Sunday Productivity, Part 2: The Ladder

Okay, so here is the system I use to maximize my Productive Personal Time (as discussed in Part 1).

For me it’s not enough just to block off that time and then have a choice of options with what to fill it with. I need a system in place.

Here’s what mine looks like.

Step One

Make a list of the activities with which you’d like to fill your Personal Productive Time (PPT).

Let’s say you have these eight items. (My own list is much longer than eight, but this is just as an example.)

• Read (non-fiction)

• Read (fiction)

• Learn Photoshop

• Yoga

• Practice Magic

• Practice Guitar

• Clean and organize around the house.

• Build Model Rockets

Step Two

Assign everything on the list a rating on a scale of 1-5 in order of importance. By “importance” I mean how much you feel this activity will be beneficial to you and your future self, either personally or professionally. For some of you, practicing magic would be a FIVE, because you either want to perform professionally or release your own magic effects or just make it something you excel. For others, practicing magic might just be a ONE. It’s something fun and you like to show people the occasional trick and you want to keep your skills up, but it’s not a big part of your life.

So let’s say the list looks like this now:

• Read (non-fiction) - FOUR

• Read (fiction) - THREE

• Learn Photoshop - THREE

• Yoga - TWO

• Practice Magic - FIVE

• Practice Guitar - THREE

• Clean and organize around the house. - THREE

• Build Model Rockets - ONE

Step Three

In your mind, break up the activities on your list into approximately 30 minute sessions. (I try not to go under 15 minutes and not more than an hour.) Most of the things on the list above could be easily done for 30 minutes and then stopped. So you could just use a 30 minute timer. But some activities you might want to break up in another way. For example, “Learn Photoshop.” You might decide to go chapter-by-chapter through a book. So instead of a session being “learn photoshop for 30 minutes,” it might be, “go through one chapters worth of exercises in the photoshop book.”

So now you have a list of activities and a way to break up those activities into 20-60 minute sessions.

Step Four

Open up an Excel or Google spreadsheet. (If you’re like, “I don’t have access to that.” Yes you do. Open a Gmail account and you have access to their spreadsheets.)

In a column on the spreadsheet list the activities that make up your Personal Productive Time.

But don’t just list them once. List them once for each level you ranked them by importance. What I mean is, if “practicing guitar” is a THREE, then you’d list “practicing guitar” three times.

So you’ll have a list that looks like this:

This is your Master List.

Step Five

Copy that list over into a new tab on your spreadsheet. Fill in the cells with a black background so you can’t read what’s in the cell. Select that column and then select “Randomize Range.” (On Google Sheets you just right-click and it’s an option. I don’t know if it’s the same in Excel.)

This is your Working List of all the productive personal activities you want to devote some time to, weighted by importance and in an unknown, random order.

Step Six

Now let’s say it’s Sunday and you’ve set aside the hours of 1-5pm for some Productive Personal Time. Go to the spreadsheet. Open up the Working List. Go to the first box. Remove the black fill so you can read what it says and then go do one “session” (as identified in Step Three) of whatever the activity is. When you’re done, delete that entry and then go to the next item on the list. Reveal that task and complete it. Then just keep doing that over and over for the four hours you set aside.

I call this The Ladder because, like a ladder, there are no choices to make—no different paths to take—you just take it step by step and do whatever is next.

Maybe on Monday you only have an hour for Personal Productive Time. So you come back to your Working List and pick up where you left off.

You keep coming back, day by day, in the time you’ve set aside for this, until you’ve completed everything on the Working List.

Step Seven

Once you’ve gone through your Working List, go back to your Master List and reassess. Do you want to add or remove any of the items on your list? Do you want to change their priority rating? Do so now.

You can also add one-off, non-pressing tasks to the list. If you have to put up a shelf in your bedroom, but it doesn’t really matter when you get to it, just toss it on the list and let fate decide when it happens.

Copy your reassessed Master List over to where you keep your Working List, black out and randomize the list, and start over again.

Cycle through, reassess, cycle through, reassess, until the day you die. That’s it.

For me it’s just the right combination of structure and randomness.

If you feel you need to, you can weigh things beyond just a scale of 1-5. The upper limit can be whatever you want.

Some might find this too regimented. But keep in mind that it’s regimented by you, based on the things you want to do and the way in which you prioritized them. So who cares if it’s regimented?

If you can just instinctively manage your personal time in a way that keeps you productive in the areas you want to be, then obviously you don’t need such a system. I’m not that way naturally. If I had four hours to devote to productive activities with no system in place, I would spend a lot of time just dawdling and delaying and trying to decide what to do next and how long to do it for and that sort of thing.

This system allows me to just bang out one thing after the other without giving it any thought and I automatically am focusing on the things I want to with the right amount of time and energy.

So there you have—in two posts—the basis of one of the productivity systems I use. First, I separate my personal time into productive time and unstructured. Second, I use The Ladder to systemize my productive personal time.

Climb the Ladder… to Success!