It’s been 2 years since my previous productivity setup post. Changelog:

  • My phone home screen has stayed the same! It works well.
  • Started using a weekly planner.
  • Habit tracker app falls into and out of my life as needed. I’ve had luck with using a physical stamp on a calendar instead.
  • I use Google Calendar at work to keep track of meeting invites, but I don’t use any digital calendar for my personal life.
  • Physical monthly print-out calendar for keeping track of events and birthdays. It’s nice flipping through and looking back at the things I did.

In November I watched an ~11 minute YouTube video about how to use planners. (I can’t find a link anymore, but let me try to convey its message.) Historically it had been difficult for me to stick to planners, because they require committing tasks to dates. I generally have lots of floating tasks of indeterminate timespan. “I should, sometime, update my character’s ref sheet” would be lost at the bottom of the “eventually but not urgent” to-do list forever, doomed to collect dust. With the new system, the process is as follows: I flip through my planner, and find an open space. I arbitrarily decide that I will work on my ref sheet at that day & time. This way, every concrete task is actually scheduled. This automatic spacing-out is really helpful. Somehow it’s less overwhelming looking at my 1-2 tasks scheduled every weekend for the next 5 weekends, rather than having a list of 5-10 tasks that might take an entire half day each?

I think back to how I originally learned to use planners. In elementary school, 4th to 6th graders are given planners. At the end of each subject, the teacher would project their sample planner on to the board and write assignments in it, and students followed along in their own planner. Writing assignments and projects on either the day they’re assigned or due is not that helpful for me. Events must be written on the day they happen, and tasks must be written for the day I visit it. Something important (also from the video): the day a task is visited is not necessarily the day it is completed. If I’m not ready for a task by the time the day comes around, I’ll simply reschedule it. This optimistic-scheduling approach with low reschedule friction allows tasks to truly be offloaded from the mind.

I guess the toughest part of self-managing is always doing the things you want to do when there is no external deadline for it. This definitely bleeds into work. There’s OKR stuff, the big projects to land so your org looks good. Then there’s a bunch of lower priority tech debt or tooling work to make your life easier, the code nicer to read, the tests green, or the previous project truly cleaned up. I struggle with wanting to do the latter but not finding time or energy for it. I also think that shared dedication to the latter is what makes or breaks a team, and everybody only doing feature work leads to a miserable dev experience.

It’s been 4 years since I graduated college. (Shudder…) I look back and feel that I was really not ready for college, I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. I sort of wasn’t a whole grown person yet? I can’t help but think about how little emotional processing I did as a teenager, burying myself in internet distractions every day. It was definitely an addiction that stunted my growth. Ultimately, the procrastination and distraction comes from avoiding negative emotions, and they still surface today. Frustration at the code being written in a convoluted way. Resistance against digging into a task and breaking it down because it takes lots of concentrated brain work. Boredom from updating documentation or writing quarterly reviews. I deal with work better when I learn to identify and respond to my own emotional signals. I really can’t separate this “productivity” topic from the rest of my life / mental health, it’s so deeply intertwined. Four years seems a long time to learn how to be a part of the workforce, a long time to be in the industry and still feel that I “haven’t fully launched yet”, but maybe it is not so long in the journey of healing and growing into someone grounded and whole.

Other random stuff:

  • I blocked r/all on my computer and personal phone (while allowing access to specific subreddits through search results). This has been pretty helpful for me. Unfortunately, my corp phone is owned by the company and they don’t allow me to install any site blockers. And so I go on reddit at work… don’t really know what to do about it. Maybe I’ll have an answer in two years haha.
  • Before bed, I set an intention (in my planner) for the work I’ll do the following day. Planning my day first thing in the morning doesn’t work for me at all.