How to do a productivity reset | 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 will suffer 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. 

If 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.

To be continued…. 

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