Maintaining Daily Productivity

One of the hardest things once our son started being able to move around on his own, was simply keeping the house in order. These little critters love to cause chaos, and pull things apart, so it can be pretty hard to clean a house when they’re able to destroy three things in the time it takes you to clean up one.

The second problem was how to get him on a schedule where we were achieving a balance that we felt was appropriate throughout the day.

It turned out the answers to both of these problems were connected. I found that using a bullet journal to manage required tasks, combined with a properly structured calendar, made all the difference in the world.

I didn’t realize that bullet journaling kind of took on a world of its own, but online this led to people trying to create the most aesthetic bullet journal they could. Trying to one-up each other on how extravagant they could make the thing. For myself, this is really at its base a tool to compile all my to-do items. As long as it contains a few key items, I don’t care about how it looks. What I need are:

1. Year at a glance – I have four total pages broken into three months per page. I use these pages to annotate big picture items that will be occurring during the relevant month. This could be things like birthdays, vacations, business meetings, etc. This is the 10,000′ view of my upcoming year.
2. Month by Month – As a new month arrives I break two pages into the picture shown above. The left page has all the days of the month from 1 to the last day by number and day of the week. As meetings, appointments, or other items begin to fill in for the month, I’ll pencil that into the corresponding date. On the right hand page, I have a list of items I want to accomplish this month. Try to be realistic here, and don’t put everything for the whole year in your first month.
3. Daily logs – After the two pages outlining the monthly view, I’ll make an entry every morning, usually while having my coffee. I’ve taken to using the daily highlight and extras list. The goal of the daily highlight is to prioritize, “If I can only achieve one task today, what needs to be done?”. There are days where I’ll have 2-3 daily highlight items if required, but I aim to only have one.

That’s basically it. I really try to apply the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid), and that hold true here as well. For me, the bullet journal does a good job of allowing me to keep track of what needs to be getting accomplished, and if I can knock out even just one item per day, over the course of the year that means I’m really ensuring quite a lot gets accomplished.

If you’d like a little more info on bullet journaling, here is the video I used to base my own journal off of.

Part two in staying productive was effectively utilizing my calendar. When it comes to budgeting, I’ve always been very much on the budget every dollar strategy. I allocate every single dollar of net income to a particular category of spending, and then I also know if I have extra money that wasn’t required in a particular area for a month, where those dollars will be reallocated.

I realized, that while I took this approach with my money, when it came to my time I kind of just winged it. So for me, the natural step forward was to budget all my hours, the same way I budget my income. I blocked out time for sleeping, I set a wake time, I set time for morning routines, breakfast, the whole day. I allocated all the time in the day to my calendar, and by doing so, I actually found about a two-hour window in the mid-afternoon where I can do absolutely anything. I’ve already included the household chores, preparing meals, taking our son outside (twice), time for him to work on his daily goals, and after it was all written down, I had an extra two hours to do whatever I wanted.

And the best part of this is…it’s working.