About personal effectiveness

Planning

I divide all tasks into two types: personal and work.

Personal can have three levels of urgency:

Today or urgent. I enter such tasks in the Clear application on the phone. He is always at hand. I check in the morning and evening.
On the week. I write them down in Moleskine. I check it several times a week. I noticed that lately I have been using it least of all, there is little use left, only a ritual.
Distant in time. These are usually not tasks, but goals. I list them in Evernote in the form of lists.

Workers have two levels of urgency:

Today. These tasks are written down on a piece of paper and are constantly in front of your eyes. I cross out what has been done.
Not today. I put it in Google calendar.

I try to adhere to the principle of "do tomorrow" and after I have made a list in the morning, postpone all incoming tasks to the next working day.

When I worked at the Dozhd TV Channel, my position was called “Planning Producer”. I really love planning everything: weekends, vacations, weekly menus, budget, shopping and so on. This is the main thing that avoids fucking. They didn't come up with anything better.

Lists

As you can imagine, I love to write everything down. I have a list of plans for a year, for a month, for life, for a day; a list of what I want to read, what I have already read, what I want to do in Bali, what I want to cook, and so on.

More often than not, I look at my to-do list for the month. He lives in Evernote. This list is convenient for keeping track of what you were doing. There is no feeling that once again fucked up the summer. It is convenient to plan the next months. You look at the list and immediately understand whether it is possible to schedule the first aid courses of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for September, or you definitely will not have time to combine it with the rest of the plans.

Lists help you remember everything, keep a balance between personal and work, stay out of rush mode and get things done on time.

Results of the year

Every month I sum up the results: what I did, what I did, what I felt, what I was worried about. From these results the results of the year grow later. I keep a regular document in Google Docs, I write to it on the 1st of every month. I have had such results since 2011. They are very convenient to track your own progress. I reread the results, for example, for 2013, and I understand what kind of garbage worried me then.

Such results are a ready-made autobiography.

Habit checklists

There is such a thing, checklists of habits. They are useful when you feel that you are not doing anything. The point is to make a checklist of everything you need to remember to do in a day, and every day to note what has been done and what has not been done. On the one hand, a checklist like this is the perfect day you want to live. On the other hand, two weeks of a completed checklist will clearly show which spheres are sagging and which ones are okay. The checklist also helps to put the routine in order when you feel that you are completely lazy.

I wrote the best about checklists. I use it in Google Sheets.

I don't keep checklists all the time. But this is a very useful practice for a short period, for example, a month. I try to do this once a season. Usually I have items like “Listen to a 20 minute lecture”, “Read a book”, “Spend time with Igor” there. But this August, I greatly expanded the list of habits, even highlighted the topics: food, beauty, sports, education, home. So many everyday things appeared, because I changed jobs, began to spend much more time on it and felt that I had no time to do anything. With a checklist, this feeling “everything is on fire” disappears.

Principle 2 minutes

Out of the entire GTD (Getting Things Done) system, two things work best: a sheet with a list of tasks (I wrote about it above) and the two-minute principle. If a task takes two minutes, do not postpone it and do not write it on the list, but do it right now.

I noticed that a huge number of processes are stalled because people put off two-minute tasks for later. Making a request, responding to a letter, setting a task - a bunch of little things that very quickly fly out of my head. At my last job, while raking the trallo boards that were left over from the previous producer, I found a card with the task “Make a card with tasks for X”.

Principle 20 minutes

This principle has turned my life upside down, seriously. Before, I constantly could not find time to watch a course of lectures, take a course on Codecademi, or write down calligraphy. All these things hung dead weight on the list of goals for the year. Until I started doing all this for 20 minutes a day.

This is the same as the principle of "eating an elephant in pieces." It's just that every day you must watch a lecture for 20 minutes. Or you code. Or you read Nabokov. In this way, I watched all 25 lectures of the Stanford course of Professor Robert Sapolsky and passed JavaScript on Codecademi.

Now I will watch Tal Ben Shahar.

The 20 minute principle applies to everything. Can't concentrate on your work? Work for 20 minutes, rest, repeat. Read 20 minutes, get out, run - whatever.

For example, I can't watch long videos without interruptions and start to get bored from any monotonous work. The principle of 20 minutes helped me - you change your occupation, you don’t get bored, things are moving forward. Of course, this does not apply to urgent tasks.

For work tasks, it is convenient to put the Pomodoro application in the browser (I have Simple Pomodoro for Chrome) and detect 20 or 25 minutes (25 is there by default).

7:30 am club

Once I didn’t work for three months. Then I woke up at 12, did not have time to go to the gym, could not find time for a lecture, but every evening I played Sims - and felt like a failure. Now I get up at 7:30 in the morning, I do not come until 21:00, I feel great and I have time for everything.

Discipline ennobles.

Budget

Always, ALWAYS save money. From any amount that came to you, at least 10% → to a separate account. Here's one that motivated me to do it regularly.

Plan the rest of the budget. I was helped by the principle that one should not count past expenses, but plan future ones. The program You Need A Budget (YNAB) is built on this, about which the best is. It also works about the same, it is the same.

I use. On salary day, I transfer a part to a savings account, to which, by the way, the percentage drips, I distribute the rest in the columns of the table. There are repetitive and identical expenses: phone, pedicure, travel card, lunch at work. There are obligatory spending of a month, for example, in August I take additional lessons with a driving instructor, a separate amount is allocated for this. There are desires for which I allocate a certain amount. And then there are "operating expenses" - this is a budget for daily petty expenses that you cannot plan in advance.

Another simple life hack that not everyone uses is a card with a cashback. Get yourself one, they are now in all normal banks. Every couple of months, I accumulate 3,000 virtual rubles, which can be turned into real rubles. Little money, but not extra money.

Household

I just hate it when the house is dirty. I kill for an unmade bed, I can't go to sleep if there is a pile of dishes in the sink. Everyday life eats up a lot of time. I order Qlean about once a season, but the hair of two cats in the apartment builds up to a critical level twice a week.

I accepted the fact that the entropy in the apartment will always increase, and the only way not to freak out is to rake a little every day. This is also called the "fly lady system", but in my opinion it is just a "common sense" system.

Life cannot be fully automated. The dishwasher has to be loaded and unloaded. Washer too. The robot vacuum cleaner is a complete mess. In general, I just devote 15 minutes every day to some area in the apartment, and as a result I have a more or less uniformly polluted house all week.

But for cleaning floors and windows - only Qlean, otherwise it will gobble up too much time.

One line

Weekends are not for work, but for family and personal affairs.
The main rule of communication is: "If you don't know, ask."
Sleep well.
No emotion at work. This is just another working situation that needs to be addressed.
Pissed off by these fagots? You too.
Learn to "extinguish" yourself when you are nervous, wind up, think out for others. This applies to all emotional introverts who cook in themselves and easily come up with all sorts of crap that actually exists only in their head.
All emotions are only in your head.
Optimize. Driving to work for an hour and a half? Read it. So I read "Quiet Don". Twice.
If the task takes 2 minutes, just do it (I won't get tired of repeating it).
To prevent debris from accumulating in Pocket, read a little every day.
Save important texts that you don't want to lose. I use.
Learn new things. Write down a list of everything you want to watch, read, learn. Start with 20 minutes a day. You don't have much time.
Identify what is annoying in your daily life and get rid of the irritants.
If something hovers you, the reason may lie elsewhere.
If you are attacked by an attack of melancholy and laziness, allow yourself to go through the whole day. Usually the next day you get up with a burst of energy, and everything sparkles in your hands.
If you're an introvert, your lack of communication may have caused your depression. Sometimes this is not easy to understand. A meeting with a friend and an evening of socialization is a great reboot.
Compare yourself only to yourself.