My method to productivity

Hey, I am Aiyush, one of the Engineering Managers at Fyle. In this article, I wanted to outline a few methods which I have found immensely useful over the years.

It is very easy to become reactive when you work in a fast-paced environment like a startup. We get work, we deliver it with the utmost speed and quality and then rush towards the next item on our plate.

But what about the non-urgent but important things?

How do you address them in this structure?

Here’s my process in the way I address this.

Bullet Journalling - being mindful of your time

I was sitting in front of my laptop when COVID was going on feeling bad about myself because the day vanished in an instant.

I had no clue where all my time went.

This wasn’t the first time this happened - unless the end of the quarter came and my deliverables got published, I used to have this harrowing feeling at the end of each day that I did not do enough.

And there was so much more I wanted to do - but my days were getting shorter and I was barely doing anything that I wanted to do.

I tried time logging my day in Google Sheets and other apps, but I used to get distracted and would realize at the end of the day, that I was in the same situation - I had only logged the first 1-2 hours, then nothing was there.

I needed something non-digital - something to keep me grounded.

That is when I discovered bullet journalling through a medium article.

Here is a super simple way to keep your bullet journal

• Take a fresh new notebook and a pen

• Put the current date on top of the first page

• As you do your work, keep adding to this in the following format -

  • Add a signifier at the start of the entry with either a O, . or ``

  • O represents an event that happened

  • `` represents a note

  • . represents an action item on you

• Whenever you finish an action item, you cross the . to make it a X

This method transformed the way I worked. I was more aware of where my time was going, missing a lesser number of items that got assigned to me as well as I was able to reflect at the end of the day on how the overall day went.

The best part of all, because I was seeing the crosses listed up throughout the day, it removed that dismal feeling of the day slipping through the cracks and me having lost time.

A more detailed note here - https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/faq

BA2SB - The knowledge management system

I squinted at the screen, trying to figure out why the thing I was trying to make live was not working. The whole afternoon of the Saturday I had spent trying to deploy Huginn into a server.

I was a big fan of Heroku, which makes it super simple to deploy your own applications but since the free tier had restrictions, I deployed a free version of Heroku called Dokku into a server that I rented out locally.

But deploying a ready-made open-source application on this was turning out to be a pain.

The worst part is, this is something I had already done before but I couldn’t find my notes or remember it.

This had happened to me an absurd number of times before - I couldn’t remember specific things from books I had read when I needed it, my notes were disorganized which led to me missing out on things and I could barely take advantage of the reading & projects that I did.

Again, medium to the rescue.

It pointed me towards a guy called Tiago Forte who had a course called Building a Second Brain (BA2SB). While this sounded a bit cringe, a lot of folks whose blogs I read were actively saying that it changed the way they approached work and made them more and more effective.

Unfortunately, the course was prohibitively expensive.

But he was writing a book on that topic, so I thought I would just wait it out.

A couple of months later, when I got it - I got a bunch of techniques and methodologies to organize my notes, my readings and reflections.

Heres a quick summary of the things I use, read the book to get a much deeper and detailed explanation of things -

• The way you want to organize your notes and docs is by following PARA. PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resouces, Archive. You do this across all your spaces (Gdrive, Obsidian, Desktop etc) -

  • Projects are anything you are actively working on. You create a folder for each active thing you are working on. This may be things like a work project, doing your taxes, planning your next trip and the corresponding tickets etc.

  • Areas are containers for documents in wider, comparatively lesser actionable things. Like your medical documents, tax documents etc as well as any notes you have corresponding to them. When you do your tax returns you can move this to the projects folder and once done move it to the archive.

  • Resources are interesting things you want to do and read up on

  • The archive is everything else

• You create a capture space i.e. a folder or a doc where you can put everything that comes your way. You discover an interesting but orthogonal article when you are researching some work-related stuff. You put it in Capture Space.

• You do a weekly reflection to clear out the capture space. Move relevant things to the corresponding folders using PARA.

• You do a monthly reflection to see if the projects that you have made, the areas that are present and the resources that you added are relevant or have undergone any movement. If not, you move them to the archive. You can bring them back any time you decide. Think of this as a monthly clean-up

• Whenever you read new things, you take notes based on the technique of progressive summarization.

  • You mark important things with brackets

  • Things which were surprising to you, you underline

  • You copy over the relevant things to your notes in the relevant PARA segment and at the top of the note, you add a small executive summary for yourself. This is to get a gist of what the note is about at a glance.

There are a bunch of things here that I am not covering but doing this should give you a basic structure to use BA2SB.

I use Obsidian to organize and synchronise my notes using a GitHub plugin. This gives me access to them on my mobile device in case I want to check it out. You can also use notion or even plain and simple Google Drive / Dropbox to do this.

Using BA2SB transformed the way my notes were organized. I have a personal wiki of everything I have read and learned including things I discovered from other places as well as things I figured out on my own.

Conclusion

This was a high-level overview of how I approach things concerning work and learning in general. Everyone has their way of approaching productivity so I recommend that you keep trying different things until you find a structure that suits your needs!