Productivity Report — June 2021

This month has been one where productivity-wise much of what I’ve experimented with is starting to click into place into a reusable system designed for improving learning and minimizing distraction. The components that make up the system are Bullet Journaling, the Idea Index (thanks Cal) and a few tips out of Atomic Habits that I’ll list as I go.

At the core of my system sits my new Bullet Journal. I have a love-hate relationship with physical notebooks, or rather the habit of consistently writing in them and organizing my life around their contents. They have a tendency to turn into an unstructured information dump where a few days after I wrote something I’d have no idea where to find that information if I wanted to review it.

This month taught me that the notebook wasn’t a problem, but my system was. When you keep a bullet journal, you maintain an index over the information you’ve written down over the previous month, which at a glance lets you know about the information you care about. My index has an entry for books I’m reading, personal projects I’m working on as well as subjects I’m studying.

My Index lets me know that I currently care about:
Book: Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
Project: Building Asteroids in C++
Subject: Game Engines
Book: Opportunity

I can summarize my June interests as Habit Building, Game Engines and Entrepreneurship.

All of that is great, but I’m mostly interested in how to build this into a habit that lasts over the long term, with the ultimate goal of learning, retaining information for longer and cross-referencing related ideas from different sources of information (books and articles)

Building habits is hard though, but Atomic Habits gave me some great tips for doing it. I set Bullet Journaling as the habit I wanted to build over the month of June and set three steps for doing it.

I will wake up 10 minutes earlier than usual, and when I do I will:
* Put on some coffee
* Go to the bathroom
* Pour coffee
* Sit down at my desk, get the journal that I keep at the side of my desk
* Write

It doesn’t really matter what I write, since writing is not the point. The point is just to show up and open my notebook. When I’m at my desk with an open notebook I’ve already won.

After I’ve won, I start by checking if I’ve written down any commitments for today, then open up a blank new page and write down today’s day and date. Then I switch to yesterday and start writing a few sentences about anything interesting that happened yesterday or just anything I might be thinking about. This log is for future me, a 100 year old man, sitting in my last home and wondering where all the years went. For after I’m gone and my kids come to clear out that same house, they’ll find these journals and read pages upon pages of reassurance that they were loved and that everything I did was for them. Also thinking of including a few treasure maps so they’ll have something to do, but I’m not a 100% on that one yet.

So anyways..back to productivity. Now that I have a system for collecting relevant information and reviewing it regularly, it’s time to eliminate distractions. Atomic Habits builds on the idea of making habits that you want to build obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Bullet Journaling is obvious, because it’s a journal next to my desk
Bullet Journaling is not very attractive, but that’s OK because of the fact that it’s an easy way to feel good about starting your day
Bullet Journaling is easy, because as soon as I sit down and open the journal I’ve won
Bullet Journaling is satisfying, because it lets me organize information and improve my learning skills.

Inversely, habits that you don’t want should be made invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying. My vices are casual browsing and YouTube.

The Internet is hard to hide, but I borrowed a few ideas for making it unattractive. I make these habits hard by setting a rule for myself.

• Any time you want to browse, schedule it for 15 minutes in a calendar at a time that’s at least 30 minutes in the future.
• If you do browse without scheduling (excluding things like opening a tweet or link that’s been sent to me) put an item in the ‘Log of Shame’ Trello Board. What’s that board, you may ask? It looks like this:

So far I’ve been able to keep the board clean, and the habit of keeping the board clean is both satisfying and attractive to me.

After a few weeks of making browsing unsatisfying your brain eventually gets the message that browsing is a distracting activity that should be avoided.

This habit eliminates distractions, builds focus and has the additional advantage of letting you not feel like an Internet junkie with zero impulse control. I still get the occasional urge to take a break from work and browse for a few minutes, but after training this habit for a few weeks I’ve been able to build an internal resistance where the cost of browsing is higher than the enjoyment I’m getting out of it, so I won’t do it.

The last bit I’d like to talk about is the idea of having an Idea Index to help you retain information and improve your learning. Cal Newport explains the simplicity of it here, but in short you maintain a list of the core ideas for any source of information and each time you come upon a passage in the book that relates to this idea then put down the page number in the Idea Index. Sounds like an excellent thing to put in a Bullet Journal.

Around review time (scheduled in the Bullet Journal, of course) you have a list of the most important things about the material as well as an index to where you can read more, saving you from having to keep endless piles of unstructured notes.

To summarize…

To start living life the way you want, building productive habits (like Bullet Journaling) is a fantastic way to start. It provides you with discipline, your day with structure and gives you a a way to organize information in a single place that’s subject to regular review.

To make the reviewing of this information easier, use an Idea Index for each book or source of information and schedule the reviews in your Bullet Journal.

Best of luck in building your own habits, and if you have any questions then feel free to @pastawriter me in the comments below.

Happy midsummer!