So I decided that I want to share my entire productivity system here in my blog. But my system is a mix of a lot of stuff I have learned since I was in the university. So I will try to tell that story from the start and all the things I have found since then.
Everything started one afternoon when I had a lot of things to do for the university, and had no idea where to start. I just had a simple To-do list in my Reminders app on my iPhone (which was not as good as it is now). So I started to look for a way to streamline my “system” because I was getting stressed with everything I had to work on, and my calendar and list were not enough.
I found GTD (Getting Things Done), so I bought the book and fell in love with the methodology. I started using it for a while but soon I got to the first limitations of it: it was not a methodology created for university students, but mostly for managers working for big companies, or at least those are their go-to clients. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (not a manager yet and still works for me), but some tweaks need to be done for it to work for university students.
So finding myself again in a position where I found the need to improve again my system, I bumped into an article in Cal Newport’s blog called: GTDCS: Getting Things Done for College Students, or something similar. The post is no longer there, but he wrote an updated version of it. The difference is mainly that in GTD you do a Weekly Review of your Projects and the Waiting For lists (stuff you are waiting for others to end), but for Uni students, that is simply not enough because you can miss stuff in the week. So he wrote that when you have a new project to deliver, you create it in the list of Projects and get a plan or just the next action, but when the deadline is arriving, you decide what you need to do next and put it on your calendar. Always scheduling some time for Next Actions as well.
GTD and GTDCS were mostly enough for going through college. I also played a bit with the Pomodoro Technique for when I needed a lot of focus on a task, but that was mostly it. When I finished the university, I stopped using GTDCS and kept with GTD. But I found it very hard to pick the next thing to do from my lists when I was in several contexts at the same time, or even in the same context, I was finding it very difficult to pick the next task.
So I developed a mix between GTD and MIT (Most Important Task) methods. I added priorities to my tasks comparing them on a 1-to-1 basis until I got to the most important one and did a top three for every context in my GTD system. It worked for me for a while, but it was a lot of work to compare the tasks every time I finished one. Also, I decided that in my Weekly Review, I was going to pick again the top three of every context. That was a lot.
I think the blog is getting too long (at least for me) to read in one sitting, and today is a Holiday in Spain, so I want to do some hiking or play some video games. So I’ll finish today, and in two weeks’ time, post the second part of it. Also, I will give some recommendations on blogs and more productivity methods that exist out there.