Everybody in the knowledge work sector wants to be productive. Work, side hustles, interests, all of that needs to be managed somehow. We can’t have all that information (aka ‘open loops’, to use Getting Things Done jargon) floating around in our heads. Over time, everybody develops their own productivity system. This is inevitable.

I am no exception. I like to do a lot of things with my day, and I do get a lot done in an average day. I wouldn’t be able to without a system.

My system has evolved over a period of time. It is an amalgamation of ideas from books, podcasts, YouTube videos, social media, blog posts, and the meanderings of my own mind that all just somehow collectively and cumulatively happened to my life.

I was listening to a podcast the other day (as you do), and they were talking about productivity systems that they themselves used. That got me thinking – maybe I should document my own system. As a matter of fact, at this point my system has gotten so deeply ingrained in my day to day and in my thought process that I don’t even think of it as an entity anymore – it just exists, it just is! It gets out of my way and lets me do things, ever present as a set of subservient tools. And every now and then I update it with some new tool or nugget that I’ve recently discovered.

Without further ado, here’s a little breakdown. Buckle your seatbelts, because after writing this summary I realized how wild my system is.

OmniFocus (I use macOS as my daily driver, but equivalents exist for Windows and Linux as well) is my meta-system, the system to manage all systems, if you will. It has all my recurring items, categorized by tags that can be places, devices, levels of energy, creation vs consumption, purpose, etc. There are also projects and folders that contain many life projects.

I use Notion for tracking goals – especially long term goals and yearly goals, broken down into tables that follow the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) philosophy. I also use Notion for managing and updating my self-education curriculum in all the fields that I am interested in growing in, and I use Notion’s kanban boards to move things forward in their respective categories. When Notion came out, the free version was very limited. But soon enough they generously increased the data that you have available to you, which made all this possible. You have to be careful because Notion is always in the cloud, so make sure to not put any sensitive information on there.

Apple Notes is my daily go to for brain dumping, for quickly jotting down TODOs or memos that can then be organized elsewhere. It’s my one true inbox, if you will, even though I’ve seen people use OmniFocus or Notion as their inbox(es). I like that it syncs between all my devices. They’ve added new fancy rich text features lately but I just use the bare bones features.

Despite being a long time Vimmer, I learned Org Mode and began using Emacs exclusively with Org Mode for tracking short term projects that can be checklists. The keyboard shortcuts I had to learn are pretty minimal (especially with Evil Mode) and I enjoy checking off the checklists in Org. I enjoy breaking down short term projects into ‘next actions’ and then marking them as done. I also adore the percentage or the counting features that automatically update as I cross things off. I don’t use other advanced features of Org e.g. tables or tags for this purpose.

I use the stock Apple Calendar for events that have dates. I’d also put one off events on there which are urgent and have to be attended to. Similar to Apple Notes this has the advantage of seamlessly synchronizing across my devices.

I also use plain old analog sticky notes or index cards to write down the one important thing for the day (which is not routine and not therefore covered by the aforementioned myriad of tools) that I want to accomplish that day.

I have a plaintext document elsewhere with a bucket list, which occasionally gets looked at in order to steer things in the right direction or course-correct.

I do gratitude journaling in Markdown, edited in Vim. I also use Vim for a running record of a given week (Neovim, btw, for those who care.)

For records of savings, investments, and other personal finance activities, I use strictly local (aka not synchronized via any cloud service) spreadsheets.

All this is for managing my personal life. At a given job, a very small subset of the above is used to manage work-specific tasks. As a matter of fact, since work often provides its own internal tools (like Jira, Miro, Asana), I’d normally just use Org Mode to cross off short term projects or work items, and use a plaintext file to keep track of yearly accomplishments (enormously helpful for doing checkins at the end of a given quarter).

The system is ever evolving. Now that I look at it, there is need to streamline and make it simpler and more canonical (aka ‘DRY’ to use a software analogy). To be honest, it is a little over the top. Maybe simplifying all that could be a future blog post. In fact, it will be a future blog post. Because streamlining and simplifying is a Good Thing™, something we should all always strive toward. I mean I haven’t even talked about Obsidian in this post which I’m now beginning to use for knowledge management!

Last but not least – you don’t have to be like me. This is just the way I do it. Don’t @ me with ‘oh this is needlessly complicated’. It’s just the way my system has become with time (and feels natural to me) and I will work on making it simpler 🙂 I will, I will I promise.