Productivity Improvement: Refreshing Your Planner

I have a confession to make. Even productivity experts struggle with keeping their system up to date. Join me today as I do a much needed planner refresh and explain how I got there, why it's okay, and what I'm doing about it.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript. (The video contains a screen share tutorial, so some of the transcript might not make sense without the video.)

Hi, I'm Cassie Winter. I help neurodivergent and chronically ill people struggling with burnout go from feeling stuck, alone, and hopeless to mastering a toolset for genuine self care and a bias toward action so they can choose where to spend their precious time and energy to create the life they want.

The way I work with clients is through my signature course and group coaching program, the Action Navigator. So like I've talked about on the channel before recently, I had a really tough 2023. And because of that, one of the main things I talk about for maintaining your productivity and time management and task management system is to keep it up to date and accurate, so therefore you can trust it.

And that's something that fell by the wayside because of my rough year. In order to understand how I got to this place where I need to refresh my system, it can be helpful to have some shared language for how we're going to talk about a system. In my professional opinion, an effective time and task management system has two key elements that need to be functioning in order for the whole system to be effective.

The first one is the structure itself, how your information is organized and presented to you. But the other element is the workflow by which you maintain the system so that it remains up to date and also use the system. Something that I talked a lot about in this video is that if you don't regularly put in the work to keep your system up to date and accurate, it's not gonna be trustworthy.

And if your system isn't trustworthy, you're not gonna use it and it's not gonna be helpful. It's not going to do the thing that it needs to do, which is help you make informed decisions on how to spend your precious time and energy. So my system has fallen by the wayside because I had a really tough 2023 for medical reasons, which I have discussed in a prior video.

And because of that, the thing that fell by the wayside was me keeping my system up to date. This is a very common and normal thing to experience, regardless of who you are. Time and task management systems tend to fall by the wayside when life happens. It is the rare individual who is able to maintain their system and keep it accurate and helpful and engage with it regularly.

It's the rare person that can do that. So the first thing to understand is if this has happened to you, there's nothing wrong with you. You're a human. That's the story there. And what I find, particularly in the neurodivergent, chronically ill, disability space that I am an expert in, a lot of people tend to take that experience of their system falling by the wayside as an indication that their system is broken or doesn't work.

Can it be an indication that there are things that you could change in your system to make it easier for you to keep up to date and use? Yes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. My system works perfectly fine when I'm using it. So the thing that I've been struggling with is that second element we were talking about. It's not the structure, how the information is organized and presented to me.

It's the how I use it workflow, how I keep it up to date, and how I use it to make decisions about how to spend my precious time and energy. That's the part I've been struggling with. The answer for me in this particular instance is not to get a brand new system, completely revamp my system altogether. No, the solution for me right now is simply to update my system, and because it's been so long since I've done that properly, it's gonna be a juicier to-do.

That's all that means. Just because your task and time management system has gathered dust, as it were, doesn't mean that that system doesn't work and wouldn't be helpful to you if you used it. So if you're in a place like me, I would actually recommend starting with simply updating your existing system and putting into place plans to keep it up to date going forward. Again, that's easier said than done, but that's a different conversation than today's video.

Today we're just talking about updating a system. So that's how I got here. Comment below and tell me whether my description of a functioning and effective time and task management system was an aha moment for you in any way. So the plan for today, we're gonna hop on over to my laptop. You're gonna join me as I do the work of first doing a big old brain dump of all this stuff that has just been floating around in my head and not in my system.

And then we're going to process that information and get it into my system, so my system is once again up to date and useful. Sound like a plan? Let's go. So welcome inside my notion. I apologize that you can't see my face. The technical difficulties are difficult today and I am annoyed. Anyways, I am inside a page, inside my notion that I call the sandbox. And this is a page where I can just do stuff.

It's very handy. I learned about the sandbox concept from notion expert Marie Poulin. It's basically where you have a page where you can play around, and in notion that can be really helpful because it's really easy to import information from other parts of your workspace in notion to a new page. So that's what I'm going to be doing after the brain dump. If you're wanting to do something similar to me refreshing your system, the first thing you're going to want to do is a brain dump.

And you can either just do that in a list format digitally or on pen and paper. Or you could do a mind map. You could do a voice note to yourself. You could use the anytime pages technique that I've talked about in a video before. The options are endless, but the idea is just to get information out of your head into a place where you can then analyze it later.

My choice right now is to just make a few lists. I have now reached that point that I think everybody reaches in their brain dump where they're like, "That can't be it. There has to be more." But my brain is drawing a blank. So I'm going to talk you through what I've got so far, and maybe by verbally processing it for you, I will have a few aha moments.

So that's another tip. If once you have finished your list or you've come to a point in making your brain dump where you feel like you're missing stuff, talking through it out loud, not just in your head, but out loud, can help you engage different parts of your brain and help you potentially think of more things. Over here we've got marketing tasks. There are more marketing tasks that I could be doing that would help grow my business and earn myself and my assistant higher incomes.

And I really would like to be earning more money. That would be great. Late stage capitalism sucks. One of the things I want to do is figure out different places on the interwebs where I can be posting short form content, either short videos or just short written content like posts that instead of it being on like my social media profile, like my YouTube channel, my Instagram profile, my TikTok account, for example, I'm actually going into like either Facebook groups or subreddits or I think groups on LinkedIn, that kind of thing, and actually placing my content in those places instead of just hoping that the algorithm is going to show my content on my profile to the right people.

And that's been the biggest thing that a has been giving me lots of anxiety because I don't want to bother people, and the imposter syndrome gets real intense in those situations. But also, it's a lot of work, and it will take a lot of experimenting. It will take time before I actually see returns on that investment in time and effort. But it's something that is important to growing this business and moving towards financial independence, both for myself and my assistant.

So that's over here. And it has not been in my system. This has just been floating around in my head. And this is a project. And then action navigator version two. I have been working on this actively, but it's not part of my system because I haven't really been updating or using my system. So it needs to get in there. Then over here we have all the sewing I've been doing.

Ooh! Repair pink blouse. Okay. Ooh! This is what I'm talking about. Me verbally processing this, saying stuff out loud is helping me remember things. Finish blouse, Mockup. And then ongoing, I want to continue participating in the foundations revealed shirtwaist course. It's for 1890 to 1920, I believe is the time period for this course. So it's both historical and how to draft your own shirtwaist and how to put it together.

I have become one of those historical sewing nerds. I will not apologize. So, as you can tell, I have a lot of sewing projects and having these just jumbling around in my mind has not been helpful. And then over here, we've got some basic home projects and tasks. Cleaning up the office (and that...this is something that I have to do with my partner because most of the office is his).

But I haven't been able to use the office because there's been too much in it. And then the other big thing is vacuuming. What does this mean? We now have a brain dump, but this is not going to be helpful unless it is in my system. Yeah? So this is where notion can be really handy, because I can just put in a linked view of my tasks database and all will be well.

If you have a system outside of notion, or if you have an analog system, all you do is now you start making decisions about what this stuff is. I'm going to start by defining whether these bullet points are a project or just a singular task. So, like vacuum for example, that is a singular task. Most other things are full on projects. Is anything else just a singular task?

No. Nope. Alrighty. So what I'm going to do, we're going to start with my business tasks. So I actually have two different tasks databases in my notion. One for my business and that's one I share with my assistant Shae. And then one is just for me, myself, and I, everything else, stuff that Shae doesn't need to see, stuff from my personal life. Yada, yada, yada. We are going to start with the business stuff.

All right. So I just did "/linked" and I'm going to click on linked view of database and we're going to pick accountability muse tasks. This is why a sandbox is handy. I can do all this work inside notion. One thing that I could do is I could just drag this block down here. But this is not written in a helpful way. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write these tasks from scratch.

We're going to add an empty task and I'm going to be taking advantage of something that notion added about a year ago, which is the ability to add subtasks and task dependencies. This first page in my task database that I'm going to make is the project name, essentially. So I'm going to call it direct marketing. Nope, that isn't helpful enough. So we're going to call it build an effective direct marketing SOP.

SOP stands for a standard operating procedure. So the goal of this project is to get to a place where I have a repeatable workflow that effectively gets me more discovery calls scheduled for my business to help grow my income. That is the goal. It's easy to understand and it's really clear what the final result is. So I'm going to add an icon. We're going to make it something to do with money.

Cash machine. I like that. We're going to make it green. And why don't we add a cover. Wow, these are just depressing images. No, we're not going to go with money. We're going to go with beach. Something that makes me feel rich. There we go. Cool. Priority. This is going to be medium because this is a long term project. I don't know, I'm afraid. I'm afraid of due dates.

October 1st. So this is something I'm going to work on for this quarter. Cool. So we're going to close this. And now here's where the fun begins. What I have done, this is something you have to go in here and you have to turn on subtasks and dependencies. And what that does is to the left of the page name, you now have these little arrows. So if you click on it, you can now add sub items.

And this is how you can get infinite subtasks for a big old project. This is something I now need to build out. I'm not going to do that in depth here because I don't want to bore you. I just want to give you the idea of what I'm doing. So now what's cool is I can now close the project and I can see or not see those tasks.

So that's how you can make a project and dependent tasks underneath. The other thing that we can do, and I'll just show this while we're here, is you can create dependencies. So for example, you can't start one task unless another task has been finished already. Post written profitable content. This is just for an example and we can have it blocked by written. Ta da. So that way this is actually dependent on this.

And as you can see, all of these also have arrows. So if you wanted to have ongoing descending subtasks, you can do that inside notion. The next thing I want to add is finish and launch Action Navigator v2. Where we are: we did our brain dump, we determined which parts of our brain dump are individual tasks versus projects, and now we are processing that brain dump list into our task management system.

I don't want you to have to be here with me for like the 3 hours it takes to do all of this. We're just going to go ahead and skip forward to my personal task database. Okay. I've added a view of my personal, and it only has one thing in it because I've added a filter so that it's only going to show things I'm adding today, because A) I don't want to overwhelm myself, and B) these are my personal tasks.

I don't necessarily want to be sharing those with YouTube. So here we're going to go and we're going to add my sewing projects. So making sure the task itself is really clear about what the task is. So it wants to be verb forward. We want it to be active, not passive. So we're going to rehem two t shirts. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to edit properties.

So I do have a separate projects database and I'm going to attach them to my like quote unquote sewing project. That's a holdover from before they had task dependencies. If you're familiar with the PARA Method: projects, areas, resources, and archives. I kind of use my separate project database as areas. That makes it so I can filter my task database more effectively. So as you can see, attaching all of these to the sewing project made it populate the area as house and home.

So the next step to actually make this a full system refresh would be to go in and make sure that each of the projects and tasks that I added have all the information that I need to make it helpful. And as you can probably tell, I have a rather robust system. So that's going to be a lot of work for me, and I don't want you to have to do that with me because that sounds boring.

But basically I'm going to be doing similar to what I did with this project, build an effective direct marketing standard operating procedure where I already have two subtasks. I'm actually going to delete this one. It was just an example so you could see dependencies, but that's not an actual helpful subtask for this. My job is now to go build out all of those projects to the best of my ability.

So that way my to do list is helpful. My to do list lives currently in the new notion home. And what's really cool is you can have more than one database in notion be marked as a task database. So this is a combined list of things from my business to do list and my personal to do list. And the goal is to make this helpful. And this is a view that I can filter and I can sort in whatever way, shape or form I need.

So that is the goal. And that means I need to build out these projects, which is going to be more brainstorming probably like we did up here where I'm going to go in and create all the subtasks. So that would be me actually finishing my system reset. So basically I have a lot more brain dumping and then processing to do. And I'm not going to make you do that with me.

The last tip I will give you is remembering that the cognitive task of brain dumping and the cognitive task of processing that brain dump into your system are two very different cognitive functions. So if you are someone like me, who is neurodivergent or chronically ill and has brain fog, it's very likely that you also struggle with task switching. And when you go from brain dumping to processing, that is task switching.

And then if you do that over and over again, brain dumping to processing, back to brain dumping to processing, that's going to be a lot of task switching, and I'm actually getting really tired from having done the work I've already done, so it doesn't make sense for me right now to go back to more brain dumping to build out these projects. That's a task I'm going to have to do later this week to continue resetting my system.

I just wanted to point that out to all of you in case that's something you struggle with too. So don't necessarily expect yourself to do a full system refresh in one sitting because it's probably more work than you think it's going to be. And also it involves more than one type of cognitive task, and therefore will involve task switching. And if task switching is completely a no go for you, separate the brain dumping and the processing in time so you're not doing them in the same sitting.

Either have a big break in between them or wait a day or two in between them. Whatever works best for your brain. So, long story short, I am well on the way to completely updating my system so that it will be up to date and trustworthy, so that way I can use it and it will be useful to me. I clearly have more work to do, but hopefully what I've shared so far is more than enough to help you get started with your own system refresh.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments and talk to you soon. I will send it back to sofa Cassie. If you enjoyed this video, I bet you would like my signature course, the Action Navigator. Designed for those who are neurodivergent, chronically ill, or disabled, it's packed with tools and techniques for mastering your time, getting organized, and offering yourself radical compassion. If that sounds like exactly what you've been looking for, use this link to learn more.

Check out this video next on how I recently refreshed my morning routine. If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with one other person. I'll be back soon with another video. See you then. Bye.