Personal productivity – Follow Ups

Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly interested in personal productivity. I can’t pinpoint it exactly but I guess it must have been at some point during my second year at university that I realized that even with very little sleep I only had so much time to get things done in-between getting up and hanging out at the bar in our student residence in the evenings…

Previously - during my last two years at schools – I started heavily relying on all sorts of lists, both on paper and my computer, to keep an overview of the things I had to do. Later I started using my mobile phone to write down all kinds of thoughts, ideas, to-do’s and other information while on the road.

I now have a pretty confusing (for outsiders) system of post-its (I count about 20 on my desk at this very moment), notes/tasks on my mobile phone (sync’ed to my computer) and e-mail tagging rules to to organize my to-do’s.

However lately I’ve been hitting a road block as I’m realizing that doing things is one thing, but following up and following through with something you’ve started doing is something entirely different.

For example for olpcnews we often get contacted by guest authors who want to submit an article. I read through the submission, write up some feedback and send it back to the author. My to-do list for the day then says read Ubuntu-for-XO submission.

Now the problem here is that I’ve only done part of what is really a multi-step task. And it’s all too easy to forget about the other steps in case I don’t get a reply from the original author which automatically triggers me to setup a new to-do task.

Dealing with this kind of scenario has become increasingly error-prone and time consuming. For some time I kept a second list on my desk with the names of people I had to follow up with on something. I also set myself reminders on my phone to follow up whether something has been done x days after I completed my initial task. Needless to say all of that only works so well and creates quite a lot of overhead…

One thing that would tremendously help me is an extension for  Thunderbird (my e-mail client of choice) which would allow me to set an automatic follow-up reminder before sending an e-mail. (Potentially even customizable depending on what kind of e-mail I send, e.g. replies to messages sent to editors [ AT] olpcnews [DOT] com come with a default 3-day reminder.)

The same kind of functionality should also be available for my mobile phone (which runs Symbian S60 3rd edition), allowing me to mark a task as done, setting up an automatic reminder and then pushing it off my regular tasks list and onto a separate follow-up list.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen any efforts heading into that direction so I guess for the moment being I’m stuck with my current system…

Blog: Personal Productivity – thoughts on follow-ups

Seeking a routine

On my way to work today I thought about how much routine I've had in my life for the majority of the past 6 months. In fact I haven't had such a regular routine since I finished my year of compulsory social service back in 2004. The reason why I'm emphasizing regular here is simple: I might call drinking beer and hanging out with friends in front of our student residence (spring 2005 was awesome!) or working until dawn and subsequently sleeping until 11:30 a.m. a routine but I fear the majority of society would disagree with me there. Not that it's been that bad in the past 2 1/2 years. However I still rather seldomely managed to go to bed before 3 a.m. and in my eternal quest to approximate my sleep to 6 hours / night I often don't get up until 10 a.m. or so.

But in the past half year I've pretty much followed the routine of a 9-to-5 office worker and always had to get up by 7 a.m. Now I can tell you that when getting up at that time I'm hardly more than a vegetable for the majority of the morning. However it's still quite good to have a regular routine and it feels great to go to lunch having been at least somewhat productive already.

So now the goal is to find a reasonable compromise which gets me through the upcoming university semester starting at the beginning of October. My current thinking is to try and get up around 8:30 which sounds more or less doable. With the goal of ideally sleeping 6 hours and knowing that I cope quite well with 4 1/2 hours of sleep that gives me enough time in the evenings and nights to get things done. With my old routine I consistently seemed to be most productive in the late afternoons and between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. If I could add 2~3 hours of actual and productive work in the mornings then I'd be very happy indeed.

Of course there's always a (big?) difference between theory and practice but I certainly hope to achieve my goals. I just set myself a reminder on my mobile phone to re-visit this topic 2 months down the road, it will be interesting to see where how things go until then.