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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about personal productivity systems. We discuss what you can do to organize all of your ideas and tasks and come up with a system to get things done. We also discuss a personal mashup of a productivity system called Capture, Sort, Do.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #13 of GradBlogger, where we help academics create online businesses and change the world with their research experience and their expertise. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about personal productivity systems. In particular, we’re talking about getting things done using my personal mashup of a productivity system called Capture, Sort, Do.
Chris Cloney: 00:32
In this episode, we’ll be talking about personal productivity, namely:
- How to organize all the crazy things that are going on in your head.
- How to come up with a system to get things done, on top of all the other things you have to do.
You need to create content; you need to build a community; you need to focus on the change you’re going to do in the world. You need to focus on social media and all these different things that we’ve been talking about in the last number of episodes.
Chris Cloney: 00:53
It’s probably enough to make your head spin, and that’s why I wanted to take a step back, talk a little bit about personal productivity, and answer questions like:
- How can we go about getting more done in a day?
- How can we go about doing things better?
- How can we create a system or framework to be more productive at work, at business and in our life in general?
Chris Cloney: 01:11
In this episode, we’ll talk about:
- Why you need a system in the first place?
- What is getting things done, if you haven’t heard of that system?
- What is my personal rendition of it, called Capture, Sort, Do?
I’ll close it with some struggles and some modifications I made over the last number of years.
Why do you need a system?
Chris Cloney: 01:30
Regarding why you need a system in the first place, I can track this back to when I had a corporate job back in 2016 and before that. I was doing grad school at the same time.
I was into personal development and wanted to become financially independent. I was trying to do all these things, and I literally felt most of the time like my head was going to explode. There was so much stuff rattling around in there: so many thoughts, so many ideas. I wanted to do real estate development; I wanted to start my own entrepreneurial venture. This was before I even heard of online business and blogging and before I started my first company, which is an independent research company.
Chris Cloney: 02:03
With the rush of life and so many things going on, it was very hard to keep track. I know a lot of graduate students feel this way, especially if you’re trying to do a side hustle, blog, or do science communication while you’re doing this work.
Chris Cloney: 02:16
That’s the first thing you need to do: get that fixed and figured out and realize a couple of things about yourself. One of the big turning points in my life in this regard was a book called [Affiliate] Getting Things Done by David Allen. You can find this as a hashtag, #GTD. There’s a pretty big community built up around it.
What is Getting Things Done?
In this book, David Allen breaks life into three things:
- Tasks
- Projects
- Reference information
Chris Cloney: 02:47
In the book, he talks a lot about how to organize tasks and put them into projects (which are just bins and categories for these tasks). He also defines reference information, uses flow charts with all kinds of different things, and talks about storage systems such as accordion files. It’s a very worthwhile book in the terms of the realizations you get from it, but it’s also pretty complicated to implement as a long term or soup to nuts strategy.
Chris Cloney: 03:18
Once I read it, I had some big realizations from this book, and I very much encourage listeners to get their copy as well.
The first realization was that reference information is not important. If you’re trying to remember that location you want to visit next time you’re travelling to California, that’s fine, but if it’s rattling in your head while you’re trying to write your Ph.D. thesis, it’s going to slow things down.
Chris Cloney: 03:44
You need a system for storing reference information. Most of the information you store, you’ll never use that at the end of the day, so you’ve got to get it out of your head. That’s going to be one of the tricks that we’ll talk about: getting things out of your head so you can be more present when you’re living life.
Chris Cloney: 04:02
Realization number two: Projects are like boxes, and it’s better to have lids. If you have 1,000 open projects at all times, you’re going to be stressed. I have maybe 15 projects going at any one time, but I only have two -at most, three- boxes open to examine what’s inside and look at the tasks and reference information.
Every other box is closed, and I don’t touch them. For example, Instagram growth for my website – not touching it. It’s in a closed box right now. I may be doing a lot more on Instagram in the future, but that’s how I think about projects. They’re like boxes. They should have lids, and you open them when you need and want to look at that specific project.
Chris Cloney: 04:45
The third realization is that tasks are never-ending. You’ll never finish your to-do list. Progress is stymied not by the difficulty in getting a task done, but the difficulty in getting it started. You waste more time thinking about which task to do next than you spend doing tasks. One caveat to this is that maybe at 3:30 or 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, you try to start writing a paper or your thesis or something similar. You may find it quite hard to move forward on that.
How do I Get Things Done?
These are the three realizations I had after reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. I started to use his system while implementing my own processes. What I came up with was a system called Capture, Sort, Do. That’s what we’re going to walk through: the different steps of that how I organize my tasks, my projects, and my reference information. Hopefully, it will help you clear your head a little bit and make more progress from day to day.
Step 1: Capture
Chris Cloney: 05:48
Step 1 of Capture, Sort, Do is ‘Capture.’ The key here is to externalize every idea, every thought, every to-do, every ‘want to do,’ and other stuff that pops in your head. This lets you live your life more fully.
Chris Cloney: 06:14
When you’re sitting at the beach, you can think about the beach. and if you have a thought about your new content idea or social media strategy or something you need to do at work or whatever it is, you externalize. The way I do that is email myself. I have a specific Gmail account set up just for self-organization and personal productivity. I email everything from, “Oh, I forgot I got to take out the garbage on Friday,” or “I have to feed the cats on Saturday,” to big things I want to do.
Chris Cloney: 06:44
Everything gets externalized to this Gmail account. Maybe you could write these ideas down in a journal or on a piece of paper, but I found that I have too many in a day and this way I know how many I have because I see them in my email inbox every morning. It drives my wife nuts because she tells me something and I immediately whip out my phone and email it to myself, but she knows at the end of the day that it’ll get done because of that system we built up.
Step 2: Sort
Chris Cloney: 07:26
That’s the first step. The second step in my ‘getting things done system’ is ‘Sort.’ We’ve captured all that information and externalized it. Now, we sort it. This is the most important part. Capture will have a big impact on your life in the sense that you’ll be able to be more present. You’ll not have all that stuff in your mind. You’ll know it’s in a safe place.
Chris Cloney: 07:45
Sorting is the most important part of personal productivity. I break sorting down into daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and quarterly sorting. Quarterly and annually are more for my personal goals but daily, weekly, and monthly are for my projects and my business to-do list.
Chris Cloney: 08:08
Let’s start with daily because that’s what we’re going to do most. I recommend intradaily as well, but we’ll get into that in a second.
The first thing I do every day is go to my organizational email and move every item to reference, project, or today’s task list. For example:
- If I should meet someone next time I’m in Toronto, it goes on a digital reference list that says “people to meet“ followed by ‘Toronto.’
- If it’s a project or related to a project, it goes with that project in a digital file folder.
- If it’s something I need to do today like take out the garbage or email a client, it goes onto today’s task list.
Chris Cloney: 08:56
One tool I like for the sorting process is Boomerang. That’s why I use Gmail, because there are lots of great tools like this. If the thing’s not relevant right now, I’ll use Boomerang which allows you to say, “Send me this email again at this date and time.” If it’s not important until next Tuesday, I’ll Boomerang it to that date, and when I do my daily sort on that Tuesday, I’ll see that email on the list.
Chris Cloney: 09:27
Now you have a list of tasks to do for that day. For the two or three projects you have open any given time, review their task lists, and add any that need to be done today to your list.
Chris Cloney: 09:46
I used to do this on a large sticky note. I’d divide my tasks list into four segments: personal, school, business, and organization. Now I don’t have school anymore, so it’s personal, nice to have, business and organization. Those are my four categories, and any task goes in under one of those four.
Chris Cloney: 10:10
It’s funny that I’ve replaced ‘school’ with ‘nice to have’ now. I’m not sure what I’m saying about my Ph.D. program here, but ‘nice to have’ is where I put the stuff that doesn’t necessarily have to be done today. ‘Personal’ is where I put personal things like ‘need to fold the laundry’ or whatever. ‘Business’ could be ‘cleaning my office’ or things that help me on the organizational side.
Chris Cloney: 10:30
Now I have this list of daily tasks, divided into four. The other sorts we have are weekly and monthly, so we just go through all our 15 projects again and say, “Do the open ones need to be open right now? Are some of them finished? Can we archive them? Can we close those forever?“ Then they go into reference storage.
I do this in my business. Any projects that we’ve completed get what we call archived, or moved to an archive folder. We put a date stamp on it and move it to the giant archive project list. Now, when you’re doing your daily sorting, you’re never looking at closed projects.
Step 3: Do
Chris Cloney: 11:12
Those are the first two steps of getting things done using my system: Capture and Sort. Now it’s time for Do, so step number three is to do the things that are on your list.
This is where the rubber meets the road. At this stage, it’s important to forget everything that’s not on your list. If it’s not on that daily list, it doesn’t get done. If it pops into your head randomly during the day, it gets externalized to your email account, so you don’t think about it. Anything that comes in and needs to get done can get added, but I recommend trying to avoid that if you can.
Chris Cloney: 11:50
What I like to do is use a combination of systems. I only do one task at a time, so I have a list each day of maybe 20 things to do. It’s broken into the four segments. What I do is put a red box around the one thing that I’m doing right now and estimate how long it’s going to take. I use the Pomodoro Process, where you set an alarm and work for 25 minutes. Once the alarm goes off, you take a five-minute break. You can do it at 50 minutes and take a 10-minute break, but I like the 25-minute time frame
Chris Cloney: 12:36
I put a red box around the next thing that I do on my list (or the next most important thing on my list) and say, “How many pomodoros is this going to take me to do?“ An even better question might be ‘What’s the minimum number of pomodoros I could do this in?“
A lot of the time, it might be one. The rationale behind squishing it into one, even if it’s going to be tough, is that you will fill your time with tasks. If you think it might take two hours, you’ll take at least two hours. If you think, “Oh, I can get this done in 20 minutes. I’m going to force myself to get it done in 20 minutes,” you magically get it done in 20 minutes.
Chris Cloney: 13:14
Put a red box around the thing you want to do, estimate the number of pomodoros (it should just be one) and then do it. If you do this for the first three hours of your day, you’ll have gotten the six most important things off your list. You could probably just close up shop at that point and still be more productive than at most other people in the world.
Chris Cloney: 13:35
To prevent myself from getting tired, I like to batch small tasks. For me, small tasks are anything that takes two minutes or less to do.
In David Allen’s book, he recommends doing them right away. I don’t do this because sometimes I have six small tasks and I lose 12 minutes, which causes me to fall behind.
Instead, I save them for when I’m feeling tired. If I’ve done three hours of pomodoros with my five-minute breaks but my mind’s feeling a bit numb, then I’ll take a half-pomodoro. I’ll take 15 minutes, do as many two minute tasks on my list as I can, and take a 15-minute extended break before I come back and start rocking with the hard stuff again.
Chris Cloney: 14:18
That’s it. That is the Capture, Sort, Do. That’s the Chris Cloney method for how to get things done.
Like I said, Getting Things Done was important in my life when I read it. I used it to start organizing my thoughts and feel more confident about how I handled reference information, projects, and tasks. Then I started to expand into this whole new model of ‘Capture, Sort, Do’ everything.
What are some struggles with Capture, Sort, Do?
Chris Cloney: 14:47
I want to go through a couple of struggles that I encountered with Capture, Sort, Do and the workarounds I found.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but I tend to follow a similar process in most of my podcast episodes. This is a learning framework. I think that it’s called 4MAT, by Dr. Bernice McCarthy. The learning framework is why, how, what and what if. With a lot of the podcast episodes, I start with why, then move on to what to do, then how you specifically do it. In this episode, it’s the specific steps to capture, sort, do, and then what if, so I perturb things a little bit.
Chris Cloney: 15:25
What are some struggles with Capture, Sort, Do that I’ve encountered? This is the ‘what if.’
One is journaling. I journal every morning and every evening. I like to take some time in the day to write out my thoughts. It’s another externalization tool, so if I’m thinking about something that can’t go in email, I might write it in my journal notes.
Chris Cloney: 15:54
This was getting difficult within my Capture, Sort, Do framework because there’s no real space for it. Then last Christmas, I read the [Affiliate] Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll and started bullet journaling my to-do list, so I no longer use a sticky note or a thousand sticky notes like I was using at one point. I use a bullet journal and break things down that way.
Chris Cloney: 16:17
This gives me a good place to store my weekly to-do list or my weekly project summaries and monthly analysis, but I also get to journal on the same daily section. I have my task list on one side of the page and my journaling notes on the other side.
Most of this journaling is reference material. What do we know about reference material? Most of it is not important. It’ll never get used. If I do an end of the day review, I’ll move anything that’s important to the projects or the task list or even just a list of self-notes that I have. (We’ll get into that in a second.)
Chris Cloney: 16:51
The second struggle involves tracking telephone calls and meetings. Again, I didn’t have a good way to do this within my Capture, Sort, Do system. The bullet journal, or BuJo system, helped quite a bit in the sense that I got everything in one book, but then I started to struggle when I got to multiple books, because it was like, “Where were the notes from that one meeting?” I’ve moved to using what I now call a life sheet.
I got this idea from James Schramko at Super Fast Business. It is a digital sheet where you put everything going on in your life, just like the name suggests. I have shared this on social media. One of the tabs in my life sheet, which is a Google Doc, is just meetings and phone calls. Every time I have a meeting and phone call, I usually write it in my bullet journal, but at the end of the day, I will also do a summary and put those tasks into my life sheet.
The nice thing about having it in a Google sheet is that it’s completely searchable. If I wanted to think about a conversation I had with a coaching student two years ago, I just type the student’s name into my sheet. and I can find the notes from that coaching call. I like that digitalization of the process.
Chris Cloney: 18:01
Those are some struggles I had with the paper-based method of Capture, Sort, Do. We’ll probably do another episode about what I’m calling the anatomy of a business: all the things going on in our online business and how we organize that. It’s a pretty complicated topic, and it deserves its own podcast episode, so stay tuned for that one as well.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 18:19
You’ve been listening to a solo episode: just me talking about my personal productivity system, Capture, Sort, Do. Some of the big takeaways are:
- You need a system in the first place. You need to externalize. You need to get these crazy ideas out of your head because they’ll make your day pretty stressful if you don’t. This way you can be more present, focused, and creative. You can get good work done and you’re only working on one thing at a time.
- Closed projects stay closed. You only look at open projects and you only look at the to-do list for each day.
Chris Cloney: 18:56
I hope you found some useful information in this episode. Some other references [Affiliate] I’d recommend are:
- Deep Work by Cal Newport, which is a great book in this area.
- The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. He also has a book called This is Your Brain on Music
Chris Cloney: 19:18
As always, if you want to download the PDF transcript of this podcast episode, We’ll include them in the show notes at GradBlogger/13. We’ll also put out a cheat sheet that you can use for Capture, Sort, Do.
Chris Cloney: 19:44
If you like this podcast episode, please rate and review on iTunes. If you have any thoughts or comments, you can leave them on Twitter or Instagram and tag me @GradBlogger, and I’ll get back to you.
I appreciate you listening to GradBlogger. I look forward to continuing to help you with productivity, building a business, building your side hustle, and finding something to do with your life after grad school, (besides going into industry) such as building your own independent research company, like I’m doing.
I also look forward to helping you through those struggles, trials, and tribulations that I’ve encountered since 2016, when I started my business. I hope you have a great week ahead and I’m looking forward to next week’s episode of the podcast.
Want to be more productive in your business, work and blogging? Subscribe to GradBlogger and we’ll send you our FREE cheat sheet outlining the steps and tools needed for the Capture, Sort, Do method to getting things done!
