Recently, our family grew by +1, and we got our lovely daughter back home for a couple of days. The experience in the hospital or clinic surrounding the birthing process before, during, and after made me realize that If you read life hacks and productivity tips including checklists, you’ll know the adage that “if it’s good enough for plane pilots, it’s good enough for you” or something like that. Over the past couple of weeks, I found that checklists would have been super useful in many situations around giving birth to a child. We did have a checklist with items to pack before heading to the hospital. But that was it.
I found this among my notes from 2013, and think it’s a fun little tool for analog productivity – the portable Kanban board! It’s a foldable personal Kanban board, suitable as an Every Day Carry in either A3 or A4 size (or US Letter or whatever). This produces four quadrants and the folded size is ideal to stuff it into a backpack, book, or maybe even your pants. Thus, it’s convenient to transport to university, school, or work.
To get more structure into my day so I get work stuff done in time and have free time in the evenings to tackle other things, I’m now experimenting with notifications to end the work day. The following is a translated version of the current data. I am using the German term "Feierabend" (which you can shout well); “end of work” is a bit clumsy, and it doesn’t sound like an exclamation.
How do I deal with reading and research projects for University? I plan and prepare the work. This is the second post of the Summer Knowledge Challenge: here, I tell you about the first step, extracting reading notes from Justice for Hedgehogs and preparing the project. The procedure I describe applies to other University assignments and writing projects as well.
It’s important to manage working time. Managing to-do lists is just one part of the equation to getting things done when it comes to immersive creative work where we need to make progress for a long time to complete the project. To ensure we make steady progress, we need to stay on track and handle interruptions and breaks well. A short Knowledge Cycle will help to get a full slice of work done multiple times a day, from research to writing. This will help staying afloat and not drown in tasks.