These days, productivity-boosting tips are pouring in from all over the place, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok. A legion of professional development coaches make themselves sirens to convince us to learn the Eisenhower matrix, “time boxing” or the Pomodoro technique… However, faced with an overabundance of #productivity tips and strategies, it’s easy to give up… Unless you choose your battles, and follow through with each one!
With this in mind, this fall, I decided to pick and follow three productivity tips (only three!) and make them my resolutions for the fall of 2022. The goal: to turn these resolutions into concrete habits by the end of the year.
Knowing that it’s very easy to abandon a resolution along the way, I also decided to announce my project publicly, on Isarta Infos, to force myself to go through with it. So I’ll tell you now about my 3 resolutions and promise to keep you posted on the progress by Christmas.
1. Learn to write with ten fingers
I’ll start with a confession: in high school, I was one of those who thought I was smart enough to take physical education – so easy and fun – as an elective instead of typing. The result is that I am now a 44 year old dinosaur who types awkwardly with two fingers, at the heavy rate of 35 words per minute. A real mess.
I know Danny Laferrière wrote wonderful novels with two fingers… but I’m a freelance journalist, I regularly copy interviews, I can and must do better. I found a free application: Dactylocours. I am motivated. I’ll see you in 4 months, with the hope of a radical improvement.
2. Learn how to make a “Bullet Journal”
Sure, there are an array of digital tools for making to-do lists (the famous “to-do list”) and keeping a calendar of scheduled meetings. But no platform seems to strike the perfect balance between the “to-do”, “calendar” and information archiving aspects of a workday. Also, the multiplication of platforms – brought on by the pandemic – creates a back-and-forth that ends up tiring the neurons.
That’s why the Bullet Journal approach is so appealing to me; its creator, Ryder Carroll, proposes to take a break from screens and to write down one’s tasks, deadlines, goals, thoughts, according to a clever modular system of to-do lists ordered according to a daily, monthly and biannual chronology.
I’m vaguely familiar with the concept, but I can’t say I’ve really mastered it. But this summer I came across Ryder Carroll’s book at the Great Library, which I immediately borrowed. I’m giving myself until Christmas to learn the clever technique of task indexing.
3. Develop a proper archiving strategy
When Google and Outlook offered us their email service for “free”, it seemed that the initial 5 or 15 gigs would be more than enough for all types of use, until the end of time. However, for the past few months, I’ve been getting more and more insistent notifications that my accounts are about to reach their basic limit and that it’s time to upgrade to a “Premium” account.
This got me thinking about managing my content, whether it’s email, documents or photos. With the multiplication of the above-mentioned platforms, I ended up spreading myself over different web providers. Also, in general, I ended up relying solely on the web giants to “store” my most valuable and important content.
It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how to save and archive my content. For the moment, I can’t say what direction this reflection will take; I’m on the lookout for best practices, I plan to read more on the subject. And of course, I plan to come back to it in a future article.
Ultimately, I am challenging myself to make significant progress in all three areas: typing, the writing of the “BuJo” – as it is affectionately known – and the science of document archiving. Then I’ll report back to you by Christmas.
What are your back-to-school resolutions?
