I used to think that to-do lists are not my thing after trying various methods and applications available to us. Every method I have tried, every application I have used, would be “awesome” for a few days, and soon I used to get bored of it. I could not get in sync with the lists. Either I would not be following what I set out to do, or I would be doing things that I did not put in it but which turned out to be important. From Apple Reminders to Todoist, from Notion to plain notes, I tried many of them but could not really find much added value from them at the time.
However, recently I came across a book called Getting Things Done. And I would say without any doubt that if you are into Productivity, and you are willing to read one and only one book throughout your entire life, make Getting Things Done that book.
Stress-Free Productivity
One of my favorite concepts from the book is stress-free productivity. Productivity is good, but STRESS-FREE PRODUCTIVITY is the real deal. When I say stress-free productivity, it means the ability to pick up a task from your list of to-dos and entirely focus on the task and get it done, without having to worry about things you might have missed or things you might have forgotten.
To clarify things further, let’s take any instance of any day of our lives. There are always lots and lots of things going on, and pending on our end. These things include the menial items on the lists such a getting Milk from the grocery store, or buying pet food from the market when we get there, or slightly bigger tasks such as calling a friend at some scheduled time, or critical tasks such as completing the document review at work, or publishing our drafts after getting it approved by the manager before the due date. The point is that we are always consciously or subconsciously thinking about all of these things regardless of its importance. And even the smallest of the tasks take up the brain’s resources, preventing us from doing our tasks with 100% focus.
Stress-free productivity is ideally not having to remember to buy pet food while reviewing the document at work or worrying about the project deadlines while shopping at the grocery store.
Although it may not sound so interesting or powerful, you will be able to finish your work in half the time with stress-free productivity.
The Core Principal
The core principle behind it, and what makes it possible, is to keep everything you need to remember or do or worry about in a trusted system. The moment you realize you need to do something, keep it in your trusted system so that you do not have to worry about forgetting it. Just this one step has changed my life so much and has made stress-free productivity possible.
The next step
After storing everything you need in a trusted system, the next step is to take some time to schedule it or categorize those tasks. After the categorizing or scheduling of the tasks, we can stop worrying about what to do, or forgetting to do important stuff, and just pick what we have scheduled for ourselves, or pick a project and complete the tasks under that project with full focus and productivity.
There are countless systems or applications we can use to achieve this. I use an application called Todoist as the first layer of storage. Throughout the day, any task that comes across my mind, I insert it into the application. The application has widgets for Android and iOS to quickly insert new tasks that make the process even smoother and faster.
The cool thing about this app is the inbox feature. Anything you insert to the app from these shortcuts go to the “Inbox” which basically acts like the tasks we need to categorize. Something like a queue of pending items.
Periodically, I look at all the tasks I have created and arrange them into projects and schedule them as needed so that I do not need to worry about them when its not necessary. Once I assign the tasks to the respective projects the inboxed tasks are automatically moved to the respective lists.
When I need to view the things due today, the Today feature shows all the tasks from all the projects that are due today, saving me the trouble of having to go through each lists.
These simple things have significantly raised the level of my productivity. I encourage you to do the same!
Thank you for reading!
