Operationalising Personal Productivity — Marrying Time Management with Goals
How does one achieve goals in the most effective way without having a burn out?
Here’s my experience fusing the management of my routine with my goals, priorities, and everything else that makes me happy by building a system for myself.
Before you begin reading, a quick TLDR of my motivation behind building this system: everyone’s advice to ‘manage your time better’ sucked.
It also feels stale because no one explains the operational mechanics of managing one’s time in a way that is exciting — allowing diversity in the things that make me truly happy. Don’t get me started on the ‘work-life balance’ unsolicited advice either. They maybe intentionally good, but unless someone’s giving you a recipe book and showing you how to DIY, it’s as good as someone telling you to git gud.
Most of the stale advice surrounding time management fixates to specific roles. If you’re a student, the expectation from you is to put more time into your studies/homework; freelancers are expected to put more time into their projects; parents are expected to put more time into managing the house and children. That does not inspire me. It confines life to a role, and becomes your identity. And that’s where the burn out happens — it sucks the energy out of you because you’re unable to spend time on other interesting activities.
I believe each individual person is worth much more than being identified by a monotonous role. If it’s about playing one role — that’s what computer games are for or trading places with a machine.
It took me several years of brain storming, experience, and plenty of simulation computer games to understand the mechanics of managing myself — hardest thing in the world when you don’t know how. I was realising that my productivity in work and occasional pat at the back or kudos from colleagues wasn’t cutting it for me. I wanted to be really myself and be equally productive, not just in work, but to be productive in the other activities I was drawn to after work or during the weekends.
Seeking a way out, I built a system that can give me a better view of the direction I want to steer my life as well as the interface to configure it.
Step 1 — Identify Your Startup Sequence (Routines)
Applications of Our Body
Push the power button on your computer or laptop — we can see how the machine spools up, initiates its startup sequence, and leads us to a breathtaking picture on the login screen (sorry Ubuntu/Linux users). Every application we run on the computer past the login screen (including the login screen) is a capability of the computer, supported by playbook driven processes i.e. routines. They run the same way every time.
Our bodies are similar in that concept — they are bioorganic machines. Except we get bored when idle or on standby. Through the lens of this analogy — the applications we run on the computer are no different from the applications we put ourselves through from a systems standpoint. If you’re a student — being a student is an application of yourself; if you’re an entrepreneur — being an entrepreneur is an application of yourself. And much like computers, you’re not intended for single roles like a juicer machine.
We as people are capable of running multiple applications; applying ourselves into multiple engagements — when observed over a long period of time. Such as a month or a year.
Routines Make Us Effective
Routines are important and critical to making us functionally effective. Routines are in essence a playbook for us; not to be confused with a plan of activities of the day. Without a routine to your sleep (8 hours a day in a contiguous format) you’re likely to develop a serious condition, if not outright die.
I put together Routines that define me, by categorising them based on common purpose (see image below). This categorisation should be self-explanatory: under each category are activities that defines the routine. Most people will be able to relate to these routines as identifiable with their lives — with room for some nuances.
Here’s the thing, routines require:
- Discipline
- Map
- Habit
A fourth requirement could be skill or expertise, allowing us to harness maximum value out of our activity. Some people sleep 8 hours a day and have the feeling of coming out of a wrestling match, while people who are skilled at harnessing the maximum value out of their sleep can get the energy of a 1 month vacation in the same span of 8 hours. There’s no magic, just skill.
Discipline and Habit require commitment. There’s a wonderful book by Stephen Guise Mini Habits — Smaller habits, bigger results that did wonders for me.
To make a map of your routine (see step 2), you need to sketch out or plan daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly activities for yourself. You can’t cram every activity into a single day. Even if you could, it wouldn’t lead you to effective results.
When you have your goals scribbled out in a diary or a sticky note, I have experienced that the best time to put them into motion is the following morning. To argue or learn why the next morning (or when you are waking up during day time, if you’re a night-owl/vampire) gives you better energy than any other time in the day when you are energy zapped, consider reading The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Morning is the best moment for your body to carry out any activity it is not in the habit. Makes for a great time for your startup sequence *spooling sound of your body (or farting noises)*.
Step 2 — Create a Map of your Routine
Activities and Personality — if it fits, it sits
There are 744 hours in a 31 Earth day month, and 720 hours in a 30 day month (you can do the math for February). According to my 12 Routine categories, I have 47 types of activities spread over them. I don’t like doing all of those things in a single week or a month. Some activities are as frequent as once or a couple times a year.
You will need to identify your preference for frequency of activities based on your personality. Treat yourself as a customer, it’s easier that way to know what do you want to wear and the size that fits you.
The internet is polluted with articles about Elon Musk’s routine, Jeff Bezos’ routine, Bill Gate’s routine, or name your President’s or billionaire’s routine. Any wise person will tell you not to take those articles seriously, and not to make life choices based on them.
You are your person, your circumstances are unique to you. Sure you can find similarities in personality, preferences and lifestyle with other people. The likelihood of those being any of the people mentioned in the previous paragraph is next to zero.
Activity Map
I figured I needed a bespoke map that I can embrace and manifest. You can use a calendar tool to make your map for yourself. Google Calendar is perfectly capable of that, or if you like things super organised, integrated with your other tools then Getplan or Motion have additional features.
Building a map of our activities by populating them on the calendar is essentially Timeboxing. You can identify the activities you need and desire — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
I create activities on my calendar by labelling them according to activity types, so within the type of activity you’re doing you can do whatever you want that stays true to it. For example in sports I play Volleyball and sometimes a bit of cricket or anything that comes along the way. Yet the activity is sports, and that falls into my Enjoyment Routine. This activity would fall into the work or fitness routine for someone who plays sports for a living. This makes things so much easier later, as everything is organised.
Step 3 — Weigh your Time Allocation Fund
Clarity on Goals
Our personality is the weighted sum of all our activities. When we carry out activities in unbalanced proportion — our mind looks for distractions, or makes us feel depressed when we fail to fund time into activities that are in harmony with our personality type.
Determining the fine balance needed for all the applications you have for yourself (time, energy, and experience) requires introspection. Start with: What are my current goals for the next X year(s)? I don’t know about you. You will have to ask yourself some questions. A therapist or counsellor would ask you questions too.
Classifying Routines
Once you are clear on your goals, you will need to narrow down the things you like to do. In my case, while I’m not attracted by every flying sparrow — there are several things I enjoy pouring my time into.
Here’s how you can narrow down and prioritise the things you like doing:
- It’s best to list everything, and I mean everything shamelessly that you like to do.
- Classify each item with a category of the routine the item best falls into. An item can fall into multiple routines, that’s fine. For e.g: I like reading history, I also enjoy watching historical genre movies, and I love writing about history as a hobby.
- Once you have made your list, count the most frequently listed activities. In my case — Information Consumption, Hobby, and Enjoyment were found most frequently.
- Any routine that you find more than 5–7 times on your list — list it out in another table.
- Prioritise the top 10 items under those routines that boil down to the essence of your personality, irrespective of their alignment with your goals.
- The items that didn’t make to the top 10 — shelf them for review 5–10 years down the road.
- Make a 3 column table, labelled: Goals, Routines, Activities.
- Populate the Goals column first, then map the Routines that contribute to those goals, followed by activity types (and activities if you want to scratch your OCD).
Funding your Routines
Should you have followed the steps thus far, your Goal>Routine>Activity map should be coming along nicely and help connect the dots for you.
Now that you have such a map, how do you fund the activities and routines with your time to achieve said goals?
This is where you go back to your calendar and look at your activity map (see step 2). Calculate the time that is funding your routines and activities — you will need a spreadsheet (here’s my template you can play with).
Find out if you are funding your time to routines and activities that match the span of time available to us in the real world. If it exceeds 744 hours or 720 hours (or 672 hours in a 28 day February), then you need to redistribute time based on your strategy for that time period. Strategy being — what is important for you to accomplish?
I like to imagine these Time Funding (time distribution) numbers as sliders of Industrial Capacity depicted in a Hearts of Iron game. That perspective allows me to redistribute my time based on priorities. You are your industry after all.
Where am I now?
This system that I built for myself wasn’t built in a day (thanks for setting the expectation Rome). Many ideas and concepts were penned as far back as 2014. I also found inspiration from several books, articles, and some amazing self-improvement YouTube channels. This effort took me 7 years to reach the stage where it’s at now; experimenting along the way. I have more ideas on how it can be improved and the pathway forward for it. The more I make use of a system, the better I understand the roadmap to improvement.
Equipped with these tools, I now have an integrated system to measure my contribution to my goals, and perhaps life choices. You can test out the same for yourself and see if it makes sense. Play with the numbers, match them with your calendar, and verify them with your Goals, Routines, and Activities table.
Let me know if you found encouragement through a better approach to becoming effective in accomplishing your goals — for all the applications that you have chosen for yourself.
If you want me to review your implementation of this system, have questions, or just want to get in touch, the best way to reach me is:
- comment under this piece,
- message me on Linkedin or,
- email me at: zein.saeed.5@gmail.com
Worth Reading
Git Gud — Life as a Service (thefaceberg.com)
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World — Cal Newport
