Neilism

The System

Taoism is a philosophy of freedom. The taoist exchanges rigidity and planning for mindfulness and creative idling, accepting that all we can really do is breathe, relax, and live in the moment. You can encourage yourself to adopt good habits, but habits can’t be forced.

Modern neuroscience shows us that the brain is plastic and is moulded every minute by the things you do. All you can hope is that you do more of the things that make your brain more interesting, rather than the things that destroy your ability to focus and pay attention.

So, as a reminder to myself, I thought it might be worth outlining my ideal productivity system. The act of creating a system may seem counter-productive, especially when you factor in the stress you get from neglected routines and relapsing into bad habits, but hopefully these guidelines are fluid enough to get you into the zone without making you guilty.

1. Be mindful
The foundation of my system is mindfulness, the ability to be in the moment and to focus on doing one thing at a time. Mindfulness and focus are the sharp edge that make your mental knife slice through the tasks of the day. Distraction leads to blunt thoughts and procrastination.

2. Do one thing at a time.
Distraction comes when you try to do more than one thing at a time. Close everything down except that one thing that you are working on. Set aside time for processing your inboxes, for thinking and planning and for following flights of fancy, don’t let these things interrupt your task.

3. Be realistic
Stress comes whe you try to achieve too much in too short a time. Do thing at a time, breathe, and make sure that your task list doesn’t overwhelm you.

4. Get things out of your head
If you have a thought, write it down and put it in a place where you can deal with it at a convenient point in the future.

5. Check inboxes once per day
To be mindful it helps if you don’t check your inboxes (email, facebook, twitter) more than once per day. For me, 4pm is perfect, just before you finish up work for the day. Any more than this and you get into the trap of constantly responded to other people’s requests, which leads to them expecting instant responses for urgent tasks rather than doing important tasks.

6. Know what done looks like
How can you do something if you don’t know what done looks like. Getting those projects defined, getting a good sense of completion, is the difference between success and failure. Visualize what completion looks like and the challenges that you’ll face.

7. Use the pomodoro technique
Make an agreement with yourself to focus on one task at a time for 25 minutes and then have a five minute break. This allows for significant work to be done and ensure that you relax.

8. Sense of Direction
The best way to clarify whether what you are doing is actually worth doing is to set goals of outlining where you want to be in the future. For instance, when I’m dead I want to be remembered as someone who was full of bright ideas, who got things done defeating resistance, producing elegant solutions, who was knowledgeable about design, generous with his gifts, got the best out of people, and who lived a good life. I want to be a freelance designer, doing elegant designs for the web and mobile devices by collaborating with other designers/developers, producing great little apps that make people’s lives better.

9. Healthy
Make sure that you eat well, exercise often, and don’t drink too much.

10. Set a daily goal
Make a decision about something you want to achieve that day and outline how it is going to be done, then do it.