In this post, I am going to introduce my current personal setup. Intended to provide some inspiration for your own setup, it also serves as bridge to my next post, which will deal with the essentials of every productivity setup.
What is a “good” setup?
Before talking about my setup, I think it’s worth to take one step back and reflect what a good productivity setup is basically about. With my academic background in consumer behavior I’ve learned about the brain, that it is either good at doing nothing (like hanging around, letting your thoughts wander) or at focussing on exactly one activity (like reading, gaming or in former times hunting a mammoth). What our brain is definitely not good at, is multitasking. You know this secnario: holding the grocery list available for this evenings’ errand run, the main topics to discuss with your project team after lunch and, of course, the budget calculations you are editing right now. No, our cavemen’s brain is not good at running several processes at the same time.
For me, a good productivity setup frees your mind from this mental backlog. By making these resources available for your task or activity at hand, it yields an incredible boost to attention, energy and capability. As result, you will achieve things better and faster. So, with a good, i.e. smoothly running setup you basically outsource the “What’s next?” to your setup. And even better, after several successful working cycles, you start trusting in your setup which frees even more resources, because you stop keeping score if you really have not missed anything important.
My professional and personal situation
As I described in mission statement, I’m deeply convinced, that the meaning of a “good” setup is highly dependent on your personal situation. I‘ll briefly point out my circumstances to provide some orientation and inspiration in case you can relate to a similar situation.
Most of my time I spend like many with my full-time job. I‘m working as Head of Market Intelligence in the marketing department of a large, global German manufacturing corporation. As German manufacturers follow high security standards, I have to work in a rather sand-boxed IT environment. Basically we can work with the Microsoft Office 2016 suite including Exchange email accounts, but that‘s more or less it. No cloud services, no communication apps, no private use of corporate facilities. Furthermore, I have a team of direct reports and we all are involved in numerous projects of our company. Thus, a lot of things that are relevant to me are decided and executed by other people – or to put it more bluntly: I have to keep track of a lot of other peoples‘ todos.
In my private life, I‘m foremost husband and father. As all of you who have kids know, life is never as enriching but also never as demanding. My wife is working, too, so there is a lot to coordinate and plan. The little time that‘s left for me I spend on my very own projects like this blog or my photography ambitions. As we are not allowed in our firm to use corporate equipment for private purposes, I have to maintain two setups in parallel.
Also I‘m underway a lot, so I need a flexible and mobile solution. Last but not least my personal likings: I love books, gadgets and to try out new things. I’m more than sceptical on the privacy security of cloud services, which means, for everything that I produce digitally, I apply the postcard principle. In sum, you see, it‘s quite a complex setting, where my setup has to fit in.
What I‘m presenting as follows is hence the result of more than 15 years of evolution and trying out things.
So, how does my good setup look like?
Literally my productivity silver bullet is my Bullet Journal (bad pun intended). Bullet Journalling was brought to this world by Ryder Caroll six years ago. The core idea is to scribble down what’s on your mind directly into your notebook – the Bullet Journal. The two major advantages are, first, that you have all your ideas, plans and lists in one place. Second, that you can just jot down without caring for loading times, sync errors or default fields in your app. Having all your precious input available in this way, you are then able to take time and peruse, plan and cluster your ideas, projects and timings without the anxiety to lose an important thought or note. A detailed guide on the Bullet Journal method I will provide in the near future. Meanwhile, if you’re interested you’ll find helpful introductions via Google, Pinterest or directly on bulletjournal.com.
Why I’m into Bullet Journalling
For me, the Bullet Journal is the bulk of my productivity setup. I use it as my ToDo-list, for note taking, managing my projects and for what I call working memory – i.e. all information, tasks and events that I need to know for my current projects and tasks. A detailed report on how I use my Bullet Journal is also in my posting backlog, so I beg your patience. In the meantime, I’d like to tempt you to try out bullet journalling by sharing what I love about it.
Above all, I love the simplicity about it – just pen and paper and there you go. I really detest to wait for apps to load, to follow the order of any default forms and to click, scroll, swipe for the blank page to finally enter something. Pen and paper, it is just such a low-threshold tool, which makes it so inviting to start and which provides the ultimate freedom for you to make it your own. Sometimes, I need writing list, sometimes, it would be better to sketch something. Working in my Bullet Journal I just do not have any limitation – a very crucial thing, if you have a mind like mine – constantly full of ideas and complex context. Moreover, it helps me to juggle all business and private projects at the same time. Any other attempt in maintaining to systems in parallel just failed, because I always had the crucial heureka idea for the one side, of course, when I was just working for the other.
Furthermore, the Bullet Journal is mobile as mobile can. I use the format of A5, weighing a little more then my iPhone XS Max. I don’t have any hassle with battery or WiFi and sun reflectiom is rather welcomed, than disturbing. The Bullet Journal is also very private, as nothing leaves the pages as long as I do not want it to.
On last, but I think very important aspect is, that the Bullet Journal is made for human beings. Despite all technological progress, we are beings living in a haptical world with an attention filter easily distracted. Thus, first, the manual work of writing things down, of actively categorizing, summarizing and transferring (more on that you find on bulletjournal.com) is highly effective as you really focus and think matters through. Second, we fathom and remember things the better, the more senses are involved. In this respect, thumbing through a book works much better than scrolling on your phone or laptop. And at the very last, a purely personal aspect is my liking of handwriting and the total freedom of my own creativity that is more rewarding than any app I ever tried.
But I have a smartphone, too
However, I’m no analogue purist. Of course, I collaborate and communicate with people. For that I use my iPhones (one private, one corporate) and my laptops (same). For private matters, after several tryouts, I stay with the Apple default apps calender, notes and mail. The main reason is, that it just works. And this also stable, which is the killer argument in the collaboration with my wife as she is the maximum demanding user with no patience at all to make IT work. In this regard the Apple apps are just paramount. We share a calender via iCloud, which makes any event coordination (yep, all parents know what I’m talking about) drastically more easy.
And – life hack – we maintain the grocery list via a shared Apple Notes list. Having all default items listed with tick-boxes, we can idenpendendly indicate what has to be purchased. And the one of us, happening to be in the grocery store knows what to buy without any reassuring phone calls. This really saves so much time and coordination. Apple Mail in the end is just the simplest solution as I found no other mail client that offered decent extra features without any extra costs or efforts. For all who would like to oppose or are just interested, I will come up with my email workflow in near future. For the corporate part I use the apps in analogy, only that I have a corporate Exchange account.
One note on OneNote
On last remark to a very dear app, which is OneNote. I know, in the productivity community one of the most popular debates is about the perfect notetaking app. For me, this is OneNote. Privately as well as corporate (yes, I have two seperate accounts). I mainly use it as archive, project management tool, inspiration list and idea pool. I really love the flexibility and the feature richness, as well as the powerful integration in the MS Office suite. The killer feature for me is the smooth and deep integration in the iPhone sharing feature, which offers a lot of useful applications. A detailed description on my OneNote workflow would blast this post, which I have put this one in the backlog. So stay tuned to this one 🙂
The essence for you
So, this is the way I stay organized and productive. It was quite a long way for me to tweak my setup to near perfection and it will – for sure – be an iterative process as my situation will not be static over time. I hope you found some inspiration and food for thought to your own productivity setup. My main message is, that a good productivity setup is 100% dependent on your situation and likings. I know, in the complex melee of your needs and obligations one the one hand and the mass of options on the other, it is hard to stay on top of what’s sensible. My next major ambition is to provide a tool, that helps you in this respect – the Master Your Time Productivity Navigator.
But before this one will go live, the next post will be about the five essentials, every productivity setup should have: A calendar, a todo list, something for notetaking, something serving as working memory and an archive. Step by step I will then publish my personal routines with these essentials. So, I hope I caught your curiosity to stay tuned, comment, recommend and enjoy.