We all want to be productive, right? We need to know that we’re getting things done. Not just that, that we’re getting the right things done. We have to balance all the aspects too. Home maintenance (that door handle is falling off the door), work stuff (yes, this project is three months late), and whatever clubs and extra-curricular activities we (or others) are involved in. Some people find this easy. To those people, I say “hats off, if you knew how hard it is for the rest of us you would feel really proud of that trait.” For those of us suffering from some level of executive dysfunction, this is the hardest thing to get right. Funnily enough, because the number of people who struggle with this issue is large enough, the only thing I can say for certain is that there is no one size fits all solution. No matter what the advertising (or your favourite YouTuber) might say.
This here is my approach to things. I am still working through some of the finer issues, and I don’t even know if I will consider it the correct solution a year from now. I have tried some things because of good advertising, and found them severely lacking. Other techniques have been things I found on my own, which landed in exactly the right spot for me. So, Let’s have a look at some of the tools I use, and some of the tools I misuse.
Offline and Tactile
The first tool to bring up is an odd one. It is a physical magnetic white board week planner. Yep – I still like to have a thing to write on physically. It is because I am a very tactile person. I need to be thoroughly involved in my planning process. The act of spending time with a marker on Monday means I have an easy to see breakdown of the things I have planned for each day of the week. Up to, and including, which day I need to remember that I am scheduled to cook dinner. It has space for notes, where I can write in a quote or a message for myself. Or I can add something which is a couple of weeks away and I want to keep in mind. And every week it gets wiped clean. There is a fresh start. It isn’t perfect, and sometimes I’ll skip out or change up the plan. For example writing a blog post on Tuesday because I had a good idea, rather than doing it on Thursday when it is “due”. It allows me to disconnect from my phone or from a widget on my computer, which is good, since I can’t reliably have those visible at all times.
Before buying the white board version, I experimented with printing out a page every Monday and sticking it to the wall with presstick. Not a bad option, but I find if I do something like that I am tempted to hold onto the old pages as a journal of sorts, and then I just get clutter everywhere. It was a good way of testing if the system would work though, as I didn’t really have to make an upfront investment. I could even have done the same thing with a pencil, ruler, and blank paper. I am somewhat lazy though, and the thought of doing that every week was not appealing.
Building Routine
Part of the process of productivity (at least in my personal life) is building routines. I have several things I have tried to get into a routine with, and my success has varied wildly. I have also used a couple of different apps to try and get this right, and many of them just “didn’t click” with my brain. Let’s start with things which I tried, but weren’t the right fit for me. All of these are things on my phone – currently an iPhone (there is a whole rant on how to choose a good phone in that one), so the app may or may not be available on a different device. Let’s begin with Habitica. This app is an odd one. I love the concept, and yet it still failed for me. Possibly because I’m not much of a gamer. Habitica turns your chores and routines into the tasks you must complete to level up in your personal RPG. It allows you to team up with friends to achieve quests, and you take damage if you don’t do everything you aimed for. I never really got into it, and so despite using it for a few months, it eventually lapsed. As did the habits I was trying to build. I actually don’t remember when I last opened the app, so when I pulled it up to see what habits I had in it today, guess what? My character was dead…
So, why does this not work for me? Why did the game not suite my needs? Let’s start with the fact that these kinds of games have never worked for me. Edutainment, yes. Gamification of daily life, not really. The trick is that daily life is a lot more complicated than the game system is designed for. If I am ill, and exercise is a bad idea, I will not exercise. If the system in which I am tracking the habit can’t account for the fact that I have legitimately skipped something, I will simply be disappointed and feel like I failed. Even though I didn’t. The other thing is ADHD. Out of sight, out of mind. Without a simple and easy to use home screen widget (they might have one now, they didn’t when I was trying to use it) I will possibly do my tasks, but will then not tick them off because I have to open my phone, open a specific app, not get distracted by messages, and check off my tasks. Also, the game quests are too “abstract” and not really “fun and story oriented” enough for me. Weird thing to have a problem with, but I need a story. I need a through line of what the character is trying to achieve. Just having random quests is fun, but what is my goal? How do I win this? So, there are some good points to this app, but it just didn’t solve my problem.
The next routine app I tried was one that I tried because of good advertising and a tired brain. I even paid money for the pro version, and then promptly realised that was stupid. Why? Because any app that is only usable in the pro version is probably not quite what I’m after. I don’t mind having a pro version which I choose to pay for after I have got used to the way something works. Or to pay money to be able to use it more. I even don’t mind paying money towards a project I like where the pro version doesn’t add to my experience. But if I can’t get use out of the free part of the app, I am likely going to regret paying money. So, what was it? Me+ one of a suite of apps from the Enerjoy group. It actually did help me put some routines into place. I will give it that. There are some simple daily things which I was not doing consistently, and having paid money for the app I felt it was necessary for me to actually try and use it as intended. I did manage to get those routines in place, and because they were simple enough, and are easy to maintain with variation, I still have them. I just no longer feel the need to check off the fact that I managed to make my bed this morning. The idea of having daily and weekly items with easy recurrence was great. I could set up some things pretty easily at the beginning, and then start working through those specific habits to build a better routine.
So what went wrong? A concept which comes up a lot for me. There is not a lot of room for grace. And the widget story didn’t really suit my work flow. I did like the little confetti display when I finished all the things for the day. That was cute. But if something threw me off the routine, I really struggled to get it back. And the app wasn’t helping me with that. It simply looked sad that I didn’t do the thing. I could go back and check it off anyway, but that felt like cheating. Also, it has a bunch of “ADHD ready plans” which are supposed to help you do the things. For someone like me, those plans were just overwhelm on a page. Something a lot of us forget, is we have to start where we are. We can’t where we wish we were. So, if I am struggling to build any routine of cleaning my house, it doesn’t help to have a list of seventeen things I need to do each week. I need to drop that down to one thing each week. Or one small thing each day. Starting with small things, and slowly adding in more as I get on top of the original lot. Then when life changes shape and other routines change, change the system to work with that. Once again, life is complicated and has a lot of moving parts. I don’t want to feel bad about having to allow for variation in the system. I actually think Me+ is pretty good (apart from the premium stuff), I just, got tired of it and moved on when it wasn’t quite the right fit.
Let us now look at the third imperfect app. To be fair, this is the best fit I have found so far, even though it is imperfect. Mostly because I think it has the best widget, and I have since seen other apps which try to have similar widgets. But they are all also usually trying to do too many things at once. Habit Tracker is really really simple. I am sure it has a whole bunch of features I am not using, and that there is a whole lot more I could be getting from it. But as it is, I don’t need anything more than what I am doing. I know it is one that works, because my longest streak (walking my dog) is at 896 days. That’s well over two years of ticking things off. Did I actually tick it off every day? No, but you can go back in time and adjust for the days when you and the dog were on vacation, and he definitely got a walk, you just kinda forgot to mark it done. And it allows me to skip. So, if the doggo had a very stimulating day and didn’t really need a walk? I can skip and the streak is maintained. Or if I was away, and I am trusting that someone else did the walking, I can do the same.
For daily routine items like this, I love the way it works. The widget is clear and obvious, marking a thing as done is easy to do, and that’s all there is to it. It gets more complicated for weekly tasks. I haven’t really looked into how it would work if I had something which I have to do only on a Tuesday (put out the bin to be emptied). But I can put in a “do x many times in a week” and have that count weekly streaks. Which works amazingly for something like an exercise goal. If I make the goal that I need to do exercise four times in a week, I can mark one session done at the time I do it, and the progress bar fills up, and resets each Monday. I can add to the goal twice in one day if I run in the morning and attend team training in the evening. It allows me the right level of flexibility to actually achieve a goal. I could (if the widget had more space) split out my exercise and be specific about strength vs running.
What I have found it isn’t great for is more nebulous goals. Mostly because they are not well enough defined to achieve them. What does it mean to do four chores in a week? Obviously laundry counts, but does cooking dinner? I can’t really blame the app for my own disorganised mind. It does the things I use it for admirably, and I like the fact that it is a simple app which does one thing well. Which might be why I’ve managed to use it for so long.
Tracking Projects
Not all of productivity is routine. We often have these massive lists of things which need to happen at some point, either for work, or for home. To this I say, choose the right tool for the goal you are trying to achieve. Don’t try and shoehorn everything into one app, unless you have one app that really can do everything. If that is the case, well, maybe I need to expand my horizons a little. On that note – I’m a software person. I’ve used Scrum, Scrum-like, and Kanban-ish processes for years. When it comes to project management, those are my go-to processes. So, when I need a tool to manage the backlog which is my at home wish list of jobs? I went for something I knew from the software world. Jira is a well known project management application for software projects. It gives you backlog management, issue tracking, the ability to build scrum boards or kanban boards. Everything you could want. Not great for recurring tasks like mowing the grass, or cleaning the kitchen, but for tracking the steps to get an air conditioner installed in your office? Surprisingly good.
Sure, it might be slightly overkill for a lot of things. And I’ll admit that I do not follow a full scrum process with my personal life. But it helps me to keep track of the bigger things. Many of my projects are DIY things which really are multi-step. They will need a design, parts to be ordered (usually wood) and then there is a set of steps which need to be followed. The order may not be crucial, but I do need to get all of them done. This fits the scrum board nicely. I can track the project from my phone or from my computer, and I can ensure that I don’t miss out on any steps. Going further, I have broken my home-improvement list into a set of epic tasks, each of which has a list of stories to fulfil. I can easily filter my backlog by “waterproof the house” or “make the bathrooms nicer” with a couple of clicks. I can also just look at the entire list, and laugh at the idea of doing all of it.
None of this makes Jira the only, or even the best, app for the job. It is the one I started using because it had the really low barrier to entry of being something I am used to from work. I have been looking at some other tools, and I am starting to think that Todoist would be able to achieve many similar goals, whilst being aimed at a slightly less technical audience. The main point being, having multiple different tools for different aspects of productivity is not such a bad thing.
Daily Tasks
Some stuff is not routine. It doesn’t make sense to plan on Monday to do it on Friday, because on Friday it might just not appeal. If you know it is something which you must get done this week you might want to plan it early so as to avoid procrastinating it. But other things will come up on the day and should be added to a list somewhere. I’ve tried a handful of things for this. The default reminders app on my phone isn’t bad (telling Siri to set a reminder can be quite helpful). But I tend to forget about it, or use the widgets wrong, or it gets complicated trying to just know what I should be doing today, and what can wait for tomorrow or even next week. And I often sit over my morning coffee and think through the shape of my day, what I want to get done. That is when I want to be setting up these reminders. I can put them on my phone, but the default iPhone reminders list isn’t going to play nicely with my boring Windows laptop. Which is why I have looked away from apple software.
The current attempt is Todoist. I can’t give it a wonderful glowing review yet, but then I also can’t really talk it down. I have barely scratched the surface of what I want from it, but I can see the potential. And they haven’t made me pay for anything just yet. Getting started was wonderfully simple. Just writing in the things I want to do today, and not really caring how they’re categorised. I’m quite likely to play with it a bit, get things organised so that I can separate out things like practising music from writing blog posts, or sorting out my fledgling job hunt. Writing down the items I need to do is the starting point, and that is what they make easy. Which is why I like it. We shall see where it goes.
Productive? Maybe
There are a lot of productivity type tools out there. Some of them are actually just the tools you use to write the words people need to see. Some of them are the apps we use to keep our lives organised. I haven’t touched on the nightmare which is calendaring and email, and messaging systems. Right now I’m not collaborating heavily, and so those are simpler. As soon as you mix in more people, you make the problems that much harder to solve. Choosing the tools and systems which work for your brain and lifestyle takes a bit of trial and error. Try out the things which work for other people, but don’t beat yourself up if they don’t work for you. We’re all a little different, and we have to accept that the difference in how we think and work is what makes all of this so wonderful.
Pippa Hillebrand 