Incorporate Your Goals Into Your Work and Life Productivity Systems
Building a productivity system is more than having a way to keep track of what you are doing, or need to accomplish in the future. A productivity system is not a ‘to-do’ list. That may become a component of it, but there is more to managing all the things you have going on in your life. And by life, I mean both your work and personal life. We can try to separate the two, but the reality is we cannot. We are one person. We have different aspects of our lives, but they all come back together into who we are and how we spend our time. Which begs a separate question: how do you balance those two things? The myth here is that balance means equal. That would imply that you’re always managing fifty-fifty in work and life. We all know that is not always possible. We have moments, even seasons of life, where balance is not equal. You will be managing both sides of the equation to ensure one does not get overwhelming, and then have a plan to shift in a different direction.
In a previous article, Organize Your Ideas and Activities with PARA, I mention the PARA system that has been popularized by author and productivity speaker Tiago Forte. In hindsight, the title of the article should have been more about balancing how you live, not just about organizing your ideas. Building a system to manage the different parts of life is more than just capturing and organizing ideas. I am uncertain if there is any one system that works for everyone, so do not think there is a silver bullet for this either. However, learning how you can put all the pieces and parts together can assist in bringing balance to your life and making it easier to live it along the way.
What is PARA?
PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. It is a way to organize the different common elements we manage each day, whether in our personal lives or our career. The part that is missing from this is our goals. Our goals should be driving what we do on most days. They are what we are working towards. Those could be short-term (maybe even projects), or long-term (think bucket list). Capturing those and aligning with the rest of the system you develop for yourself is an excellent way to build it altogether. Carl Pullein has an explanation of pulling these together in this YouTube video. Don’t let the title of the video fool you (he is showing it in Apple Notes), it is really about building a productivity system that incorporates your goals into the system itself. Adding this changes PARA into GAPRA (because acronyms are always important). It keeps the elements of PARA and adds goals. I think it also flows a little better when you move to Goals, Areas of focus, Projects, Resources, and Archive. It feels like a more natural progression.
Using a system
How you set up your system will be uniquely personal. And, if you are anything like me, it will likely take time, trial, and error to hone in on what it looks like for you. I am not completely sure I have mine where I want it yet. What I have found, and believe this to be true for any type of system or process, you need to make it your own and then become well-disciplined in using it. This is far more difficult than it even sounds. We all have habits of doing things today. We save files to a folder on a hard drive, but now we need that in a different saved location. Or we forget we can keep an article we liked in our system and not just in another application somewhere. This is an exercise of practice, patience, and refinement. As you get more comfortable with what you’ve set up, you will find yourself using it more often. That will then highlight the usefulness that comes from having that system. It is a continual work in progress. Give yourself grace on this one, especially in the early days.
There is not a one-size fits all approach to productivity. In recent articles, I started with trying to understand what productivity actually is. It means different thongs to different people. Define it for yourself. The multitasking approach doesn’t work. There are steps you can take to break the habits of trying to do more than one thing at a time. And, finally, leveraging the benefits of single tasking can help you find opportunities in places you didn’t know were possible. You may find that staying focused improves the quality, creativity, and enjoyment that comes from the work you are producing. That is the core of being more productive, in service of balancing a single life lived to the fullest.
How can you develop your personal productivity system to help you do the things you choose to do, better?
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