Productivity tools I use to stay on track

As a busy business owner and software consultant who has numerous projects on tap at any given time, I’m always working hard to stay on task and focus on what needs doing, at the time it needs to be done. Over the years I have developed a routine that I use to map out exactly what my days will look like, complete with checklists, to-do items, calendars and time blocks. I wanted to share some of these building blocks in this post.

The foundation: my calendar

I firmly believe that if it’s not in my calendar, it doesn’t exist and I won’t be going. My calendar is the heart and soul of my system and for good reason – I keep it meticulously up to date with every time-driven appointment I have.

I use BusyCal (I’m a SetApp subscriber) and it handles all my calendars beautifully. I used to be a Fantastical subscriber, but $90/yr for a calendar seems steep, especially when SetApp gives me all kinds of other apps for the same price. On the calendar I have every appointment – meetings, in-person appointments, and travel time (if an appointment is in-person).

Since I have multiple clients and projects, I have multiple calendars and multiple calendar accounts. BusyCal syncs each calendar and shows me all the calendars in one view – handy for knowing my whole schedule at a glance.

For booking meetings, I use SavvyCal. I prefer it over Calendly for two reasons. First, when I need to book an appointment while working for a client, I can intentionally configure the booking link to put that appointment on the correct calendar (Calendly does not support this, and places all appointments on a single calendar). Second, SavvyCal doesn’t seem to cap the number of calendars it will sync and read from to determine my availability – something that’s important when you have multiple calendar accounts as I do.

Checklists and to-do items

For checking things off and organizing my daily activities, I step away from the calendar and into Things, which does double duty for my checklists and daily to-do items.

I have a Daily Checklist project that contains a recurring set of items that come up every day with designated times. These items are my daily tasks, and they contain subtasks so I make sure I do things like brush my teeth and network with other professionals. These items are designed to pop up at certain times during the day, so I get a push notification that they are due and a reminder to complete them. It helps me trenendously.

I also have a project called Daily Goals. One of my checklist items is to set three daily goals – the things I want to accomplish that day – and I use the daily goals as a benchmark for a productive day. I can also use the project to plan out several days worth of daily goals: I can set the day that a particular goal pops up in the future, so I can plan my work around my availability.

Then I have generic projects that contain to-do items. I have a recurring checklist item to review all projects and plan relevant work, so no project goes too long without being looked at and no to-do item goes very long without being reconsidered. I have projects for blog posts, software I’m working on, client projects, etc. And the power of Things is that I can say “I want to accomplish X task on Y day” and it will pop into the “Today” window on the chosen day. It may nor may not also make an appearance as a daily goal.

Time blocking

How do I get around the fact that I have many clients and projects all at once? The answer for me is time blocking.

For this I have an old-fashioned color-coded Excel spreadsheet that I print out with my working hours and place on my desk. When scheduling tasks, I base it on what projects are slotted for that day and the available time I have in that slot. All projects requiring deep work have at least one long block of time (usually more) to allow me to do that deep work; my SavvyCal availability is synched with my time blocks so when people book me for particular projects or clients, they can only book in that project’s allotted time block. I rarely deviate from the time blocks.

I can use my time blocks for setting my daily goals. For example, if I know Project A has a 4-hour time block coming up in three days, I can plan to do a heavy bit of coding in that block and tell Things to surface that goal in three days. Conversely, if I know that I only have an hour or 90 minutes, I won’t schedule heavy tasks in that window; I might instead focus on administrative, research or other tasks that need to be completed.

I try to be strict with my time blocking, but things get in the way. For example, occasionally I’ll need to take off for my own appointment (doctor, friend, whatever) and I’ll have to shift some of the time. But in general, I don’t work on Project C when it’s time for Project D and vice versa. In this way I make sure I have enough time to dedicate to all my projects.

Other strategies

I’m a firm believer that very little should repeat on my calendar, ever.

That is to say, I don’t schedule recurring meetings except in very limited circumstances. Instead, what I try to focus on is scheduling meetings that matter and will be impactful to my project. And I often schedule meetings for as short as possible – 20 to 30 minutes – because an hour is rarely needed to take certain decisions. And I hate having 15-20 minutes after a meeting before the next one.

I also block my meetings into a couple of days. I don’t schedule anything through SavvyCal on Tuesday or Thursday, for example: those days are for deep work and heads-down focus. While I will take meetings on those days, they are scheduled at my discretion and intentionally for a particular reason.

Finally, when scheduling with a client, I always look at what project they belong to before allowing them to book the call, and enforce the boundary of “I’m available between X and Y” of my time blocks. This helps make sure that my time blocks don’t end up becoming Swiss cheese.

Having a system matters

This is one system. It’s my system. It works for me, but it may not work for you. That’s okay!

The point isn’t to find and adopt someone else’s system – it’s to build your own that works the way you do. This works the way I work for now, and it’ll change as I do. But my system isn’t suitable for everyone and may not even be suitable for your needs.

Whatever system you come up with, make sure you don’t implement a wholesale change up front and be sure that you make incremental changes to it over time. This small adjustment over time philosophy ensures that you have a chance of sticking with your system. Yes, your system today may be terribly broken; one small change that you stick with at a time will beat one massive change that you ditch in three weeks.

Tell me in the comments about your system. Look forward to hearing more!