Personal productivity is a vast topic. There’s a multitude of systems for managing tasks, plans, and what not. This year has been interesting for me in that regard since I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about planning. People have so much to do, they look for ways to optimize getting it all done. The truth is there’s no perfect system, and even if you adopt one, you likely won’t keep up with it. More likely than not you’re also doing it for the wrong reasons.
The Now
When you’re overwhelmed with things to do, you need help getting through it all. This is what I consider the now. To help with the now, there are so many different methodologies and systems. You may have heard of GTD (Getting Things Done), Pomodoro, or Kanban. The best ones are often the simplest ones. Any of them can help you manage your tasks and get more done.
I particularly like the concepts of GTD. I don’t use it exactly, but I follow a similar idea. I have two primary “inboxes” to track tasks (my email and an Apple Notes note). Every day, I go through my inboxes and do the things that are quick to do. Once I’ve gone through the quick things I start working through my longer tasks. I order them as follows: Important and Urgent, Important and Not Urgent, Urgent and Not Important, and Not Urgent and Not Important.
I started doing this earlier in the year to great success. Now it’s a habit.
But, there’s a danger with just following a task management system. It’s looking back at the week and not remembering what you actually did. This happened to me.
It’s one thing to mark things off of your checklist. It’s another to feel good about it. Which brings me to the later.
The Later
The later is the things that are meaningful. The later is your long-term plan and goals. Most people have them, the problem is actually getting started on them. It’s easy to fall into just working on things as they come up to the detriment of your own personal goals.
Lately, I've been planning my weeks and days ahead of time. Every Monday my first task is to lay out what a successful week looks like to me. I fill it in with the “right” tasks I want to complete. I choose what’s important and urgent to me. That way, when Friday evening rolls around, I can look back and plainly see if I had a successful week or not.
It feels far better to see a completed list than a half completed one. But, I also know my week is going to fill up with random things to do. Which is why I break the list into two: “What I can accomplish” and “What would be nice to accomplish.” The first list I know with 90-100% certainty that I can do in the week. If I do anything on the second list, it’s a cherry on top. Sometimes, the random things that come up are meaningful! For that reason, I also keep a list of the “Other meaningful things I did” to record the things that came up that were worthwhile.
Planning my week in advance has helped me feel far more accomplished. Personal productivity isn’t about getting work done. It’s about feeling accomplished. Accomplishment isn’t about marking things off of a checklist, it’s about making progress towards your goals. Design your life around that.
I use Todoist to track all of my tasks and while it's not perfect, I'm sure I couldn't go back to a time before I used it.
Similar to you're "What I can accomplish" vs "What I'd like to accomplish", I divide my tasks into things that have to get done (like a deliverable I gave a time-based committment on, or taking out the trash the night before it gets picked up); things that should get done but don't have to (getting a head start on certain tasks, errands, or chores); and things that don't have to get done but I don't want to forget about.
My main complaint, which you mentioned, is that there's no easy way to see what you've already completed. I love the feeling of looking at a list and seeing that I've crossed off 8 items and only have 2 left; seeing a list with just 2 items in it isn't the same. It's the main reason why I still use pen and paper sometimes when I've got a set of things I want to be able to knock out, like a set of weekend chores. It feels good to cross things off!
That's what I like about Apple Notes. The checklists don't disappear. I move the completed lists to an archive at the end of the week. I feel with disappearing tasks that you end up on a treadmill. It always pushes you to do more. It's one of the reasons I don't use Asana.
Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture and asking yourself what you can actually do that's worthwhile is so much better than constantly checking stuff off a list.