Minimalist productivity
Productivity is a vastly discussed topic, especially by unproductive, distracting YouTube videos. It is easy to fall down the optimization rabbit hole and end up installing tons of to-do apps, missing the main point.
That's why I think that minimalism and productivity are two sides of the same coin; what has worked for me is a “minimalist productivity” approach, reached after many adjustments over the past few years.
Why
When discussing such topics with friends and acquaintances, there will (statistically) be someone who scoffs planning and productivity as an expression of excessive rationality; according to him/her/whatever such cold rationality makes our the existence akin to machines, preventing a free, spontaneous life.
While there may be some truth to this, I find that a more deliberate, planned approach can actually give us more time. Not only does a productive system provide more accountability than a “spontaneous” approach, but it also provides insights by looking at the past.
Thinking in "systems"
When dealing with many projects, structuring ideas and notes into a system leads to a more manageable complexity. For me, this structuring process means moving in this fashion: vague resolutions > goals > projects > tasks, while keeping track of the related set of knowledge for each of them. I use Google Keep to gather and summarize project-related information.
- Project management: when starting a new project, I first proceed with a brain dump on paper, then organize these notes and convert them into macro tasks in Keep. I convert those activities into smaller, actionable items and I block time in Google Calendar to complete them.
- Time blocking: I use Google Calendar to block time for the project activities well in advance. Downtime should be scheduled too. The advantage is that you can completely relax during the downtime, because you know that you've already taken care of the rest. Moreover, the planned blocks can still be flexibly rescheduled; one should only be careful to not “overbook” and leave time for rest.
- Habit tracking: I see this mentioned often, however I do not find it useful. Recurrent events are already on my calendar and happening consistently.
However, being productive does not necessarily require such a complex system. I noticed that many people use plaintext productivity to stay on track. If you are really into the topic, to the point of OCD, Johnny Decimal will blow your mind with this level of detail.
Memory
Not relying on our biological memory and building a second memory helps to relieve mental effort and stress, while focusing more on our present reality. This generally boils down to three groups:
- Documents: any cloud drive is okay for storing them, better if there is an offline option as well
- Passwords: easy to manage with Bitwarden. No papers flying around, no ugly excel sheets, no pptx heroes. You can print the master password, put it in a safe place and tell a trusted person about it (for worst-case scenarios).
- Photos: following the 3-2-1 principle, I have 2 local copies, one per hard drive + a cloud backup
Retrospectives + planning
Journaling is a practice that, like to the previous one, can help reduce stress and unburden a busy mind. An added benefit is that, over time, a history of our thoughts, challenges and emotions slowly builds up. For me, this consists of jotting down notes spontaneously, plus a weekly retrospective and planning.
The retrospective, also known in Agile, helps us reflect on what went well or not, how we felt and what our values and perspectives were at a given time.
The planning phase itemizes the tasks to be done the following week for each area/project.
Information search
I really miss 10 years ago when communities were built around independent forums.
Fast forward to the 2020s and they seem to have been replaced - in a worse way - by Reddit (more social, entertainment-focus, unstructured) or Discord (many scattered communities, content not indexed by search engines). The trend of enshittification has also impacted Google’s results, currently mostly dominated by AI-generated fluffy SEO-optimized websites, Quora and other commercial answers.
Some of these are really annoying; fortunately they use a limited number of domains that can be obscured with the extension uBlocklist. A possible trick is appending “reddit” to the search terms to find informed opinions, moderated by humans. However, it is not clear how long this will last, as the platform is also rapidly moving towards enshittification in the name of profitability. Within each website I use uBlock Origin to remove the annoying o useless parts of the webpage.
Another big elephant in the room is generative AI, which has led to potentially unlimited possiblities to create content. Such content is often: unverified, verbose, strictly politically correct and potentially wrong. I do not recommend using LLM tools to search for and summarize information, as in my experience it is simply not worth it due to the potentiaI for very convincing answers containing gross errors.
Taming the smartphone
The natural design of the smartphone and its apps is to spend as much time as possible consuming content on it. This is possible thanks to a frictionless design that helps our lazy minds to slide into the easiest, default option. So we need to create some artificial obstacles to make using the phone less enjoyable. The key idea is to turn an entertainment device into a tool.
One option could be to go for the dumbphones, such as the Nokia 3310. I tried using one and in fact, it really does remove a lot of distractions. However, the price to pay is very high: no Google Maps, no banking apps, no video calls, no quick access to the browser for a quick search. For example, typing using T9 takes 2-3 times longer than using the modern on-screen keyboard, so the time saved can be wasted again on basic things like this. Therefore, I reached the conclusion that dumbing down a smartphone is the best compromise: it retains the “smart” features, but get rid of the crap.
I uninstalled all the distracting apps, and kept: Phone, Messages, Contacts, Clock, Store, Calculator, Camera, 2FA apps, Bitwarden, Browser (suggestion: Brave = Chrome + built-in adblocker), Drive, Email, Banking apps, Calendar, Maps. In addition, I switched from the default launcher to Olauncher (open source too) to avoid distractions on the home screen and remove the temptation to open distracting apps out of boredom.
I have set up timers for each app: 10 mins. Of course, you have to put them off from time to time, but manually extending the timer is more deliberate and still makes you more aware of how you are spending your time. On top of that, I found that setting the colour settings to grayscale also contributes to making the smartphones and their apps far less attractive and enjoyable.
Currently trying other stuff worth mentioning:
- getting my bearings from time to time using street names and directions without following Maps routes
- listening to music on an old iPod instead of Spotify
A privacy word
Most of the aforementioned systems are proprietary and lack strong privacy guarantees. There are cool open source projects out there, such as Nextcloud, that allow you to build your own private cloud. I have personally tried them, but they always have an additional overhead. In this case, in the trade-off between privacy and efficiency, I weigh the latter more heavily. That is, I decided then to sacrifice privacy, in exchange for a frictionless system.
Should this not hold true for you, PrivacyTools gives a good overview of private / open-source alternatives.
Wrapping up
Looking back at my productivity system, the different steps revolve around the same principles, namely:
- reducing to as few tools as possible
- fast, minimal systems to avoid friction
- making distracting things as inconvenient as it gets
- leveraging the power of habits
- looking at the past, learn from it and plan for the future
I think that as long as you cover these points, any system can lead to a more intentional life where we have a better control of our time.
Any ideas? Want to discuss further? Send me a flying duck with your message :)