Unleash Your Potential #30 - Organization and Productivity
- Douglas McCall
- Jul 25, 2024
- 4 min read
Douglas: Welcome to the Unleash Your Potential Blog, what question can I answer for you today?
DreamDesigner: What techniques can help me stay organized and productive?
Douglas: Thank you for asking! These are two somewhat separate concepts that often get lumped together. I am sure there is research that suggests these two concepts influence each other, and maybe they are related, but I am going to approach them separately.
There is no one way to be organized. From everything I have read and experienced, effective organization is highly personal. I also think that it changes as we change. The secret is to find the system that works more effectively for you. Over the years, I have tried many things and found some success with many of them, but I have not found one that works absolutely. The most important technique is to be willing to keep trying different techniques until you find the one that works for you and then be open to change when that one starts to be less effective.
For example, I have tried folders (both physical and digital), planners (both physical and digital), sorting trays, and colored folders. I find they all have limited success and even less the moment they are no longer in sight. I am definitely someone who needs to have everything important in sight, or I will get sidetracked by the stuff that is in sight. It is why I find social media so distracting. I don’t need to look at Facebook for 20 minutes, but the pictures are right there. For me to stay organized I have to have things in folders (or binders) that are clearly labeled and right in plain sight when I am working. The same is true for my phone (my digital organizer). On my home screen are only the apps I need. I don’t have social media on that opening screen. The items that are present are the ones that will keep me organized. The largest icon on my home screen is my task list. For now, this seems to be keeping me organized. This was not true a year ago and may not be true in 6 months, but I will keep modifying it to find that “right” balance.
As far as being productive, being productive is about making progress toward your goals. For me (and I imagine others), we feel less productive when we are prioritizing our time on projects that don’t line up with our goals. If my goal is to lose weight, then I feel less productive when I do things that serve to help me gain weight. The key to productivity is aligning your actions with your goals and then making daily progress toward those actions/goals.
Recently, I have found several things that work for me regarding productivity. I will qualify this by stating that like organizational techniques, this is highly personal and what works for me might only work for me. The first thing I did was clarify my goals. In the last 3 months, I have found I am taking on a lot and some of it is not taking me in a direction that I want to go. As a result, I had to let go of some things and decide they were not important right now. Then, with the goals that remained, I started to structure my day around these things. I have found a few things valuable in this struggle:
A task app on my phone that allows me to add and check off things I need to get done. I can assign things dates/times and priority. Over the last 3 weeks, I have been far more productive using this approach.
The Focus Assist app on Windows. You can set it for however many minutes you want (I like 60 because I can shift gears periodically to prevent me from getting in the weeds). In addition to the time on my desktop, it also shuts off notifications and other digital distractions for that period.
Google Calendar has been highly effective for the past few years. As long as I remember to put everything in my calendar the moment I become aware of it, I have found lots of success in keeping my days organized.
As I said at the beginning, effective organization and productivity techniques are highly personal. On the upside, a quick Google search will provide you with a plethora of options to choose from. My suggestion is to try something that looks promising or appealing and then be willing to continually re-evaluate and try new things until you find a system that works for you.
I hope my answer sheds some light on your question. If you want to dig into this concept further, I encourage you to reach out and set up a conversation. In the meantime, check back tomorrow for the next question in the Unleash Your Potential Series!
Be Well!
Comments