Productivity Systems Are Like Walking Sticks – The Climb #560

Friday 4^th September 2020

I’ve been caring for pets and ol’ crispy (as they are now known) for just over a week now, but it seems like a lot longer.

As a result, a lot of my own tasks and jobs have been put on hold. There was a time when recovering from that would have been a nightmare, as I scrambled to remember what I needed to be doing and what project was where. However, I know bringing myself back up to speed won’t be a massive ball ache.

This is the thing I’ve learnt about productivity systems. Good ones are a bit like a walking stick. You lean on them only when you need to.

I used to feel guilty that I’d sometimes fall off the wagon, that I’d not use my task management system when I was really busy. I’d slowly but surely get myself into a bit of a mess and then sit down, go through all my tasks, crossing off the ones I’d done and rescheduling the ones I’d missed. I always felt like I failed – that I’d put in this great productivity system and then failed to use it.

The thing is, it’s there to aid you, not control you. When I properly use it, I’m ridiculously productive. When I’m feeling ill, or busy, things get missed and I feel so unproductive. The truth is that it’s a safety net. Things still get done, just a bit slower. Whilst it’s there to help me achieve super-productivity by allowing me to batch tasks, it’s also there to ensure things don’t get lost when I’m not feeling so productive.

What I like about mine is that it’s robust. So I can have a week where nothing gets done because of Burngeddon, but can go back to it and quickly get back into it.

The addition of planning this year has added another layer of complexity into my system, and I’m still finding my way with it. If the task management is the now, then the planning is the future. I think it’ll be the end of the year before I can really comment on it but it’s helped me have more direction.

The truth of the matter is that even when I’m not feeling super-unproductive, I’ve managed to get a load done, because I am able to quickly pick back up again afterwards. I can choose to look at Lockdown as a time I muddled through or see how having productivity systems allowed me to continue to navigate forwards despite loads of challenges and feeling unproductive.

Of course, I love it when I’m super-productive, and I want to be able to be that in the coming months, but I like that the systems I have in place are such that even at my worst, things get done in good time.

Despite all that has happened in the last week, a couple of hours and I can be back up to speed.