Drive but you’ve got some stuff in Dropbox and some stuff in OneDrive.

Or, in a more generic sense, we are working with two apps for basically the same purpose.  Both excel at different things and are incredibly weak in other ways so you continue to use both.

The more apps we have in our system, the more confusing it gets, the more time needs to be spent maintaining it all and the more likely it is we will struggle to find what we need.

I am not against having more than one similar app in my stack on principle, I just need a good reason for it.  For example, I use Two’s as journal/bullet journal notes and tasks app, alongside everything else.  Why?  Because I like having an app that, in my head, is outside my system.  It is great, when I feel overwhelmed, to go outside the system that is trying to tell me what to do and, independently of all that, write down a list of what I am going to do.

So, go through the apps you use, one by one and ask them point blank to justify their existence.  Ask if you can replicate their purpose in any of the other apps you currently use.  What will you lose if if you cut this app and can that loss be mitigated elsewhere?|

Prune the branches – Organising for the sake of it

I’ve written about this recently in the post Productivity & my old SatNav…or don’t do things for the sake of it!  The point is very simple, are there things you in your system that are of little benefit.  For example, employing a complicated system and structure of labels and tags.  For example writing out a plan for the day in a notebook, a daily note, your journal and timeblocking your day in your calendar.

A common way for this to happen is that you read a blog post or watch a YouTube video from a productivity expert where they outline part of their systems or process.  It looks like such a good idea so you work to incorporate it into your system.  But, you do not stop to consider what value it adds or how it will or won’t fit within the context of the rest of your systems and processes.

So, examine the processes that you follow to organise your work, your tasks, projects, notes and files and ask the question – what am I doing here that ultimately serves no purpose other than looking nice and being impressive on YouTube/Social Media.

Example – Task Management

I once used an app called Nirvana to manage my tasks.   Nirvana allows you to ‘mark’ your tasks in multiple different ways.  You can set up ‘Areas’ which would be for your life areas or buckets.  You have a separate list of contacts to reference people and then labels for anything you want.  In addition you have a whole host of options for marking the estimated time (from 5min to ‘Whoa Nelly!’) and three different options for the energy a task will require.

Because the functionality was there, I used it and when I process every single task I would consider each of these different things and mark up and label the task accordingly.  Because it was there.

When I switched to ToDoist, I created around 30 separate labels so I could do all this in ToDoist.  My process was for each task, to click the label button and run down the full list each time to apply every label that was relevant.

At some point I realised 2 things.  The point of labelling your tasks is primarily to help you filter them and decide what to work on in any given moment.  Most of these labels were never used for that purpose.  I used the 5min label occasionally to find a quick task if had some spare time but none of the others.  I never used the people one and never used the energy ones.  So, the second thing I realised was that this was a complete waste of time and energy.  Like a trip 6 miles east on the M18 and back again, applying these labels was a detour from effectively processing my new tasks that required time and effort but did not advance my productivity journey at all.

Life is messy – have you noticed this?  One big, wibbly and wobbly mess of stuff.  It always ebbs and flows and chops and changes.  In the Old Testament in the Bible, the ancient nation of Israel used to observe a year of Jubilee.  This was a year, every 50 years, if I remember rightly, where everything reverted back to its original family/clan ownership.  In part, this was about resetting things back to their original position.  Every year, as part of my annual planning, I like to take some time to reflect and instigate the productivity and focus reset.  Throughout the last 12 months a lot has happened.  In every period of 12 months, a lot happens.  As I reflect, I often find that my focus has shifted.  Looking back, I find that my productivity has become a little muddled.  So, the productivity and focus reset.

The Focus Reset

This is the most important part.  In the reality of life, the things we give our time to are often not the most important things.  This is normal.  The purpose of the focus reset is to conduct a course correction.  What this means is either shifting our current focus to be more in line with out intended focus, or amending our intended focus so it is more up to date with our new and refined priorities.  Have you been working more and spending less time with your family?  Now is the time to course correct.  Has your exercise or diet shifted from what you had intended – course correct.  Perhaps you have a new goal in life or circumstances have changed – well then its time to update your intended focus.

The focus reset is an essential part of keeping our actual life aligned with what is important.

The Productivity reset

If the focus reset is all about making sure the planned route is still taking you to the right destination, then the productivity reset is all about making sure the vehicle you travel in is going to get you there.  I have talked before about Killing the bloat and pruning the branches.  Key parts of any productivity reset.  But, there is a bit missing.  If your productivity system is what guides you day to day, you have to be sure that it has the capacity to direct you to focus on what matters.  For example, if you rely too heavily on a task manager, this may not be enough help you when it comes to building relationships with family and friends.

So, think about what it is that matters to you and what is important.  Then ask a very simple question – how can my productivity system direct me to give that time and focus.  If the answer is that it cannot, then the productivity reset is needed to provide that capacity, somehow.

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E|F Muses on....

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