Justyna Dorsz

Productivity

Less distractions

To focus on a task, we need uninterrupted time. No phone calls, no notifications, no distractions. It’s getting more and more difficult to work and not be disturbed every few minutes.

Recently, I’ve been paying more attention to creating an environment when I can really focus. One thing I do is put my phone on Do Not Disturb. Only when I am expecting an important phone call, I unmute it. But it’s not enough. Even the “mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity”. So I started hiding my phone in a drawer when I work.

Another thing I noticed is that some days I receive an email every 15-30 minutes. Now that my phone is on silent mode, it no longer distracts me. But I use Checker Plus for Gmail that shows me a red envelope in my browser’s toolbar if I get an email. When I work on my computer I either work in my browser or have it open on my second screen. And every few minutes I would notice that the email icon is red, stop working, check email, and sometimes get distracted by articles or twitter or whatever else. I would get back to work after, say, half an hour, and need another few minutes to remember what I was working on.

I found out though, that it’s easy no disable Checker Plus notifications for any period. And I disabled them indefinitely. Now I only check email a few times a day, mostly in the evenings. I am still too used to checking email often but I plan to limit it to just 2 times a day.

Pomodoro Technique

You’ve probably heard of The Pomodoro Technique. But for those who haven’t: The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity method where you set a timer to 25 minutes and then focus on work for those 25 minutes, avoiding distractions.

I tried it a few times before, but my timer was just a browser extension that displayed the remaining time in the browser’s toolbar. It was so small and subtle that for me that wasn’t a sufficient reminder that I should be working. I gave up on the technique.

But a few days ago, I’ve read the recent post on the Raptitude blog. Raptitude is one of my favorite blogs, for example, here’s an article about meditation that I enjoyed, and I think is a good summary of why meditation is so useful: Mindfulness is the Opposite of Neediness. Read also “Wise People Have Rules For Themselves”.

Anyway, the latest post on Raptitude is about productivity, and one of the methods that are mentioned as useful is The Pomodoro Technique. I decided to give it a try one more time. But instead of using a browser extension with the timer, I bought a simple physical timer — you can see it in the photo above. The timer is attached to my microphone’s arm, right next to my laptop’s screen, so I see it all the time when I am working. I expect it will be a more effective reminder. I will report back the results after a week or two.

Create designs faster

The process for creating a design is:

  1. Have an idea.
  2. Sketch it.
  3. Draw it properly.
  4. Clean up the lines. Polish.
  5. Add text if needed.
  6. Export to a PNG file. Sometimes you need a few variants.
  7. Submit to your online store.
  8. Add tags and a description.
  9. Share on social media.

That’s a lot of different kinds of tasks. And it always takes a moment to switch from one task to the next one. Instead of making one design and then another one, it’s more efficient to batch similar tasks together.

First, I note down ideas. At the moment I have 9 ideas for designs that I want to create for my new store. Today, I’ve made initial sketches for all of them. Then I will draw them all. After that, export all the designs to PNG files. And submit to my store.

I know from experience that this way is faster. When I focus on just one design, I end up making only that single design during a day. But, when I work on groups of designs, I can make 3 to 5 designs a day.

Roam Research – Templates

I make notes about all the books and articles that I read, about anything useful that I learn. I note down all my ideas, I plan my future projects, I write down notes from courses I take. And while I work I chronicle the process.

For all that I use Roam Research. It’s kind of like my second brain. I wrote a bit about it before.

One feature that I’ve found out about recently is: Templates. When you keep writing the same things over and over again you can use templates to speed up the process. For example, when I read a book and want to add it to my Roam, I create a new page for that book. And then I add notes: the author, keywords, sometimes quotes. Now however I can create a template so that notes for each book follow the same structure.

The format for the template is:

The first line is key: you need a trigger to be able to use your template, and you need to add “#roam/templates” to specify that it’s a template.

I created a new page in Roam called “Roam Templates” to keep all my templates there and added the first template The template is for book notes, the trigger is — “book”:

All the sub-blocks: “Title”, “Author”, etc, are the content of the template.

Now that my template is declared I can use it wherever I want.

I go to another page that I created for the book “Annihilation” which I’ve read recently. To use the template I need to call a trigger, you do that by writing a semicolon twice: “;;”

When I write “;;” I get the list of all my templates. For now, there’s only one template: “book”. I select it, press enter, and my template shows up:

Now I can simply add all the data I want to have here. And then I can use the same template for other books.

What gets measured, gets managed

I don’t remember when I’ve first heard or read the words: “What gets measured, gets managed”. I thought it was something Ray Dalio said, but I just checked, and it seems the words are attributed to Peter Drucker (I don’t know who that is). Nevertheless — I like the principle.

I just checked how many designs I made this year — 21! I only made 21 designs, and there have already been 19 weeks this year. That means I barely made one design a week. That’s a lot less than I thought. I am not as productive as I want to be.

Can your output be measured?

10 time management tips (not mine)

I’ve been trying to get better at managing my time because I can see how bad I am at it:

  • I am busy all day, but nothing substantial gets done.
  • I don’t prioritize, and so I complete minor tasks and I leave the most important thing for last.
  • I keep putting off doing things I don’t like.
  • I get distracted, so tasks take more time than they should.

The only thing I have gotten better at recently is actually deleting tasks that are neither important nor urgent.

Today I watched Ali Abdaal’s “10 Time Management Tips” and it gave me some ideas. Maybe you will find it inspiring too:

The main takeaway for me is that I should have a daily highlight — the most important task that needs to be done even if it’s the only thing that gets done. And I should time-block which I haven’t really done before, but I am going to give it a try.

Overwhelming to-do list

My to-do list is always a few hundred items long. I am overwhelmed by it on a daily basis and constantly try to make it more manageable. Thomas Frank has just released a video “5 steps to tame your overwhelming to-do list” which, I think, drove the point across that I can’t do it all. And if something is neither important nor urgent then it needs to be deleted.

After watching the video I went through my list for the upcoming week and deleted a few items, including participating in a local art competition. I had wanted to take part but it’s neither urgent nor important, I have other things that I want to work on, so it had to go.

ReMarkable Productivity Boost

I’ve been using a reMarkable tablet nonstop for the past week.

I moved all my to-do lists there. All notes on reMarkable are organized into notebooks so I now have a notebook just for my to-do lists. I created separate notebooks for all my projects that I am working on. One more notebook with weird ideas that might turn into projects one day.

I keep it nearby all the time, open on my to-do list for the day. No longer do I have to shuffle paper notepads and loose pages that somehow always accumulated on my desk.

But it’s not useful for notes and lists only. I also sketch in it a lot. I have a notebook for my sketches and another notebook for sketches for my next apparel store. When I have a completed drawing I simply export it to a PNG file. I still have to remove the background in Photoshop but it’s way faster than sketching on paper and then taking a photo and cleaning it up.

Here’s another sketch that I made yesterday:

"Dog Looking Out a Window" by Justyna Dorsz
Dog Looking Out a Window

Available on Threadless.

Make your first 100 mistakes

Quality doesn’t matter, quantity does. It’s better to do 100 drawings than spend all that time on a single drawing.

Starting a blog is scary, but I knew I would only get better if I wrote a lot. The first 100 designs are going to be awful, get them out of the way as soon as possible. Same with photography:

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

This reminds me of the story about a pottery class. Students who practiced a lot made better pots than the ones who were focused on creating one perfect pot.

Quantity over quality. This is the sort of thing that I need to remind myself of.

Complete small tasks right away

Do you know the 2-minute productivity rule? It goes like this:

If a task takes 2 minutes or less to complete, then do it now.

I first read it in Getting Things Done by David Allen which is a very useful book and I recommend it to everyone.

I like all the productivity rules and tricks that help me optimize my time. And the 2-minute rule is one that helped me immensely. It applies to lots of small tasks: getting up and putting away a book into its correct place, ordering some items online, paying bills.

But most importantly it applies to all those tasks that are easy but unpleasant like responding to emails when we can’t accept an invitation or offer. We hate disappointing people so letting someone know that we won’t come to a meeting or can’t help them with something is difficult. I used to procrastinate on it a lot but now if an answer is obvious and I don’t need to consider it, then I answer at once.

If I catch myself thinking that I need to add something to my to-do list, I consider if it’s something simple that could be done quickly. If the answer is yes, then I do it right away.