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?

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.

Eisenhower Matrix

If you don’t know what an Eisenhower Matrix is, it’s a tactic to decide what to work on next. You can put each task into the correct category based on whether the task is urgent or not, and important or not.

So for me writing a blog post is urgent and important each day. And sending a design to a client is both urgent and important as well. But buying a Christmas gift is important but not urgent so I schedule it for a specific day. Same with a dentist appointment.

According to the matrix everything that is urgent and not important you should delegate, meaning hire someone to do it for you. But I mostly do everything myself so I don’t delegate but schedule those tasks too.

The most important part, and the thing that completely changed how I handle my to-do list, is the rule that tasks that are not important and not urgent should be deleted. That was a new thing for me. I had almost never deleted anything from my to-do list so it kept growing and growing until it reached a few hundred tasks. There were things like ‘play Terraria‘ which I still want to do but it’s neither urgent nor important so I deleted it. Same with my ideas for side projects – I moved them to my ‘Ideas’ page in Roam. There’s no reason for them to be on my to-do list when I am not even sure which of those ideas I will work on.

Now my to-do list is much more manageable. It’s also helpful to ask myself if the task that I am working on now is truly an important and urgent one. Or am I procrastinating and working on something easier but not important?

Best way to take notes

There is one app that I use every day, many times a day — Roam Research. And I can’t overstate how vital this tool is for me. Roam is a note-taking tool but on their website, they advertise it as “a tool for thought” and they might be right. It certainly feels that the way I see connections between topics changed since I started using it.

I’ve tried many other apps for taking notes like Evernote and Notion. I had high hopes at first but inevitably I stopped using them after weeks or even days. A note talking tool must be, first and foremost, easy to use. If there’s a barrier to taking a note, let’s say if you have to open the right directory and find the correct file, open it, and then add your new note — then it’s unlikely you will take as many notes as you could.

And if we don’t take notes, we forget.

To take a note you open Roam and you already have an empty page with today’s date and you start writing — that simple. In Evernote and Notion, you can create new content fairly easily at first too but after a while you spend more time organizing your notes into hierarchical structures that those apps enforce and less time actually writing.

Creating a link to another note in Roam
In Roam you put brackets around a phrase and this creates a page and links to that page.

This is not a tutorial to Roam, by the way, because Roam doesn’t need one. The only thing that you need to know to get started is that you can put any phrase in [[brackets]] and it automatically creates a page and links to it.

And this is how you create a link to another note in Notion:

Creating a link to another note in Notion
Are you serious, Notion?

If you want to use Notion then don’t even look in the direction of Roam —once you see how easy to use Roam is you, won’t be able to switch to any other tool.

I like Roam so much that I recommend it to all my friends but it’s a surprisingly tough sell, maybe because it’s so different than what we are used to in note-taking apps.

I use Roam but there’s also a completely free alternative to Roam – RemNote.