Elevate Your Effectiveness

Building Your Productivity System from the Ground Up

Hello everyone! First and foremost, thank you to the 40+ subscribers who joined me after my initial outreach. You know who you are, and I am grateful for the confidence you've shown in me and the consistent support you've extended by actively being a part of my everyday life.

It's my 29th birthday today and in this week's email, I wanted to share with you one key idea that I have consistently pursued and has progressively shaped the past year for me so let's dive right in.

Building a Productivity System

For more than 15 months now, I have been investing a large portion of my time every single day towards building a system for myself that works in a robust manner, in a way where other external factors do not hamper my daily progress in any aspect of my life. There is a prejudice around being productive or having goals that I have come across from a lot of people in my life, where people directly or indirectly relate this to being good at your profession, at your workplace or doing well in your career, or becoming a machine or inhuman in your pursuit of achieving more material success. To me, being productive includes everything, as long as I am doing what I want to do and being intentional with my time whether it’s getting better at software engineering, playing poker, watching a movie with friends or just sitting idle doing nothing, it doesn't really matter. If I am doing what makes me happy for most parts of my day, I would consider it to be a productive day.

One of the things that makes me happy is getting better at whatever I am trying to do and I do want to pursue a lot of things in my life (like growing professionally, getting healthier and fitter, effectively managing all the household chores, reading, creating content, traveling, having an active social life where I meet my friends and family on a very regular basis, playing poker or cricket, learning a dance form or a new sport, painting, sketching and the list goes on for me as I become more and more aspirational). So getting better at all of them or even pursuing all of them becomes extremely challenging.

To overcome this, I realized it was extremely crucial for me to have some kind of system that I could rely on, and after drowning myself in many books and a countless number of YouTube videos around this, I have finally come up with a very simple system for myself that I think anyone can benefit from and I will share some of the key ideas from that with you along with a few examples.

1. Aspirational Goal Setting - Aim for the moon! I have always had high aspirations for myself and those aspirations are not just in terms of materialistic things, more success in my professional career, or more money. Of course, I want all of that, without a doubt but I also like to push myself for higher standards in terms of my habits and my relationships, and that contributes a lot towards my overall progress as an individual. About 12 months back, when I started on this journey, I wrote down a big list of identity goals for myself and the things that I would need to do in order to achieve each goal. I had created this on Apple Notes but have created a duplicate for you all, which you can find here: GOALS. I haven't really seen this in the past 8-9 months but writing this down did instill in me the direction I want to move in and how far I want to reach in the long run. And now, when I actually did see this list of goals after months, I felt so good because even though this was a very rough list, I did actually make progress on some of these in the past 1 year. Some of them are:

1. I have been able to take a lot of control of my work and delivered two major projects this year for eBay Ads.

2. I have been able to formulate an investment plan for myself in terms of how I want to invest, where I want to invest, and when I want to invest.

3. Very recently, I have also figured out a diet plan for myself with the help of a nutrition and fitness coach, and even though, not been up to the standards I have set for myself yet, I have started hitting the gym.

4. In addition to the goals mentioned in the doc, I did manage to travel to Mexico, New York, Hawaii, and some more places, overcome my fear of the ocean and snorkel freely, learn a lot about productivity, start this newsletter, plan some memorable events with my friends, bought my first car and many more.

The point is, even though I couldn't revisit that list of goals for a large part of the year, it did help me push myself in the right direction and it was somewhere in the back of my mind, always. I did not make any progress on some of my goals but I made really good progress in some of them and that is the key for me. I learned things on the way and I am now better prepared to move more aggressively towards all of my goals.

2. Clear-cut Planning - I cannot emphasize on how important this has been for me. I have always been a planner, I like to predict how things are going to happen and have a response planned in my mind for multiple situations that I can think of which are most probable, and this, I believe is also one of the things that helps me be calm in pressure situations at work or even in daily life. This year, though, I have taken my planning game to a whole other level, thanks to some of the books I read like 5 AM Club, Winning the Week, and videos from my current favorite YouTuber Ali Abdaal, Tiago Forte (author of Building a Second Brain) and few others. For an effective planning system, I have designed a 4-Step approach for myself:

1. Yearly - I tried to have a very comprehensive, bird's eye view of my goals at the start of the year. Since it was my first attempt at setting goals for myself, I didn't know where to start and what to include in a year-long list but nevertheless, as I said, it did give me some direction to start. But now that I have a better idea of how to plan one whole year for myself, I think I will do a better job at it with more precise goals for the coming year.

2. Quarterly - Tried this about 6 months back, to give me a list of goals to work on for 3 months. This kind of hits the sweet spot for me, where the duration isn't as long as a year where you can kind of lose track of your goals, or as short as a month where you can just get occupied with something more immediate or important and your actual goal has to take a backseat because the time is just not enough to achieve a medium-sized goal. The 3-month period hits the right balance of long-term and short-term planning for me, where the window is big enough for me to track 2-3 important goals in my life and also short enough for me to break it down into smaller subtasks and make significant strides in the direction I want to.

3. Weekly - In my opinion, this is the most important one and the one I still struggle the most with. Weekly planning helps me to focus on the high-priority items for me in the very short term. This includes all kinds of things ranging from my work, the books I want to read, all kinds of household chores, social events, workouts, and many more - all of them included in a weekly plan. In the weeks I am able to get this weekly planning done before the week starts, I see a significant spike in my productivity and I get done with a lot of things on my TODO List. I usually do my weekly planning over a 2-hour session on Saturday or Sunday. Some things that help me with my weekly planning are:

   1. Calendar - I timebox everything I can on my calendar with enough buffer time for each task.

   2. To-Do Lists - I have two lists on my Todoist app - "*weekly TODO* list" and "*someday list*". As the names suggest, the weekly TODO list contains only the tasks I need to look at this week while the Someday list is a never-ending list of things that I just keep adding tasks to. Whenever I sit for my weekly planning session, I go through the Someday list to check if I want to pick any of them for the coming week. You can also sectionalize your someday list based on some categories.

   3. Weekly Meal Planner - I have started using Notion to plan my meals weekly and track my daily macro intake.

   4. Daily - Every day, I take 15 minutes to plan my next day - including my work, workouts, reading, cooking, any social activity, and any other things that I might want to do, I also leave some spare time every day for ad-hoc things that come up during the day. The primary focus is maximizing daily productivity while maintaining a keen awareness to prevent any potential burnout.

3. Ruthless Execution - Since you have taken care of everything in the previous phases, all you need to do now is execute the day you have planned for yourself to the best of your abilities. A key concept here involves identifying one ruthless priority for the day and ensuring it’s completed consistently - for example on most weekdays, that involves something around work for me and for weekends - it includes weekly planning or having some social time with my close ones or special days like today - writing a newsletter :p. In addition to one ruthless priority, you would have a list of 5-6 tasks in your daily plan. In the execution phase, there are always some days when I find myself lacking the motivation to pursue the planned tasks or the day isn’t going exactly as I planned due to some external factors. The key lesson here is to recognize that it’s impossible to have each day go as per your plan and instead of getting disappointed, you need to embrace it with flexibility. I adhere to the principle of not allowing two consecutive days of setbacks. Even if one day deviates from the plan, I commit to trying harder the next day, and more often than not, I succeed in completing the tasks for both days—maintaining a resilient and adaptive approach.

With more ideas to share, I find myself exceeding the 2000-word limit I had set for myself, so I'll bring this to a close. The concepts discussed above are all works in progress, and I firmly believe that we will continually refine and improve them through iteration. Starting next week, the newsletters won't be as extensive; this inaugural edition was comprehensive due to the nature of introducing a complete system. I look forward to exploring more topics with you in the upcoming newsletters. Please leave a comment with your thoughts, ideas, and what you like/dislike about this newsletter. See you next Monday :)

-- Mehul