I’m just currently wondering, how to be more productive. I think that for now this question occurs quite often because of productivity addiction. There is a huge amount of videos on YouTube, blog posts and podcasts about productivity. Some of them even discus if it is really needed - to be productive. Anyway, should it be like a goal of all your life or not, everyone want to achieve some goals and results. From this point of view you either do something, or not. People can discuss what approach of making things done to use, which one is better. They can plan anything, create endless TODO lists, fill bullet journals with beautiful staff like stickers and color headers. But at the end the main idea is to reach some results. And I have problem exactly with the main point :-). And for me now nothing is helpful enough alongside, I couldn’t go forward after planning. Dozens of different approaches for planning and almost no results.

I tried google calendar with blocking. More about time blocking in following resources:
How to Win Your Day with Time Blocking - YouTube

Of course here not all the time is filled out. But even in filled time I somehow don’t want to do that I should. And because of this do less that I actually can.

Someone could say that this is problem of motivation… - Ok, I’m trying to break big task to smaller subtasks and use all kind of checkboxes to have a filling of finished task and to get so dopamine from that. Almost no result. It is just so enticing to do nothing… It is better to search in the internet how other people are more productive then you and to blame yourself for not enough efforts.

Next step - pomodoro method. To make yourself doing something is easier for not so long time. Moreover, 25 minutes - it is not so much right? Especially when you have some beautiful timer app. I used this one:
focus to do - Android Apps on Google Play
Here you can grow a tree or a forest (for me it was just a sprout because of my “huge patient”:-), but at the beginning it was fan to catch suns). So you already understand that it didn’t become more then a sprout. So think that again almost no result.

After that I thought that it is not enough to have a pomodoro method and a list of tasks. I need like a plan for the day. As pomodoro session is not so big, I can plan all my current task for every day and try to do something from each section. Currently my plan looks following way:

The idea to put this list right on the desk and always see that you need to do today as a daily routine and also see what is weak side of your productivity (Like for example you can see that for me it is studying from some learning platforms). Also I’m trying to track not only daily tasks but also something which I should do maybe one a month or a week. But all this staff is not currently the theme of this post. To be hones it is a second version of such list, so you can imagine that it doesn’t work as a single tool as well.

So as a last chance to be productive I decided to combine all this tries. I still have google calendar (which actually is very convenient especially for events or calls) with time blocking. Also I have Google Task lists with small tasks for almost each line of paper daily plan. I’m trying to use pomodoro method for that list, to force myself to not pass anything. And finally I wrote about all this staff here. Like maybe as it is published, it will be a shame to fail the idea. Let’s see how long this can last and how effective it can be.

Hope a successful continuation follows :-)