3 Great SYSTEMS That Will Increase Your Productivity

Productivity hacks are great, but you know what's better? Systems. And today I'm going to share with you three of my favorite systems that keep me consistently productive and on top of things.

Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.

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I help my clients get productive and stay productive through coaching, accountability, and helping them set up personalized systems that meet their needs. And now it's your turn, so lets get started.

System number one: inbox and inbox processing.

A lot of us are familiar with having an email inbox. That's just the place in your email provider where all of your incoming emails appear - often at a rate we don't appreciate. What I'm talking about is a inbox in your planning system where you put things that need to be processed. The important part about this system is separating collecting things that need to be processed from the actual processing of them.

For example, let's say I'm doing an intensely benign activity like playing a computer game of which I love. (Someone play Titanfall 2 with me because it's dying, and it makes me sad.) What I can do is when I conveniently die, I can hop over onto my phone, and in my notion setup, I have a dashboard for inbox and inbox processing. And at the top of that is just my inbox database where I can really quickly add a new entry with just enough information about the idea, so that way when I read it later, I will understand the idea I was trying to get down. And then about once a week I go through everything in my inbox and process them.

So I might have ideas for future videos. I might have ideas for projects that I want to work on. I might have ideas for tasks that need to get done. I might have collected recipes that I want to try out. I might have collected some articles that I want to read. Basically, anything that comes up that you need to do something about you collect in your inbox, and then depending on how quickly your inbox gets full, you process it. I appreciate processing my inbox about once a week, sometimes twice if it's a really busy week.

And what's great about the processing part is that's when you can make decisions about those things in your inbox, and decide where else they need to go in your planning system so they come up when you need them. For example, my video ideas? I have a separate database for that where I can filter it in a certain way. So that way, when it's time for me to start doing content planning for my next batch of videos, all of the ideas that have come up over the past whenever show up.

So that idea I had 3.5 weeks ago while I was in the shower. I put it in my inbox. Then sometime over the next week I processed it out of my inbox and into my ideas database, so when I sat down to do my content planning, it was there! And it makes my content planning so much easier. Similar for when it's a lazy Saturday morning and I'm like, "Wow, I would like something rather stimulating to read that isn't the YA Fantasy that I'm reading (because I don't want to be in that mood right now)." I can go and I can look at my knowledge database and see what articles I've collected and processed that are ready for me to read and take notes on.

And then similarly for big projects or tasks, you can decide when you're processing them out of your inbox, how important they are and if they need to happen right away. If they need to happen right away they go into the system to remind me to do them as tasks or projects. If they're things that I don't want to forget about, but I don't want to act on quite yet, they can get categorized into my someday/maybe/back-burner files. And then that way, when I am at a loss for a project someday, I can go into those and be like, "Ooh yeah! That was a great idea. Let's move that forward and put it into the live and happening part of my planning system."

The key takeaway from this inbox -> inbox processing thing is to keep those things separate. Because if you're trying to force yourself when you have an idea, or something comes up that you need to write down, if in that moment or you are trying to also make decisions about it, those are two separate tasks. It takes a lot more time and effort to make a decision about something. And that can really easily create enough resistance that you never write it down at all because you're not up to making decisions about it right now, and then the idea disappears and you never find it again.

Having an inbox with as little friction as possible between you and getting something down: super important. I have that dashboard in my Notion workspace. And then I use the Notion widget on my phone that shows my favorite pages, and that dashboard is in my favorite pages. So from my home screen on my phone all it takes is two clicks before I'm adding an entry to my inbox database. It's the one to open up the dashboard and then hitting the new button inside that database to add a new entry.

All right, so that was system number one: inbox and inbox processing. Now let's move on to system number two, which is the weekly reset.

Weekly resets are something that get talked a lot about in the productivity space for a good reason. One of the things that can make a planning, task management, organization system fall apart is that it isn't kept up to date and useful. If it starts collecting dust and is no longer accurate, you're not going to trust it, and therefore you're not going to use it, and you're going to keep not using it until you're so flailing around - you have no idea going on - that you blame the planner instead of your lack of using it properly.

I'm going to talk more about stuff like that next week, so subscribe if you're into that topic.

Basically a weekly reset is a dedicated time that you have every single week on the same day that you use to go back through the previous week (dot all your I's cross, all your T's), keep appraised of the things that fell through the cracks that you need to move on to your to-do list for next week, analyze how the week went. If there were things that came up, did you like how you handled them? If not, how would you handle them differently in the future? It's just a way for you to see how far you've come and not lose anything important and be ready for the next week.

Because the second part of the weekly reset is to plan for the upcoming week. So you review, and then you plan. Depending on how in depth of a process you want to do with that, it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more.

The weekly reset is such a powerful routine to have that I actually include a guided weekly reset in my coaching membership, because just having that little bit of external accountability, to have it as a co-working session that's guided by me, it makes my clients who already struggle with procrastination and resistance more inclined to participate in that routine and that habit because they have me to hold them accountable to it. One of my favorite side effects of that is when one of my clients shows up to that weekly reset thinking they haven't accomplished much of anything, and are kind of beating themselves up for the past week, but then when they actually take the time and energy to review what they did do over the past week, they see how much they have gotten done and already feel empowered and motivated to keep going. So comment below and tell me if you do some form of weekly reset and if so, what it looks like.

All right, the last system is what I call: the power of three - where you choose three priorities for the month, three priorities for the week, and three priorities per day.

Any more than that? Thou shalt get overwhelmed. And three in my opinion is the maximum. There are some days when I can only handle two. There are some days when I can only handle one. But making sure I am never setting myself up for failure by aiming for more than three priorities per day or per week or per month, I am able to get so much more done and make so much more progress without burning myself out. It's a much more healthy relationship to productivity.

The last thing I'll say about that is understanding what a priority means. On the month level, a priority can be a project, and a project is a group of tasks. It's more than one task. Per week it can be a portion of a project, so it can be a smaller group of tasks. But per day? A priority ideally should be one task.

For example, if my priority today for like this video, let's talk about making this video right now. If my priority for today were to be to research it, write the script, film it, and edit it - if it was just make a video on your three favorite systems - that is not a priority for a single day because that's too much! That's a priority for a week maybe. Definitely for a month, that's a thing. So instead, because of how I have done a really good job batching my content, what I'm doing today is filming. I'm able to film more than one video because I have the time and energy, but my priority today? Filming! That's it! Filming! [AH!] And that is doable.

So now you know three of my favorite systems for increasing productivity: inbox and inbox processing, the weekly reset, and the power of three.

And if you take only one thing away from this video? Let it be this: the more you plan, the less you work.

But what about procrastination and resistance?

Well I've got good news for you because I've got a system for that too, and I taught a whole masterclass on it. All you have to do to get access to this free masterclass is go to this link and sign up.

If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe, and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with another video. See you then. Bye.