24
loading...
A productivity app for one user
Productivity techniques and apps have been around for several decades now. From the simple to-do lists, Pomodoro timers, Bullet Journals, and apps that gamifies real-life tasks; none of those stuck with me to become a habit. It felt bad whenever a technique or app doesn't work for me—I always felt that the reason was my lack of determination or laziness.
It confounds me to this day why task lists never worked for me. I do want to do the things the I've put on the list, but for some weird reason there's this — almost physical — mental barrier that prevents me from doing so. At the end of the day I'm left wondering why I focused on the day-to-day stuff again instead of the long-term stuff.
Thankfully, this frustration also directed me to my possible solution. To find out where my day went, I used a 21-23 minute timer and then logged what I did on every cycle. In an ass-backwards, counterintuitive way, this also helped me commit and finish more tasks that could've been in my to-do list — compared to following a prepared to-do list.
I'm just a computer nerd and not a psychologist so I can't explain why it worked for me. My pet theory is that the lizard part of my brain resents authority, so telling it what it should do makes it more unlikely to do it. You know that feeling when your parents tell you what to do while you were already in the middle of doing it? That feeling.
So here are a couple of GIFs that shows my program:
This is basically the digital version of what I'm doing on a paper notebook.
Because the logs help me keep track of what I already did, it helps me decide on what to do next. Since the tasks I'm writing down are not "written in stone," it doesn't make me feel confined.
One detrimental aspect of task lists for me was the depressed feeling I get when there's an unticked check box on my list; this method doesn't do that for me. If there was something on my mental list that I wasn't able to do, I can easily see on my record what the reason was.
So instead of feeling bad, I can look at the reason then decide if there's something I need to fix: Do I need to reschedule? Fix a bad habit?
With the notebook I've been able to keep at it for more than 3 months now, which is already a farcry from from the other methods I tried. I've only been using the app for about a week, but it's delivering the same result so I'm hopeful
There are also several ideas running around in my head that I want to try out such as syncing with multiple devices.
I will most likely be the sole user of this app, but that's fine. The bonus is I get to improve my programming skills too.
24