Productivity – Month-End Update

As I’m writing this, I’m nearly at the end of the second month in my year-long Foundations project.¹ This month’s focus was productivity, specifically creating and maintaining a full-capture productivity system. You can also see my opening update and books reviewed.

Overall, the month was a success. Behaviorally speaking, I was already fairly close to where I want to be, so I decided to refurbish my system instead of starting from scratch.

The main tweaks I made to my productivity system were:

• Reorganizing all of my lists. My system had degenerated over time into somewhat scattered lists for different projects and goals. Now my setup consists of:
  • NEXT ACTION lists for work/personal and home. The latter is shared with my wife so we can coordinate on household chores and family tasks.
  • SOMEDAY/MAYBE lists for work and home. Keeping these separate from my regular to-do list has helped reduce clutter. When I want to remember a task, but am not sure whether I want to pursue it right now, I put it on this list—particularly if it’s a lower priority.
  • CALENDAR. I was already using this, but I took some extra steps to coordinate calendars with my wife so we don’t have as much back-and-forth when booking events as a family.
• Other lists, including IDEAS, GROCERIES (divided by shopping location), PROJECTS and WAITING.
• For work tasks, I also made subdivisions for TODAY and THIS WEEK to maintain the weekly/daily goals system I’ve been using for years while still keeping my entire to-do list visible.
• I decided to make a principled decision about keeping all deadlines and temporal reminders within the to-do list system (rather than on my calendar) unless they are hard deadlines. My calendar had been getting a little cluttered with various deadlines that weren’t really hard deadlines. By adding time-based reminders, I can follow up on tasks that I don’t want to think about now without having them cluttering my calendar.

Did I Actually Get More Done?

As might be expected given my renewed focus on productivity, I was pretty productive this month—especially at home, which was a bit of a weakness in my old system. I spent the first two weeks of the month changing lightbulbs and fixing door hinges that had been neglected.

However, I think it’s misleading to claim this is due entirely to my new system. Productivity is heavily influenced by focus and motivation, so it’s natural to have a spike in productivity when you suddenly start focusing on it, which happened with my household projects.

While I’m glad to have a bunch of little nagging projects done, the real benefits to this month’s foundation are long-term. Namely, have I built a system that will reduce psychic friction in the long run?

Given that the tweaks I’ve made have been relatively modest, I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to resolve some of the weaknesses I noted in the past. Particularly on the home front, having organized, shared calendars and to-do lists with assigned responsibilities has made it easier to get clear on what needs to be done at home.

At the same time, writing down a task doesn’t mean you’ll do it. I still haven’t gotten a family doctor, something I had written as a to-do list item in my opening update but didn’t set aside time to get figured out. This doesn’t seem to be a failure of my capture system; it’s simply not a task I prioritized. 


Plans for the Long Term

I think one reason I delayed many household or personal tasks was that during the workday, I prioritized work. When I got home, dinner and bedtime for the kids would occupy me until around 8 or 9 pm, after which there was usually only an hour or so before I’d have to sleep. As a result, even if the chores were relatively modest, I was tackling them at my lowest energy. Given that few of these tasks were urgent, it was easier to say I’d do it later.

In my work, a successful strategy for dealing with these issues has been explicitly planning when I’ll do work. Keeping a weekly/daily goals list has been one of my better productivity habits for work since it carves a manageable chunk that can be accomplished from the infinite to-do list.

To make progress on the household work more reliably, I think I’ll need a similar focus on setting goals—perhaps monthly, weekly or daily—for chores or projects we intend to accomplish now, versus projects we’d like to take on one day. Recognizing that the time to do these chores is always going to be when I’m tired (or when I’m also minding the kids) means I need to set realistic goals here but also accept that being tired isn’t a good excuse for not doing them, since I’m never going to be able to work on them full of energy and total focus.

Of course, another powerful solution is simply to lower expectations. It’s easier to populate a to-do list than to do the work on that list, so being more aggressive about shifting things I don’t intend to do imminently to my someday/maybe list is probably smart.

Overall, this month was a success, but there are still more tweaks to be made, which I’ll strive to be mindful of as I go into future months.

Follow-Up on Fitness

Fitness continued to go well throughout the second month. I maintained my unbroken streak of daily exercise, including during a week-long vacation. Before this project, I rarely exercised on vacation (after all, isn’t it supposed to be a vacation?), but I found I really enjoy running in a new location. Thinking of trips as a chance to do something new with fitness, rather than as a break from it, has been a mindset shift for me.

I also did my longest-ever run—17 km (10.5 miles)—during the trip. Since running has gotten easier, I’ve found it enjoyable to go farther. While running 10 km would have been a real strain for most of my life, it’s now easy enough that I can comfortably listen to an audiobook without getting distracted while I run.

My strength is improving, but I’m still nowhere near my peak strength of about 5 years ago. I expect it will take a year or more to rebuild, as I had largely neglected weights since the start of the pandemic. But given that strength training is secondary to cardiovascular exercise in my current routine, I’m not going to fret too much over my rate of progress here.

My weight on the scale hasn’t changed much from the 4 or 5 pounds I lost initially, although a few people have told me that it looks like I’ve lost more weight. Perhaps there’s some change in body composition, but I haven’t done enough careful measurements to know for sure. I’m still above my college-age weight by at least 12 pounds, but given that I’m also trying to rebuild muscle mass, I’m not striving to drop it too quickly.

With the second month’s foundation concluding (and the first month continuing strong), I’m moving next month to the third foundation: money. I’ll share my opening update in the next essay!

1. As a reminder, I’m working on my personal Foundations project three months ahead of the Foundations course and the content published here. As I’m leaving on a family vacation for the long weekend, I’m writing this post on August 27, 2024, a couple days before the “official” end of the month.