05 Mar Lifestyle Hack: The Productivity Planner

“Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.” – Peter F. Drucker. Do you agree or not? Personally, this quote speaks to me because my main weakness is time management. I often try to multi-task (and we all know what multi-tasking really mean) and end up doing not much. From creating videos, developing social media strategies and consultation meetings; my days are crazy busy and I feel like I am running out of time in my day. In fact, I need to manage better and this past weekend, I went to Chapters and bought the Productivity Planner. ( S/O to my friend Lola for telling me about this!) I am a big fan of writing down your goals and notes daily and by writing this blog I want to bring you with me on my journey on being productive and more organized.

The Productivity Planner focuses on beating procrastination by using productivity principles and supported goals research that are proven to increase productivity. On a typical page, you find a couple of square and circles to track the most important task of your day and the time you put on it. The planner itself helps you on deciding on the most important thing; showing different day hacks and more. It has a very good daily and weekly tracking method to make sure that you stay productive.

The Podomoro Technique: it only takes 25 minutes at a time

Are you familiar with the Pomodoro Technique? If you are not, don’t worry, I wasn’t as well! In fact, the productivity planner is designed with this concept in mind. The way it works is that

1. You decide on a clear task that you want to focus on that takes at least 25 minutes to do.
2. Then, you start your timer and block your time to do it. You CANNOT do half of it, and if you end up stopping your task mid-way, restart the task. This forces you to put multitasking aside and increase productivity.
3. When you’re done, you can take a 5 min break to stretch, drink water and then on to the next Pomodoro!

Which means that your day ends up being a cumulation of all your Pomodoro time. At the end of every day, you rate your productivity on a scale from 1 to 10. In my case: My goals for this month revolves around content.

I want to produce more content such as blogs, photos, and videos! (So expect me to keep going with my Content Mondays!) In term of videos, I am doing more local content such as trying different restaurants, vlogging around the city and doing collaborations with other content creators (check out my last video with Bryan from Pho Your Eyes Only). Content Monday is really important for me because it forces me to stay consistent. This is the beginning of a new journey for me, to understand better my time and to not take it for granted.  “Time is truly your most precious commodity. Money will come and go, once time is lost, it is lost forever.” The Productivity Planner.