Simplifying success: Streamlining your productivity systems in 4 easy steps

Declutter your productivity system. There comes a point when you spend more time tracking, taking notes, measuring, and planning than doing the tasks that your systems are supposed to help you with. Some call it the productivity paradox: as more investment is made into information gathering, tracking, and additional work, productivity actually goes down instead of up. So what can you do? What do we need, and what needs to be thrown into the bin (trash can)?

1# Streamlining your digital toolkit into one

Firstly, ask yourself what you are tracking and why. How many calendars do you have? Do you really need a personal, work, and side-hustle calendar? Why not just combine them into one calendar? How many notebooks and journals do you need? How many email addresses do you need? If you have more than one for spam signups and one for work, get rid of them. What I'm getting at is if you have more than one of the same system tracker, streamline it into one system.

2# Knowing when to graduate from tracking

If you still have an abundance of things you need to track, ask yourself does this tracking help? If it's just for joy and aesthetics, then by all means keep doing it. But if not, ask yourself, does it hold me accountable? This is very easy to see; just look at your past tracking and see how many days you missed. If you missed a bunch, then this system isn't working. The other side of this is if you haven't missed a single day, then you don't need to track that task anymore because it has become a habit.

3# The hidden costs of constant data tracking

Gadgets, this is a hard one to accept; most system-oriented people love technology, apps, and gadgets: smartphones, smartwatches, smart rings, smart drink bottles—the list is endless these days. I have a partner that loves tracking her sleeping patterns. Now, does she have a healthy sleep schedule? Not in the slightest, so tracking this is pointless and only makes her miserable. The moment she stopped tracking her sleep, she still stays up ungodly hours, but now she gets around 8 hours a night. Ask yourself, do you really need to know that information, is it benefiting you or just distracting you by making you think your doing something? Or are you just putting money into the pockets of the companies tracking your data?

4# Finding balance in a sea of software

Software is a hard one to tackle because most jobs require us to learn a plethora of different softwares. Whenever we fail at a task or a system, we blame the software or app. We say, 'It just wasn't for me,' 'It didn't have all the features I needed.' This is true; I'm not denying this. When it comes to apps and software, they all are missing that feature you need. None of them are tailored to your specific needs because we are all different. So, do the right thing and delete them. Now, how many of the systems that you use are related to work? Can you do step one in any of them and streamline them into one or two things? This one is a little cheeky, but will anyone know if you stop using it?

How I thrived by going back to basics

I used to do all these things. It wasn't until I looked back at everything at the end of the year that I realized I only used them consistently for about a month or two, or I used them and some. So now, my job is overwhelming, and just opening up the laptop or journal gives me anxiety. It's once I realized that all I need was a notebook and a pen. You might be different; everyone is. What I have found is that analogue systems work best for me, and everything else I only use when I'm at work.

Decluttering our systems can feel like we are admitting that we failed. This is so far from the truth. What we have found out is that all these systems don't work for you and are a hindrance to doing the work. Sure, highlighting that you went to the gym in an app is all fun and good, but the real accomplishment is that you made it a daily habit, and that app is no longer needed. It helped, and we can thank our systems for that, but that's it; they helped, and we no longer need them anymore