My productivity philosophy

Over the years, my personal definition of productivity has shaped up this way:

Productivity = clarity of purpose + idea organization + time management

Those three things combine to manage the direction, quality, and order of operations of my endeavors in life and work.

My thinking goes: Once you have a true sense of direction and motivation (clarity), you can more effectively act on goals and inspiration (idea organization), which involves figuring out how to prioritize with discipline (time management).

Even though clarity of purpose comes first in my productivity equation (and it truly does underpin everything), my experiences have shown me that, in practice, all three components run concurrently and constantly. In fact, it’s perhaps difficult to find clarity at all without first organizing ideas and time.

That’s why in the next section, where I’m sharing my go-to tools and systems for cultivating productivity, I’ll start with idea organization then move on to time management and clarity of purpose.

This is my all-purpose, unfiltered “idea dump” for on-the-go thoughts, ideas, quick drafts, reminders, checklists, etc. The danger here is that it could all get unwieldy very fast, but there are two ways I try to keep it under control:

1) “Pinning” the most important and/or “recurring” notes (cleaning routine, reading list, shopping list, publishing checklists for my newsletters)

2) (Somewhat) regularly going through notes and deleting — my favorite place to do this is on a flight, with Airplane Mode on (any other time/place without internet access would be a good opportunity 😛)

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