Reviving Your Productivity System
It’s going to happen: no matter how disciplined you’ve been about maintaining your productivity system (aka “Second Brain”) you’re going to hit a stretch where you just can’t keep up. You’ll sit down one morning and notice that your email Inbox has ballooned, your task list is a biblical scroll, mountain ranges of notes are forming on your desktop and in your notes app, and some creature scattered your documents everywhere. Don’t despair! You’re human. It happens… (I speak from experience!) The good news is that you can bounce back and so can your system.
I’ve designed a five-step action plan for reviving your productivity system. You can reboot your system in as little as 90 minutes. It may take longer, but I suggest you limit yourself to a maximum of four hours to complete the process. Your goal is to deal with the important overdue/missed tasks, not every overdue/missed task. The process is designed to be completed in 25 minute sprints (or pomodoros for those of you who practice the Pomodoro Technique). Pause for five minutes after each interval to rest and celebrate your progress. Complete your jumpstart in one day if possible and no more than two days—focus and momentum are essential to getting your system up and running again.
Even from where I’m sitting I can hear you saying, “You don’t understand, I’m so far behind it’s going to take me at least a week to catch up!” I do understand. (Again, I speak from experience.) You’ve heard of the five stages of grief, right? This is where you jump ahead to the fifth stage: acceptance. You will never get to every task you dropped, every email you didn’t respond to, every note you should have filed. And most of that won’t matter in the long run. The important thing now is finding the things you missed that do matter and handling them. (One last time, I speak from experience.) Take a deep breath in, forgive yourself, and let go of all your guilt as you breathe out...
Let’s get your productivity system back up and running!