How to Build the Ultimate Productivity System

How to Build the Ultimate Productivity System

This post will discuss how to create a productivity system. The first question is why you need a productivity system in the first place. 

The primary purpose is so that we can do the things we wish to do. We may do things that are important to us in an efficient manner without wasting time. So we’re less stressed while doing it. 

We don’t have to rely on our brain to perform things it’s not built to do, and we can almost think of this as a Venn diagram where we have the brain and our system and we can categorize tasks into one of three categories.

So type one tasks or things that our brain accomplishes best are things like creativity and enjoyment and relaxing and living in the present moment and all that good stuff interacting with other people.

type 2 work is something that we frequently utilize our brain for but our productivity system or some other system can probably execute a little more effectively. Keeping track of chores, calendars, and emails, for example, is extremely exhausting and stressful, particularly if you have a lot on your plate.

Third, there is type 3 stuff that we should certainly use some kind of mechanism for. In general, it entails memorizing information that is not immediately related to the things we genuinely care about. For example, memorizing phone numbers is a waste of time, as is memorizing a lot of people’s birthdays; you can just outsource that to a system like a calendar, and so on.

The concept of a productivity system is that productivity is the conscious and effective use of our time. So the goal of having a mechanism for it is to relieve our brain of some of the work.

So, in this post, we’re going to speak about three distinct layers of a productivity system that you may choose to develop if you believe that it helps you with your life, as it certainly helps mine, and we’re going to divide that into layer one, layer two, and layer three:

1. Ron layer

2. Hermione layer

1. RON LAYER

The first layer of the system, Ron, is all about keeping your life organized, and there are four different components that you require in a productivity system. In my humble view, to get to a point where your life is somewhat organized.

a. CALENDAR

Let the party begin! The first is a wall calendar. It’s remarkable how many individuals I know who don’t live their life on a calendar and try to remember everything in their brains, like events they need to attend, a friend inviting them to a birthday celebration two weeks from now, and supper with my mother next week. They will not write it down; instead, they will try to recall it.

Our brains are terrible at remembering these things, and one of the statements I often return to comes from David Allen, one of the world’s most famous productivity gurus, who argues that “your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.”

One of the productivity ideas to which I always return and have done for the previous five years is that my brain is an idiot. I don’t want my brain to have to remember stuff it doesn’t need to remember. So, feel free to use a traditional calendar if you choose, but almost everyone in the world nowadays utilizes some sort of digital calendar. Apps on your phone are usually beneficial. A calendar is quite useful for remembering.

The benefit of using a calendar is that you can set out time for each event independently. It’s great for doing what you need to do, but it’s also great for consciously carving out time for the things you genuinely want to accomplish. For example, work on a book, article writing, sports exercise, or a social media event, Reading, reciting, and so on.

The final reason to utilize a calendar is to enable automatic scheduling. Apps such as Calendly, tinycal, savvycal, and others generate a link that connects to your calendar. If you wanted to save the back and forth of scheduling, you could organize a meeting with someone, a Zoom call with someone you found on the internet, or even a hangout with pals. 

It’s just very beneficial, and it saves a lot of time, which means the brain doesn’t have to make all of the effort in organizing everything.

b. EMAIL MANAGEMENT

At the absolute least, every productivity solution needs some sort of email management system. 

That’s fine because most of us use Gmail. You can use very nice software called Superhuman, but it’s pricey; you have to pay for it, but it’s pretty solid.

There’s a new method to email that I like: one tap to inbox zero. The concept behind this strategy is that each email only touches your inbox once, and if it requires a calendar event, it goes into your calendar before being archived.

If it’s a to-do item that needs to be completed, it goes into your task manager (more on that in a moment), and the email is archived. If you need to refer to this information later, save it in a note-taking program. If it’s an article or something you’d like to read later, it’ll be saved in your Read it later app.

There are a few general tips that apply to emails as well, and they are completely game changers for productivity if you haven’t already done them.

The first is to simply unsubscribe from all of these strange emails, such as Amazon or sales or stores because all of this is unneeded. We don’t want to treat our inbox as a place where any marketer from any firm can just spam stuff into it.

You may make a smart filter in Gmail that searches the content of every email for the word unsubscribe. If the term unsubscribe appears in an email, it is most likely not important, because no actual person will email you with the word unsubscribe.

However, if you get a marketing communication or a newsletter or something and it has the term unsubscribe in it, you can just make it skip your inbox so it doesn’t fill it up.

c. TO-DO LIST

Having some sort of to-do list is a good productivity system. Again, your brain is for having ideas, not storing them. If you don’t write it down in a to-do list, your brain is unlikely to remember it. If you want to, you could do this with pen and paper. However, you can do a daily planner and a notebook.

If you don’t get all of those things done, that’s what you end up doing daily. When you have an idea for something, simply add it to your someday list. 

d. FILE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Anyway, the final component of our Ron-level productivity system is a file management system. This is simple information, however, many people do not have a good file management system. In general, you desire cloud storage. Personal Google Drive should be used for personal purposes, while business Google Drive should be used for business purposes.

These drives can be used anywhere and at any time. You do not need to copy and paste your files from one device to another. To access your files, you must first create a Google account. Searching, sorting, creating folders, and many other options and facilities are available in Google Drive, which is extremely useful for managing and discovering files.

So that was the Ron layer of the key life management productivity system. the four components that, in my humble opinion, every single individual requires to thrive in this world so that your brain is not overworked trying to retain all these strange things.

2. HERMIONE LAYER

The second tier of the productivity system is an optional bonus for people who read a lot of books. The Hermione level of the productivity system enters the picture, as do the modules that you can add to your basic productivity system if you consume a lot of books, audiobooks, podcasts, articles, or anything else that you might want to remember later.

This productivity system layer is all about taking notes. It’s about extracting information from the things we consume that speak to us. This is for those who have experienced that sensation. when you read or listen to all these things and get all these insights but don’t write them down and then a few months later you’ve forgotten what you read in that book that maybe altered your life.

That is the purpose of this level of the productivity system, and we have four more modules of the system here.

a. READING APPS

The first is reading apps such as Kindle, Epub Reader, ReadEra, and others. There are other ways to read, such as Apple Books, but the best one is that you don’t even need a physical book, but that is one of the most life-changing goods I recommend.

These apps are insane. People prefer to read eBooks over physical books. But it’s not just reading that you can do on these apps; it’s also highlighting. If you need to revisit something you learned from a book or a quote from a paranormal romance book that you particularly enjoyed, just open up my highlights and you’ll see everything that’s previously resonated with you.

b. READ IT LATER APPS

Following that, we have read later apps or choices within the same reading apps. One that I’ve been using for several years is called Instapaper. It’s free, and the point of Instapaper is that whenever you’re reading something or want to read an article on the internet, if you don’t want to read it on your phone or browser, you can just share it into Instapaper and it will just show up on your list.

When you have some free time, pull up Instapaper on your phone and browse through some of the articles. This sounds intriguing; it’s a bit of a self-help critique, and you can highlight stuff via that article as well; it’s quite helpful, and it’s simply a terrific method of separating the reading of articles from coming across the articles.

c. READ WISE APPS

The third component of the Hermione layer is a program called read-wise. It’s a small hub that takes in details like Kindle highlights and your Instapaper highlights, among other sources. It collects them all in one spot, and you can then export those highlights to apps like Idea or Rom (more on those in layer three), which is quite useful because now everything is automated.

Returning to the idea of a productivity system, people often question if you don’t need to remember all of these things because the system is remembering them for me, and then I trust that the system will resurface them as and when I need to access those highlights again.

d. NOTES

To make notes for revising or reviewing you don’t require a physical copy. You should also install some apps like Google Docs, Google Notes, or any other. With these apps, you can easily search again your notes whenever it’s required.

Conclusion

Productivity is not an auto-created thing. You have to create it for yourself as you want. You can around the world, some people wrote so many books in their life, and some invented a lot of new gadgets, some of them created many theories. But the rest of the people don’t make any definite achievements. The difference between both types of people is only productivity. 

Who created a productivity system for them they achieved so many successes and their names are written in history, and people will remember them till the end of the world. Therefore, I emphasize all people to manage productivity so that they can achieve success.