Real Productivity: Results That Transform Your Life

💡 One day you will wake up and there will be no more time to do the things you always wanted to do.

Everyone talks about how it’s important to be productive, but what does that mean? What is productivity?

To me, productivity is about getting the results you want, as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible.

Obtaining these results aims to ensure that you feel satisfied with your life and that you can be present, without regrets about the past or worries about the future. That is, they obtain a positive change in your internal state.

Being productive is having foolproof systems, processes and habits that ensure you are meeting your goals and improving yourself.

1. Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

Is it productive to have 14-hour work sessions or complete 120 tasks a week? If we are meeting our objectives, yes, but we are probably wasting resources.

Effectiveness: Doing the right things — getting the result you want.

Efficiency: Doing things right — working with minimal waste of time and effort.

To achieve more, you need to be efficient and effective, but effectiveness must come first.

In the long run, prioritization beats efficiency. There is nothing more useless than efficiently doing something that should not be done.

Ideas to improve efficiency:

• Eliminate multitasking: focus on one task at a time. Switching from one task to another has a cognitive cost, in your mind there is a “residue” in the previous task that affects cognitive performance in the new task.
• One space, one use: separate your work space from your rest or leisure space. This way, your mind knows that it is time to work or rest because of the surroundings.
• Reduce distractions to a minimum: Distractions take you out of your state of focus, forcing you to spend another 10 minutes trying to focus again.

2. Objectives

Is it productive to complete a bunch of tasks if we are not getting closer to our goals? The truth is that no.

Is it productive to get everything you want if it makes you a bitter and resentful person? Maybe the objectives were not correct.

To be effective, we must clearly define what our objectives are and what result we hope they will produce.

For example, we can establish the following categories: finances, mental health, social relationships, professional career and physical health.

And for each category, we can define a series of objectives.

Instead of measuring how many tasks you have completed (vanity metric), we should measure what progress we are making towards our goals and whether we are enjoying the process.

Each time of your life has different objectives and priorities. At some times you will invest more efforts in some areas than in others. The important thing is not to forget to carry out maintenance on those areas in which we are not investing.

Aside from goals, you can also add anti-goals: things you don’t want to happen while we’re working toward our goals.

• Objective: I want to develop my professional career to the highest level.
• Anti-goal: allowing my personal relationships to deteriorate due to lack of presence and care.

3. Prioritization

There are many ways to prioritize the tasks you have to do. One way is to categorize them by the impact and effort they entail.

Another way is the Eisenhower Matrix, which categorizes tasks by their importance and urgency.

You can use several strategies in your planning:

• Start with high-impact, low-effort tasks, to complete them quickly and create inertia with which to move throughout the day.
• Start with important and urgent tasks, especially if they are fires that must be put out quickly.
• Start with high-impact, high-effort tasks, taking advantage of the fact that in the morning is when you have more energy and ability to concentrate.

Use the 2-minute rule: If a task takes less than 2 minutes, do it right away.

4. Systems

💡 You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Objectives are the results you want to achieve. They are good at indicating direction.

Systems are the processes that lead to those results. They are good at making progress.

The problem is that we focus too much on our goals and not enough on our systems.

Below I present some systems that may be useful to you. Implement and adapt the ones that best fit your style.

Task Manager

Use a task manager like ClickUp, Trello, Habitica, Asana or Todoist to organize your tasks and prioritize them.

Whether the night before or in the morning, review your tasks for the day. Prioritize accordingly to your system.

To avoid procrastination, set a due date for tasks. Use Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands to fill the time available for completion.

Ask yourself: can I do it in less time? What is the simplest version of this task that counts as completed?

Calendar

💡 Don’t tell me your priorities. Show me your calendar.

Your calendar reveals the truth. Each block is a decision about what matters to you. Your calendar not only records your time, it exposes your lies.

Record the events of your life, adding reminders so you don’t forget them. This way, you won’t have to worry about remembering everything.

Set aside blocks of time for focused, uninterrupted work. Set aside blocks of time where you allow yourself to be bored and your mind can process all the information you’ve accumulated.

This record will later be very useful to review your progress.

Second Brain

💡 Your mind is there to have ideas, not to store them. — David Allen.

The Second Brain is a methodology devised by Tiago Forte, explored in his book Create your second brain: A proven method to organize your digital life.

This personal knowledge management system revolves around two ideas:

PARA System:

These are the folders you can use at the beginning to structure your Second Brain. Adapt them to your taste.

• Projects: short-term efforts you are working on.
• Areas: current roles and responsibilities.
• Resources: topics that interest you.
• File: inactive items from other categories.

CODE process:

This process defines how information should be collected and digested.

• Capture: save what resonates with you.
• Organize: save what is useful for the action.
• Distill: find the essence.
• Express: show your work.

The information recorded must be actionable, a project must advance.

We must be careful about developing an information Diogenes syndrome, in which we capture so much information that it is no longer useful.

Use tools like Google Drive, Notion, Evernote, Obsidian or Logseq can help you synchronize your work between several devices and be able to quickly search your Second Brain.

Revision

To know if we are heading in the right direction, it is essential to review what we have done, what we can improve, what results we have achieved and whether they fit our objective.

You can set a weekly or monthly date when you review everything you’ve done and where you are now.

You can use some of the following questions as a template:

• What is working for me right now?
• What is not working?
• Is there anything I can do to improve my health, wisdom or relationships?
• What do I do that I think is productive, but isn’t?
• What do I do that I don’t think is productive, but is?
• What am I not achieving simply because I haven’t asked for it?

Productivity is not about doing more things, but about doing what really matters and doing it well. It’s about living with intention, clarity and purpose.

Each person has their own rhythm, their priorities and their values. The key is to find a system that works for you, not against you.

What strategies do you use to be more productive without sacrificing your well-being? I read you in the comments. 💬