Hi, I’m Peter from Amsterdam. I’ll help you get organized and be more productive. Every Sunday, I send a productivity-themed newsletter to 10,000 people. Join us!
A conversation with a busy client
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The other day, I was chatting with a client. She’s extremely busy, with many responsibilities at work and at home. She values her time very highly. Because she has so much going on, it’s tricky for her to find time to focus on her most important projects. She said: “I’d love to have regular blocks of focused work on my calendar.” “And then, from my master task list, I want to drag tasks into those focus blocks.” Her first question: what’s the right tool for this? I immediately thought of Akiflow. It excels at time blocking and has a “time slots” feature that does this dragging-and-dropping of tasks exquisitely well. Akiflow is also a combined to-do and calendar app, which means you don’t have to figure out how to make two apps work together. That said, another strong option would be combining Todoist and Fantastical. Todoist has been developing incredibly rapidly. In fact, I’ve been testing its “deadline” feature, which is being implemented really intuitively. Can you spot the deadline feature in this screenshot? Of course, talking about apps only gets us so far. Choosing the right app helps. Learning how to use it helps even more. But as I’ll be telling my client, while apps can be a good place to start, they are always only part of the solution. Apps illuminate the choices available to us. Take on this commitment or that one? Spend time on this part of our life—or dive into that other project? The real work is in choosing. The real work is prioritizing, based on our values. Only then, after we’ve prioritized, can we get into the nitty gritty, like where in our week we’ll slot in this particular task. Are you clear on your priorities? |
Peter Akkies
Hi, I’m Peter from Amsterdam. I’ll help you get organized and be more productive. Every Sunday, I send a productivity-themed newsletter to 10,000 people. Join us!
If you’re ambitious, you need a personal productivity system. Or a personal assistant—but not everyone likes someone hovering around them all day long. So what should your personal productivity system consist of? At least these 3 apps: First, a task manager to capture to-dos and organize them. It’s your central source of truth of what you need to do. The task manager helps you to be proactive about what receives your attention. It lets you prioritize day to day. And it makes sure you don’t...
Many of us are great at adding tasks to our to-do lists. But when it comes to actually working through them… that’s the challenge. Let me share 7 tips that will help. #1: Prioritize at a high level. When you’re looking at your task list, you shouldn’t have to think hard about what to do next. Your next task should be obvious. If you’re not sure what your priority should be, you need to take a little time to update your list of goals and settle on the action steps you’ll take in the next 3...
Some people love to talk about “deep work”. Focus on your core work, that which requires the most focus, and which adds the most value. Do that and your productivity will skyrocket. Right? Not always. Yes, measured over months or a year, you’ve got to do your deep work. But some of the biggest chance I’ve seen in people’s productivity have come when they’ve given themselves permission to do the opposite: to tackle their shallow work for a while. Always behind on taxes? Give yourself a week to...