One of my favourite areas that I have spent lot of time learning is personal productivity. I have lived my life trying different techniques using different kind of apps but none of the methods I tried gave me fulfilment. If you look at dictionary meaning of productivity : “how effective you are in achieving goals”. I believe that’s a fair definition however I need to expand it to meet my personal purpose. Personal productivity should give a feeling of relaxation not something that always running on your head. My personal belief is this can not happen unless you invent a system on your own. If anyone wants to prove me wrong, than I am up for conversation.

All my frustrations of visualising my ideal life and not living living it has led me to create a solve this. Since I am a learning Design Thinking I am inclined to apply some of the principles learnt..

Design Goals

1. Not a burden - This design need comes from frustrations of all the designs,methods which exist in market. Like to do apps, planners etc. I have tried all those but was never successful in adopting one. The only system I have respect for is Bullet Journal which is like open format.

2. Visual tracker - The system should be visual. Where I stand, what I have accomplished so far this month.

3. Feeling of accomplishment -

   One of the question I have for myself : Do I feel motivated after accomplishing my goal? I believe this is related to feedback. Working all alone and not getting your work reviewed is the culprit. So I believe this calls for getting your work evaluated. Guitar and health goals are easy to measure because you can attach a number to it. Here I go, the solution is when I am decomposing a task and not giving a way to measure it, than I will never get feeling of accomplishment. Do you think the same ?

4. Room for Creativity - I feel most of the creative work happens unplanned, if you are planning too much and don’t give free time to yourself mind will be too preoccupied. Its like your planning system owns, not the other way around.

5. Capacity Planning - How much time I should allocate per day for productive work?

6. Socializing - Obviously no one can live without socialising, a call to old friend, attending a birthday party, making new friends all these can have a impact/influence which can not be measured. Conversations are so powerful that it can lead us anywhere. It can be meeting an unknown person at birthday party resulting in sales cycle too. Life is full or surprises. It could also be a deep spiritual discussion which made you think differently. Its a human desire to expand thinking have more perspectives. At my stage I can not spend crazy amount of time in socialising however I would love to reserve time for people around me.

7. Time for Books, Unplanned learning and recreation - Books are a big source of inspiration and thinking differently. Its good to have a monthly target. How about giving time to things that you wanted to do from a long time but never able to do it for e.g I always wanted to learn 3d. I bought books also but never completed them. Can I spend few hours at least, who know where this will lead me to. How about connecting with nature? Can any one live without it? I like to watch sunset, its one of my favourite activities.

8. Daily Chores - I vacuum my house everyday and I am proud laundry man too in my house. If I skip those, than I will end up firing myself. And I won’t let that happen :)

9. Spending time with my kid - How should I utilise this time, can I inspire him by sitting with him. Can I learn with him too? Can I do some cool projects or craft? Can I have a plan in place, instead of delaying it over and over.

These goals don’t look bad I guess. If I don’t live up to this, somewhere I will feel dissatisfied. But the question is, am I asking too much from my life? Since I am the customer of my own product design I have every right to :)

With these design goals I came up with following format.

If you are interested in why I took these design decisions than read the para below or you can skip to why this design prototype failed.

Whats behind these decisions

Couple of months I adopted Pomodoro technique. I became a big fan of it. It was recommended to me by close friend around six years back. Those days I didn’t listen and ignored it. On my journey to Freelance UX designer, I also wanted to solved the problem of focus/deep work. Stop multitasking and do only one thing. I loved this technique so much that I ended up buying timers. The photo below is collection of timer I have. Even at this moment I am using a timer to write this post.

With the help of pomodoro timers I was able to pomodorize my life. I used to log how much time it takes to a particular activity. The goal is to find out how many pomodoros I can allocate to accomplish my goals. For e.g if I sleep for 7 hours than I am awake for 17 hours. Which is 1020 minutes. In these 1020 minutes I wanted to subtract one hour before sleep. Because I don’t want to track that. It leaves me with 960 minutes per day.

That comes to : 960/30 = 32 pomodoros per day. As per pomodoro technique after every 4 pomodoros you should have break of 15 minutes. Not a purist here but I guess it will come down to 30 pomodoros per day.

So how should I plan a spread of 30 pomos?

I listed down all my daily, weekly activities on a sheet of paper and wrote down how many pomodoros will take to accomplish it. This is where I listed down every detail of my life. Things like: Waking up, Morning stretches (which I am not regular at), Shower, Breakfast prep, Power Nap in afternoon, Daily Chores, Body grooming, Meal Planning, Buying grocery, Checking emails, Reddit, Gym/Sports etc.

Whats the number? - If I divide weekly activities by 7 and add time for daily pomodoros it comes down to 20 pomodoros. Which leaves me with 10 pomodoros per day.

This number gave me jitters, because that’s all the time I have for myself. In which I have to learn, be productive also.

If 10 is all I have than how should I plan to accomplish my goals.

Designing Solution :

Monthly Planning : Reserving a full day for planning

I never had guts to allocate a full day planning but dissatisfied with the way how my life was organised I thought to take a plunge. Here is what I did. Just like Agile I considered all my goals as User Stories and decomposed them into tasks. I decomposed tasks carefully for e.g. these days I am taking lot of training. So I went through each and every course content and did a evaluation on how many pomodoros I need to complete a lesson. The top most picture is the tracker I came up with. Its inspired from Agile: Here is the template:

When I came up with this solution I instantly liked it, because my goal for Visual Tracking was getting met. I can stick this to wall and track it. But this alone was not enough. At the start of my day I needed a pomodoro tracker sheet to plan my day. Here is the format I came up with :

So the solution was to start the day with this tracker and keep filling it up and at the end of the day fill the Monthly tracking sheet. When I came up with this prototype I had a wow moment. Because I felt by doing all this I will feel relaxed.

Now I will share what are the flaws of this design.

Why Design Prototype failed?

Simple reason - Design is too complex and I ended up spending lot of time tracking. I tried to discipline my mind but it never happened. Applying principles of Agile IE. filling remaining hours was not worth. In first five days I stopped filling monthly goal tracker remaining hours.

Is this a complete failure ?

While I was upset about failure, I chose to think that I am the consumer of my own design so I should not stop and refine the prototype. Which made me question what were some good things in this solution:

#1. Realistic - All my activities like :

1. Monthly planning
2. Decomposition
3. Daily logging of everything I did

All these things made me realise that my time is limited, whatever I can not achieve this month has to go next month. Its like I can see far ahead 3 months. Which never happened before in my life.

#2. Prioritise - This retrospective made me understand what are the prioritise in my life. Am i focusing on right things or I am getting fooled by my own mind?

#3. Confrontation - One thing I learned from Marie Kondo’s book Spark Joy is that organising is an act of confrontation. By organising you confront yourself and make better choices. The best way to explain this would be, when I cleaning up my Son’s cupboard we ended up with a situation that he had less space than no of toys he had. When I asked him he has to get rid of some of toys he owns he became emotional and started crying. When I asked him logically, see this is the space we have, now its your choice what you want to keep and what you want to give away. When my child was faced with this confrontation he had instant moment of clarity and made the right decision. I believe constraints are good, they help us take effective decisions.

How do I go from here?

So whats the solution of this? Granularity in decomposing Goals is definitely needed. Because that sets the direction however tracking granularity everyday can be a daunting task. There might be ways to make this easier for e.g. a mobile app asks you everyday how many pomodoros are remaining for this task. Since at this time I want to stay away from mobile apps and its my personal choice to use pen paper based approach I am afraid to go in that direction. That’s like a design constraint. I feel the solution of this problem is not by adding new things to design instead taking things out from design. I want to give another round of Ideation to make this better. Stay tuned for another post as I do my monthly planning for November at end of this month.

UPDATE 11 November : Here is the next part in series:

Goal Based Monthly Planning