Productivity-related topics. How I hack my life, do things better, faster and most of all, create long-lasting habits. I’m a constant productivity student. Now focused mostly on team productivity with the recent launch of Nozbe Teams.
Productivity-related topics. How I hack my life, do things better, faster and most of all, create long-lasting habits. I’m a constant productivity student. Now focused mostly on team productivity with the recent launch of Nozbe Teams.
Derek Sivers in his book “Anything You Want” coined the term: Hell yes, or no!. This basically means that if a decision is not an instant, exciting yes for you, it should be a no. Turns out my 4-year old daughter, Liliana, already gets it. She applies a very similar rule: I don’t love it.
Now after I’ve posted the details of my iPad Pro 11” home screen it’s time to share the Home Screen of my cute iPhone 12 Mini. As I was doing my annual review I decided to also simplify and reduce the number of apps on my iPhone’s screen as well as embrace the two things iOS14 was all about - the widgets and the app directory. Here’s the result:
About three years ago I posted a detailed screenshot of my iPad Home Screen with the list of apps I use that help me work #iPadOnly using iPad Pro 11” as my main computing device. That list hasn’t changed much over the years. Now that we’re entering 2021 I’ve decided to re-think and simplify my app setup. I hope this inspires you to set up your iPad as a more serious computing device that you can carry anywhere.
I like journaling daily. I like planning my next day in the evening. I like tracking how my day is going and what I spend my time on. Yes, I care about all these things and to make sure I do them consistently I prepared a Siri Shortcut (iOS only, sorry!) that helps me do just that! I hope you’ll also find it useful:
Just yesterday I posted a 9th episode of the Team Productivity Show which up until now was only available on YouTube. Now you can enjoy all of the 9 past episodes in an audio form - just subscribe to it as a podcast.
On my last webinar about working differently I did something crazy and performed a live demo of Nozbe Teams and turns out it went pretty great. It’s only 20 minutes and it shows clearly how easy it is to invite people to a team, create projects, add tasks and delegate them, and just make sure you know what’s going on in your team. Check it out:
Today I’d like to remind myself and you that to start a good habit of doing something consistently you should commit to doing it just once a week. And for best results, same day every week. This helped me start running and eventually doing triathlons. This will hopefully help me blog more regularly and reply to emails. From now on I’m committed to writing a new blog post every week on a Thursday and reviewing all my email backlog every week on a Friday. Details below.
I’ve been keeping a semi-regular journal for the past few years and every now and then I’m tweaking the way I approach it. In 2016 I posted why it’s important for me to journal regularly and who inspired me to do that. In 2018 I posted my updated workflows for journaling and planning the day with additional apps I was using - Ulysses, Bear, etc. Later I introduced the concept of intermittent journaling with updated workflows. For 2020 and iOS13 I decided to review and simplify all of this and now I write both my journal and daily planning in Bear app using only three Shortcuts in iOS - here are the details:
In the January isssue of iMagazine - the leading Polish lifestyle magazine I wrote a column challenging people to simplify their stuff (and the way they’re doing things) in 2020 - to make this year a year of simplifications and reducing the barriers of entry to things they want to be doing more of… to basically simplify in order to create good, meaningful habits.
Get iMagazine 01/2020 and read my column (in Polish)
Decision fatigue is real. It means that the quality of our decisions deteriorates as the days go by. We make better decisions in the morning when we’re rested… but by the end of the day we make worse decisions. So the key is to make most important decisions in the morning… and to reduce the number of decisions we make every day - and that’s where the concept of “pre-deciding” comes into play: