I’ve tried everything. Books, journals, notebooks, desk planners, wall calendars, digital apps, time blocking, colour-coded spreadsheets. Some I used for 5 minutes, some for 5 days. None of them lasted 5 months. They didn’t stick because they weren’t created for me. They were built for someone else.

Sound familiar? This stop-start cycle trips most people up.

productivity tools.

So, which productivity tool or tools are the winning formula?

I know that digital planning doesn’t work for me, although I still try the latest tools when I hear about them. They never work. I am a paper and pen person.

Notebooks are interesting for me. I love a notebook. I love writing lists. They work up to a point. The issue for me is that they can be the most beautiful, detailed, works of art but they sit on my desk closed. I can feel the words on the pages trying to reach my brain, but I don’t pick them up and look at them. They need to be open and easy to access.

procrasti-learning.

The hours I’ve wasted trying to learn how to work better. How to organise myself. It’s exciting when you read something new. It feels like you’ve finally found the solution that will work for you. You set aside time to figure it out, set it up, put it into action. Only to be disappointed because, yet again, it doesn’t quite work. So, you do more research. Read another book, listen to another podcast.

All this learning only for your hopes to be dashed each time. You are planning to plan. Organising yourself to get organised. Time blocking to create time blocks. It’s a vicious circle. And yet it’s also very simple. You are procrasti-learning. Putting off what you need to do by doing something else instead. The hardest part is that you feel like you are doing something useful. Learning is good, right? Not if it’s replacing the work itself. Reading about productivity instead of being productive creates the feeling of progress when nothing is really happening. It’s a clear case of the knowing-doing gap in action.

how do you work?

This is the question to ask yourself. Not how should you work. Or how does a successful person work. They aren’t you and their solutions won’t work for you. Time blocking doesn’t work for me. Not in the colour-coded, map-out-your-day sense. I like something visual, something that is in my eyeline all day. I spent hours creating calendars, spreadsheets, colour coded blocks. After a day they didn’t work. They were too complicated, didn’t effectively balance structure with flexibility.

I stopped creating them and asked myself what I needed. I realised I didn’t need my whole day mapped out in 15-minute blocks with a colour code I needed to refer to so I can decipher my next task. I also realised that creating a plan on my laptop and printing it out wasn’t working very well.

Now, I have a coloured card where, the night before, I map out my day with 2-3 key things I want to get done. I have a few time stamps to tell me when I’ll have breakfast, what time I want to run by, any calls and meetings. The rest of the things I want to get done are written in a rough order. I don’t have more than 3 work tasks.

The next time you pick up a new tool, before you set it up, spend five minutes on one question: how do I work? That’s how you start habit hacking.

If you’ve tried everything and nothing has stuck, that’s where I start. Book a free introductory call.