Introduction
Your apartment is a mess. The sink is always full; washing everything in it is an hour-long endeavor by itself, and you only bother doing it when desperately trying to procrastinate on something else. To cook anything more complicated than ramen you need to push back the trash piled on your counters and tables to make room to chop vegetables. All clothes are in piles around the rooms, organized roughly by how many times the piece has been worn. The clothes you wore to that camping trip last winter still sit soiled in a trash bag in the corner. New, important mail (when it's not stuffing the mailbox full) sits mixed into piles with old, useless notes. Your computer has viruses. Your car need maintenance. There are constantly multiple responsibilities hanging over your head, but you never seem to get to addressing any of them. They ruminate under the cover of your daily cycle of inefficient travel and fulfillment of cravings. Your passions fall to the wayside as you give in to laziness and spend almost all your free time on low-effort, consumption activities like video games, Reddit, YouTube, and Netflix. You don't want to host because it takes too long to make the place presentable, and you don't want people to think you are what you are: a slob. Because you know this isn't truly you. You know this isn't the way things have to be...
This guide is a representation of my personal self-improvement journey and solution to such problems. The means of my solution is an excessive and almost obsessive use of productivity apps on my phone.
Getting Started
Download these apps:
HabitBull
This app allows you to schedule a number of habits that you want to accomplish a set number of times a week. Do the task (e.g. read a chapter of a book), then record the success in the app with a yes/no or a number for how many minutes or reps you did or whatever. The goal is to make your chains of successes for each habit as long as possible and keep your overall score as close to 100% as possible. Use this app to track the activities you want to do almost every day.
Set your first habits. I recommend this combination:
- something pretty easy, pretty fun, and quick to do, hopefully anywhere (1 - 15 minutes)
- a block of time to do chores (15 - 30 minutes)
- your highest-priority hobby (15 - 30 minutes)
These durations are only a suggestion, but I think it's best to keep the total time required below one hour. Even though I suggest using durations as a measure of success, I find it's easier to still use the yes/no option for tracking success within the app, as it reduces clicks and the in-app statistics are not impressive anyway.
The first habit is meant to keep you using the app. You can do something like meditate for ten minutes every day; I chose to do a couple lessons in Duolingo, a free language-learning app, every day. It should be easy to keep this chain going. The second habit is the part where you put your gloves on and get to scrubbing. It's annoying at first, but you'll get "into it" and start going overtime just because you feel like it. The third habit is your hobby. This is your 10,000 hour passion that you always want to do in the back of your mind, fantasizing about it but never actually investing enough time, so maybe you plateaued years ago or maybe you didn't even start.
Trello
This app is basically a virtual bulletin board with index cards. Organize cards into lists and organize lists into boards. Use this app to keep track of the chores you'll do during your habit block.
Start with one board with these lists: "Goals," "Tasks," and then a list for the current month. In the goals list, make a card for each of your habits. You can come back to these cards periodically to make comments and keep a sort of mini-journal about your progress. The tasks list will have everything that you need to do during your chores block. List your chores, and then consider how long it would take to finish each card and safely discard it. If you can't finish a card in a single chore block, then break it up into smaller cards until they will. Then sort your tasks by priority. During your chore block for HabitBull, pull tasks from the top of the list. When you complete a card, move it to the list for the current month. This is your completed-list so you can see what you've accomplished. At the end of the month, archive that list and make a new one.
Forest
This app is a simple pomodoro-style timer with cute trees that you grow by setting the timer and not using other apps in your phone for that time (whitelist settings are available, too). Use this app to make sure you're keeping on task during your habit blocks. If you're going to say, play the piano, set the timer for how long you want and then actually focus during that time. Don't worry about "how long is enough" and let the timer decide for you. Feel free to exceed the timer, though.
One more note about HabitBull: you may get tempted to fill in previous days with a success if you skipped it on purpose but then "made up for it" by doing double blocks for that habit later in the week. Don't bother doing this. Once you've done this for long enough you realize there's no point to complicating the process other than the hope to convince yourself that you're more disciplined than you actually are.
Now is the time to progress to that greater vision. The only way I've made large gains is to make small gains consistently over time. Motivation is overrated; don't expect to have any. Discipline is the way to get what you want.
A Few Months Later
After a few weeks or months have gone by, the major waitlist of chores should be significantly reduced. Your place should be less cluttered, and you'll start caring about chores like dusting. There are basically three kinds of chores:
- daily chores: picking up clothes, throwing away trash, washing dishes
- regular chores: cleaning windows, changing car oil, haircuts
- one-off chores: buy a rake, organize dvd collection
It's important to maintain a balance of these categories or you risk having some things never get done. Here's another app:
Regularity
This app allows you to maintain a list of activities with expected intervals between occurrences of those activities. For example, you may want to get a haircut once a month, but whether you get that haircut in two weeks or two months isn't important. Use this app to keep track of your regular chores. Use Trello to keep track of your one-off chores.
If you are comfortable with your level of dedication at this point, try challenging yourself. Extend your Forest timer blocks, so you're doing your activities longer. Spend less time taking breaks between each of your activities. If you enjoy HabitBull you'll probably want to add more habits to it, and that's fine (I think)! I eventually added more habits. But what also comes with that is an inevitable increase in "failure." Your chains will be broken, your score will drop. This is not something to be concerned about. Now that your expectations for yourself have risen, ask yourself: are you really "at 100%"? The answer is probably no. And that's OK.
You probably have unlocked more tree types in Forest. I had fun by assigning a tree type to each kind of activity, so I could look through my forests and see what I have been doing.
My Current Setup
My main approach now for productivity is maintaining a daily routine. I do this with HabitBull. Most of the major activities I want to do in a day are listed, 9 items at this point. I don't have to do all of them every day, but I do most of them most days. My philosophy about this is that the routine itself is more important than any individual task. If I do get that rare, coveted drive from motivation, though, I'll gladly be flexible with my time to plow through a specific creative activity.
I try to push my times in Forest as much as I can, and reduce the length of my breaks between timer blocks. I have the task in my routine or Trello, I time it with Forest, and when I'm done I jump over to HabitBull or Regularity and enter the success. I also use Forest to time some other random things like reading novels.
My Trello setup has grown significantly. I have four boards:
- "Life": one-off chores and random tasks
- "Profession": everything having to do with my career and professional skills
- "Self": all my hobbies
- "Meta": current todo list and history
The first three boards is where I list basically everything that I could possibly do in my free time, roughly sorted by priority. Every time I get an idea to do something, I add it to my boards so I can compare it relative to everything else I want to do. Every week, I draw a reasonable number of tasks from each of the boards and put them in a list called "This Week" in the "Meta" board. Every day, I choose one or two tasks from "This Week" and move it to the "Today" list, so I can quickly check what I want to get done that day when I'm planning. And finally, once I've finished the task I put it in my completed-list for that month. If something is left by the end of the week, I move it back to its board to reevaluate whether I really want to do that it before some other thing.
DAE?
Who else has experimented with productivity apps? What apps have you had success with or enjoyed using? Are there apps out there that effectively combine all the uses I've listed?