My Little Personal Productivity System

A couple of people have asked about the productivity system I’ve set up for myself this year, so I decided to write it up as a blog or article (and probably a video after) or whatever it is we’re doing here. I’m definitely guilty of falling into the productivity porn trap before—many, many times—where I’ll read or watch a youtube video about a new shiny method of really for real this time getting things done, try it out for a little white and then… just stop. Is it that the system is bad, or that I’m bad, or it’s just not for me? Who knows—but I do know that I have a pile of dead bodies of half-started productivity efforts around here. It’s a fucking mess, honestly.

So before we start, a couple of caveats: I’ve only been using this iteration of this system for a month or so, since the end of December, and it’s had its ups and downs. But it feels sustainable so far, so I’m going to keep giving it a go for a while. Also, if you don’t know me, hi, I’m Marc, and I’ve got wicked ADHD with a heaping side order of depression and anxiety to spice things up in this brain. It’s really hard for me to stick to a schedule for any length of time, or to do “just a little bit every day”, and I’m trying to figure out how to work with that, rather than against it. I don’t know that I’ve got it all figured it entirely, and I can’t necessarily recommend this (or anything, really) to anyone that’s not me. But, if any of this this helps you figure out something that works for you, great! I’ve smashed together bits and pieces from all over to get this far, so hopefully you can do the same with anything you can take away from this.

(Hey, look, while I was writing this, I popped over to youtube to find the video that originally inspired it, and got sucked away for like an hour and a half. Can the system account for this? Watch to the end to find out! [1])

So, what I’ve wound up with is a combination of a few things: Theme Seasons, Quarterly Quests, a Weekly Reset, and Morning Manifests. These are just weird ways of saying that I set some long and short term goals, and check in on them on a regular basis in some particular ways. I do all this using a bunch of tools: Obsidian, Google Sheets, Todoist, and 750words. You don’t have to use all these, of course, but they’re what works for me.

First off, the big picture: Seasonal Themes and Quarterly Quests. (I don’t actually call them “Quests”, but let’s go with that for now.)

Seasonal Themes

My Seasonal Themes are what kind of kicked this all off for me—I’m sure I saw a video or something about the ThemeSystem, which I’m sure works great for some folks, but was simultaneously too vague and too granular for me. But I did take away the idea of picking a one-word theme and using that as a general heuristic for doing things for the next three months. So, every solstice and equinox, I pick a theme and try to make sure the things I do for that period of time are in alignment with that theme. The first one I chose in winter of 2022 was the “Season of Embarkment”—the basic idea was that covid and isolation had taken a toll on me, so when I had to choose a thing to do, I’d lean towards whatever got me out of the house and doing things with other people. Someone says, hey, let’s do karaoke or go to a play or get coffee or play games or whatever, and I don’t have to decide whether or not I want to do it—it aligns with the seasonal theme, so I just go.

Other themes have been: “Foundation” (building or setting baselines to work from more easily), “Completion” (actually finishing things that I’d started and left undone), “Regularity” (my note on that one was Boy Did I Do A Bad Job There), “Transparency”, and so on. I have a MOC (“Map of Content” or index) file for my themes in Obsidian that’s prominently linked from my Home document, and I just list them out there. For each one, I start a new document with a statement paragraph for guidance that says What I’m doing with it, Why I chose this particular theme, and How exactly I’m going to get there. So, for this current one that started December 21st, it’s the Season of Re-Emergence—similar to the original one, I’ve kind of fallen off track and hunkered down a bit, and moving to a new city and trying to get settled and figure stuff out and being unemployed for a long time hasn’t helped, so it looks like:

What: I’ve been holed up for too long just doing my regular stuff and making do, so I’m going to get myself out there more.

Why: Because there are a lot of things that I can’t do by myself, and I’d like more recognition for the things that I actually do.

How: Create more media on youtube, maybe podcast or blog (hi!) some, publish more physical games, and get the house here in East Lansing put together and set up to host friends and guests.

That’s setting the overall destination for the season, and then the Quarterly Quests are the more mechanical part. New Year’s resolutions don’t work for me (or most people, I don’t think) because a year is just way too big of a chunk to think about and effectively plan for and execute on. So to work alongside my three-month seasons, I’m using the same checkpoint to set three or four big goals for the quarter as well. I’ll shoot a little high, and if I don’t absolutely nail it, that’s still okay—I just don’t want to set the bar too low and then knock them all out in the first month. That would mean either more effort to re-orient, or worse, just drift aimlessly until the next quarter, because that’d probably mean that I’d likely forget about the whole thing, and that’s no good.

Quarterly Quests

Right now, my three main goals (or Quests) for the quarter are aligned with the season’s theme, and they’re specific, measurable things that I can easily tell whether I hit them or not:

1) Post ten videos on youtube and make three podcast episodes in order to create more visibility for me and my work. (With a side quest of blogging more, for the same.)
2) Get at least one more title into print and sent to Indie Press Revolution for distribution — more if possible—in order to get my games in front of more people.
3) Get completely unpacked and organized in the new house in East Lansing so we can start making new friends and hosting them and building a better social life here.

Notice that each of those goals has both an aspect that I can measure, and a “because”—I’m not just choosing arbitrary things that I feel like I could do. Each one has a reason for doing it that aligns with what I’m looking to achieve with the seasonal theme.

So now I’ve got three months to get these things done, and they seem like kind of big chunks, so I need to break things down even more, and that’s where the weekly review (or reset) comes in.

Weekly Review/Reset

I used to write up monthly review posts here, and I do still keep a monthly log in Obsidian to keep track of things that I’ve played or read or watched, keep a general eye on health and home stuff (and work, when that was a thing). But that’s just kind of a place for making lists and collecting things to remind myself of later—to actually make progress towards those quarterly goals, I do a differently structured review (or reset?) every week. I find the smaller chunks easier to manage, and they help me steer a little bit better—like driving, making small adjustments as you go is going to work much better than trying to calculate your direction at the start of the trip, lining yourself up, and hoping for the best.

The format I use here is super simple, and takes about fifteen minutes. (I used to do a thing that took up way more time, which made me not want to do it, so I didn’t, and now here we are. I was going to look that up for reference, but it makes me tired just thinking about it.)

It goes like this: I have an Obsidian document for the quarter, and start a new heading in that for each week. Under that heading, I write down what my Quarterly Quests are—and typing them out is kind of important for me, because doing that helps me stay actively focused on them, instead of just skimming over them and mentally going yeah yeah yeah. So I’ll write those out, and then briefly summarize how I think they’re going.

Then I do a quick review of things I’ve done or accomplished in the past week—it’s just a simple list, and it’s pretty easy for me know because of the logging I do in the monthly document I talked about above, my morning and evening daily journal, and having everything (including working time blocks) on my Google Calendar. So, a dozen quick bullet points just to remind myself, hey, I actually did do some stuff, and I wasn’t just a lazy jerk all week, even if that’s what it feels like sometimes.

And—this is pretty important for the whole mindset part of it all—the weekly check in isn’t to judge or see if I was good or bad or to beat myself up for not getting things done that I wanted or needed to do (which, honestly, I still do a lot), but just to notice them, and take them into account for next time. Like, I completely blew the Season of Regularity back there, because that’s just not how my brain is wired—I need to have a daily checklist of things to do in Todoist, and if I somehow lost track of that, i’d be totally screwed. So, I try to just notice what works and what doesn’t, use that as information going forward, and let the rest of it go. (Easier said than done, of course, but I gotta try…)

Then the third and final part of the weekly review is just choosing my top three things that I’d like to work on this week, and writing those down in priority order. And that’s it! It’s super fast, no more than five minutes or so, and now I have a short-term vision for the coming week based on the longer-term goals that I’ve set for myself for the quarter.

Daily Manifest

Now that I know what I’m doing for the week, it’s just down to the daily stuff. The video that inspired me to do this part calls it the “Morning Manifesto” (that’s also where the “Quarterly Quest” thing comes from), but I kind of think of it as a “morning manifest”, just the checklist of things I’m on the hook for today.

I have a recurring daily p1 task in my Todoist that contains a bunch of sub-tasks that I need to do every day. That includes basic stuff like “take pills, brush teeth, make coffee, shower, go to sleep, dummy” that would just be a habit for most people, but I need to make explicit. Then there’s the other routines that I’m trying to keep, like feeding the bunnies, or reading a chapter of War and Peace every day, or painting a little diary card every night, or writing my morning journal—and doing the morning manifest along with it.

So after my coffee and inbox zero and a few other little distractions, I open up my daily journal on 750words and get to it. The Morning Manifest just has two (well, and a half) parts—restating my weekly tasks, typing them out manually and doing a quick check in on how I think they’re going, then setting out the three main things that I want to get done today to make progress on those tasks. I’ll label those one, two, and three, enter them as p1 tasks in Todoist, and also make a note for them in my daily focus log in Google Sheets. I know it sounds a little fiddly to manually put them in a few different places, but that helps me—the more hands-on this part of the process is, the more likely I am to actually do them, since I have to get my hands dirty a little bit. If it’s too automated, I can just let it all kind of slide, which is no good.

Then during the day—ideally, on a good day—I’ll set up time blocks on my Google Calendar for those three tasks, and I’ll use the pomodoro timer I’ve got set up in Chrome (I use Marinara right now, but it looks like that might be going away soon) to track how many chunks of work I can get done. I’ll track those pomodoros on my focus log in Sheets, as well—I’ve added some little fussy bits, like calculating how many pomodoros I get done each day, what the monthly average is and whatnot, but the most important parts are just blocking out the time, using the timer, and logging the work chunks so I can see that I’m making progress—or not.

So yeah, that’s basically it! I decide on a direction every quarter, set some goals for those three months, review those goals weekly to see how they’re going and set tasks that align with them, use my morning journal to look at those weekly tasks to figure out what I’m doing each day, then time block and pomodoro and track my progress. There’s a little bit of administrative overhead, doing the quarterly and weekly reviews and managing all the Obsidian documents and Google Sheets and todo lists on a handful of different platforms, but like I said, a bit of manual fiddliness really does help the whole thing stick in my disordered brain.

So the actual question becomes: is it working? Well… kind of?

I have made some actual tangible progress on all three of the main goals I’ve set for myself this quarter. I’m a bit over a month in, and I’ve been writing blogs and scripts and publishing youtube videos, I’m making headway on an RPG zine (Roguelike, a duo storytelling game based on an improv format that my friend Ryan and I did a while aog, with an ASCII art tarot deck to go along with it), and the house in more or less ready to go—we’re actually having some new friends over for a game night tomorrow! So yeah, I’ve still got a couple of months to go, and it all feels pretty doable right now.

Is the system robust enough to work around my spicy brain? Well… I’ve had a hard week or so here, and I’ve made very little progress on anything. But, I can not only see hey, here are some days with a lot of zero work logged and dead time all around, but I can also see the things that I actually have been doing, which helps counteract the despair a little bit. And even though I have fallen behind a bit, I have a good view of where I’m actually at, and I can see that I’ve got plenty of wiggle room to hit my goals—or get close, at least—and that feels pretty okay. Progress is good.

I’ll check in again when the spring equinox rolls around—I’ll see where I’m at with everything, and I’ll have a better sense of where I want to go next and how to point myself in the right direction to get there. And… yeah, I guess I just do that until I’m done? Which, as a side benefit, I get to see all the things I’ve got left to do in my life, and how little time I have to do them in, in the long term. So, I’m just going to keep plugging away until I can’t plug away any more.

So yeah, that’s the system! It’s janky and frankensteined together, but so far it’s been pretty good. I hope that you can find something in here that’s useful for you. There’s links throughout to a few things that have inspired me and helped me get to where I am here, and if you have any feedback or suggestions for tweaks and improvements, I’m all ears.

[1] Lol, no.