Earlier, I wrote about the notebook I use for planning and tracking my daily and weekly work. It’s great for the low-level tactical aspects of productivity, but is not very good at long-term planning. I’ve tried to use it for that — semester planning pages and similar ideas — but it has not been very effective.
To manage the birds-eye view of my work, I use a Kanban-style board made of Post-It notes and painter’s marking tape on the wall of my office.
In my previous post, I described how I use a physical notebook to manage my daily and weekly work.
Getting things done is not the only purpose of this notebook, however. It is also an important part of how I maintain my mental health.
My notebook is the center of my day-to-day workflow. In it I track what I need to do, what I am doing, what we’ve discussed in a meeting, and countless other things. It isn’t terribly often that I actually go back more than a week or so to look at things — I tend to transfer long-term notes into digital storage after I’ve processed them — but they’re still there, and I find the very act of writing with pen helpful.
However, it isn’t just an ad-hoc thing where I write without structure. There is quite a bit of structure to how I use the notebook, and it helps immensely as I plan and execute my work.
I have tried a number of different productivity systems over the years. Some have worked better than others. I’ve tried:
One of my favorite people-and-preference papers is Kahneman, Wakker, and Sarin’s 1997 article ‘Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility’. They report on a series of experiments that examine how people experience and remember utility, pain, or pleasure, and the ways in which it affects their decision-making processes.