written by
Matthew Rensberry
on 2024-09-20
Consider A Productivity Purge
How it works:
- When it feels like your schedule is becoming too overwhelmed, take out a sheet of paper and label it with three columns: professional, extracurricular, and personal.
- Under “professional” list all the major projects you are currently working on in your professional life (if you’re a student, then this means classes and research, if you have a job, then this means your job, etc).
- Under “extracurricular” do the same for your side projects (your band, your blog, your plan to write a book).
- And under “personal” do the same for personal self-improvement projects (from fitness to reading more books).
- Under each list, try to select one or two projects which, at this point in your life, are the most important and seem like they would yield the greatest returns. Put a star by these projects.
- Next, identify the projects that you could stop working on right away with no serious consequences. Cross these out.
- Finally, for the projects that are left unmarked, come up with a 1-3 week plan for finalizing and dispatching them. Many of these will be projects for which you owe someone something before you can stop working on them. Come up with a crunch plan for the near future for shutting these down as quickly as possible.
- Once you completed your crunch plan, you’ll be left with only a few important projects. In essence, you have purged your schedule of all but a few contenders to be your next Theory of Relativity. Here’s the important part: Try to go at least one month without starting any new projects. Resist, at all costs, committing to anything during this month. Instead, just focus, with an Einsteinian intensity, on your select list.
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