What's In My Toolkit These Days
Five tools that are helping me out
I gave a talk recently and someone in the audience asked me what tools were in my personal productivity toolkit. This inspired today’s Tending Letter, where I’m covering five tools I’m currently using to help me be productive while prioritizing rest and downtime.
Tool 1: Batching
Batching means scheduling particular tasks for specific days and times. For me, this looks like reserving one day each week for “inward facing” admin and business prep tasks and, as a result, scheduling my meetings and workshops for three “outward facing” days a week. You can read more about batching here.
Tool 2: Actionable & Achievable Goals System
I developed this approach to goal setting when I was working on my PhD and I’ve used it since then to navigate every big project I work on. As I say in my book Tend to It: A Holistic Guide to Intentional Productivity, “An actionable goal has explicit steps” and “An achievable goal is one that you can complete given your skills, timeline, access, and motivation.” Through this approach, I can easily choose which tasks to prioritize, and I can adjust my approach based on what feels accessible to me in the moment.
Tool 3: Bullet Journaling
I’ve experimented with lots of planners and scheduling apps in the past, but I finally learned how to bullet journal this year and I love it! Bullet journaling is super customizable (it is literally a blank notebook), and I use it to track my quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals and to translate goals into daily to-do lists. I dedicate one page to each day’s to-do lists and relevant notes, which makes it easy for me to track my successes and obstacles when I do my end of the month reflection and planning. If you’re curious about bullet journaling, I encourage you to start with the book The Bullet Journal Method and go from there.
Tool 4: Must-Do Method
I mention this one often because it really is that good. I learned the Must-Do Method in 2018 when I read Sarah Knight’s book Get Your Shit Together. By focusing your efforts on just the tasks you truly must complete on specific days, you can limit working ahead and as a result have more down time. I’ve been using this tool since 2018 and it has definitely helped me to set boundaries around overworking. You can read more about the Must-Do Method here.
Tool 5: External Accountability
If you’ve read Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies, I’m totally an Obliger, or someone who responds well to external accountability. Since I know this about myself, I weave external accountability into my productivity practices by working with coaches and an accountability buddy. I’ve been seeing my coach Kate Snowise since 2018, and we set goals together during our calls, so I have focuses for each month. I also have a dear friend who is also a business owner, and we meet every two weeks to share our progress on our goals and to motivate each other to dream big. A tip for people who work with coaches: reserve blank space in your schedule right after your coaching calls so you can ride the momentum to dive into your goals!
xo,
Dr. Kate
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