10 Things Productivity

After returning from the super intense tour of North American customers, I'm back in my woods cabin continuing daily trail runs wearing the Bose Frames - my go to way of consuming audio content. Actually I have a significant backlog of podcasts and books to go through. It is not that I did not run while in the US. It is just I did not listen to audio, as most of the runs were in urban or suburban environments (read: noisy) and the Frames just don't work when there is outside noise. And somehow I don't like running while wearing headphones and being isolated from the environment.

So the first in my backlog was the recent podcast by Richard Lucas interviewing Michael Śliwinski, the founder of Nozbe - the productivity tool. I have never heas4rd of Nozbe and despite considering myself fairly productive, I mostly don't care about the tools.

The reason is, at least in my opinion, it is not the tools that make people productive or not. It is the discipline.

Of course I do use tools but nothing really fancy. The fundamental tool is a list. Can be the Notepad or Google Keep or - I think - even a pencil and a paper notebook would do. As productivity is not about tools. It is - again - about the discipline.

That discipline - in my case - comes down to two basic behaviors: adding things to the list and removing things from the list. Of course I could do without a list entirely, but my memory fails quite often, so lists help. Lists in general are the fundamental way of making sure things are getting done. Every pilot follows a list before a takeoff, even if he/she knowns the list by heart. The list is about making sure you never miss or skip anything.

Now speaking of tools, I do use three:

1. Google Keep - for a number of less-frequently updated, subject-oriented lists, e.g. a shopping list (I do groceries once a week so a list helps me go quickly through the shelves and not forget anything)
2. GMail - yes this is an email application, but I do consider it a "to-do" list. I generally follow the inbox zero concept, practically almost never getting to zero, but to a single-digit number of messages.
3. Any.Do, which IS a productivity tool, but I probably only use a tiny percent of the tool capabilities. I use the free version and the thing I like the most is that it divides things to be done in four buckets: today, tomorrow, upcoming, someday.

Google Keep is just an organized "don't forget this" tool, so not exactly something I consider a productivity tool. The other two - GMail and Any.Do are helping me getting things done. But they themselves are not the reason why I think I am productive. I am productive because of the discipline of getting things done, which is reflected in these tools by getting into this "single digit" number of items.

The goal is always to have 10 or less outstanding items - either emails in the inbox or items on the Any.Do pane. More than 10 becomes difficult to manage. Difficult to prioritize. Difficult to think about. Difficult to remember.

More than ten may also mean your tasks are too detailed.

I have also noticed the items in the "Someday" category are rarely done. This means this category could be dropped altogether, leaving just the three: today, tomorrow, upcoming. With the limit of no more than 10 items in total.

I think anyone who tries improving the productivity by starting with a tool and filling it up with many items / tasks will not succeed. You need to start with the discipline of working hard to keep removing things from a to-do list. And adding anything that needs to be taken care of. I know this may not be very comforting to many of you, as there really is no silver bullet. To get to the destination which is far away, stop dreaming of a teleporting device or calculating how long it will take you to get there. Just start walking. You will be closer with every step.