When people ask me how I am so productive, it is often through the lens of building systems to get the most things done in a week.
This is certainly how I thought about productivity coming out of college where I had spent the last four years focused on completing as many assignments as quickly as possible. And while there is something to be said for this lens of productivity in school and work, when it comes to thinking about our lives as a whole, those four thousand weeks we have to live, I believe it misleads us into spending time on tasks that feel important and keep us busy, while not actually moving the needle toward the life we want.
In this blog I’ll share my system for focusing less on filling my day with tasks and instead on ensuring that I always have the big picture in mind. How productivity comes from fewer but compounding tasks, rather than by chasing the number of things we get done.
I’ve tried different tools for keeping the big picture in focus. Journal planners, Notion Calendar, Todoist setups, Things3 setups. Yet I couldn’t find something that mixed the convenience of digital tools with the feel of using a more visual journal planner.
Then one day I watched a video by Nick Milo who described the idea of a linear calendar showcasing your entire year on one page. Where you could easily time block based on weeks and months not hours of a day. Visually seeing in one view how you spent your year and how you are spending your year. This concept of a linear calendar really clicked for me and I currently use Birdseye (which I developed) as my linear calendar of choice.
Using a linear calendar, I highlight days/weeks across month boundaries as time periods of focus towards a goal I’m working towards. For example, I’m planning a 5k in April so across most of the weeks of March leading into April I’ve set it as a focus period for training.
Within a linear calendar this gives me a clear visual that for the time period some of my finite time and energy will be spent pursuing this focus.
That isn’t the only thing I’ve time-blocked across March and April. I’ve also blocked weeks for editing and publishing photos, and milestone periods for building new features on my next indie app. The purpose of visually dedicating time on a linear calendar is to see where I’ve overcommitted across overlapping efforts and to gauge whether I’m spending too much time on goals that aren’t worth it. This is a routine I’ve found works best in this visual linear calendar format as it becomes way easier to pull up and get an entire year view.
Why not use a regular calendar? Calendars get cluttered with your everyday life events. Appointments, birthday reminders, meeting invites. Your linear calendar is a place to focus on you and the big picture of how you want to spend your life, and should be treated as a more sacred place than your traditional calendar. I use Birdseye as a companion to my appointment calendar and not a replacement.
Now that I have a big picture idea of the focus for the coming months I need to actually turn these ideas into things I’ll actually do. More specifically things worth doing because they work towards a life goal and not because it feels productive to be busy.
For that I organize not by the day but by the week.
I’ve found that systems that involve time blocking hours of a day or having daily tasks be planned for a certain time of day eventually became draining and reminiscent of a work/school structure. Never lasting more than a few months before falling apart.
I now instead rely on weekly notes and weekly plans. Starting every Sunday I open my weekly note in Obsidian and outline the 3 big things I want to do that week. An example for this week was:
By keeping the main focus of the week to just three things, you are forced to really think and make sure that those three things actually matter and it helps eliminate planning to do more things just for the sake of it. I’ve found that three big things a week will very quickly build progress to something when compounded over months, and eventually years.
Goals you can complete will compound, goals you fail to reach will be forgotten
For breaking down my three big things into smaller tasks I previously was an avid fan of Todoist, and before that TickTick. And while those apps are well made and feature rich, I always felt drowned in the need to tag and use all the fancy features for organizing my tasks when really I just needed to know the 2 or 3 important things for that day.
I eventually created and now daily Someday as a no frills weekly planner with built-in flows to make it easy to reschedule things across the week. There’s no time of day planning or crazy reminder system, just a “here are the 2 things to do Monday”.
Within Someday, I don’t plan out individual tasks for the entire week. Instead, I assign tasks for just the few days following the weekly review. As I get close to finishing those tasks, I plan out the next few days against the three big things for the week, continuing the cycle until the week is over and it’s time for another weekly review. I’ve found that trying to plan every day a week in advance easily falls apart as soon as something impromptu comes up, you have a busy day, or you just feel tired and need a do-nothing day.
This system has given me the flexibility to live each day without worrying too much about individual task management or keeping to a strict schedule. It rolls the big focuses up into manageable weekly chunks without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day planning
While these are the tools that worked for me I, believe the concepts of ensuring we focus on the big picture and not the day-to-day could be applied to really any digital or paper system that fits your needs.
Whatever tool you use think not did I get a lot done, but did I get the right things done