What tools do you use for managing your personal productivity and planning out your week?

It's more about energy management and timing for me. I started correlating my biometrics, & wellness habits with my work calendar. Been super cool & insightful. I prioritize deep work for when I have the most energy, creative work when I'm lower energy and drainers (ex. meetings) far away from high-energy times. I've been using https://basishealth.io/ & adding in a CGM this week to correlate with my glucose as well.

I think productivity is more about energy, focus & attention than time so time blocking never really worked for me... nor have Notion templates changed the game (a la previous suggestions)..

What works best for me is:

• Daily Note - This is a note about what's happening during the day. It's a collection of work-related and personal tasks, smaller todos, meetings and so on.
• Weekly Plan - This is a document that I write at the beginning of the week that collects the most important tasks I want to achieve during the week. It also links to all daily notes during the week.
• Tasks - I would create a separate task for something larger that contains multiple smaller tasks inside it - like a project for example. I'd link the tasks to my weekly plans and daily notes.
• Backlog - This is a note or document that contains the backlog of tasks that I want to achieve. I would check this regularly and move tasks from the backlog to my weekly plan or daily notes.

I believe Kanban view looks visually appealing but it's an overkill when it comes to personal productivity. You can achieve most of this with well-structured lists instead.

It helps if you use a tool that combines all that and ideally allows you to link between notes and tasks quick and easy. I'm biased but in my case I'm using https://saga.so to do all of that.

I always had problems with keeping all tasks and plans in one place. I've tried many different apps and now I use Notion to make journals for different projects, and collect information. And I use Bordio https://bordio.com/online-calendar-planner for short tasks and events. I like that in Bordio I can set an estimated time, so I can see how much time I would spend on it. And so far, my favorite function is a waiting list; I just can write all my to-dos there and if I would need to, set a date and time later.

Hey :)

Todoist : so easy to use, free & give the motivation to kill the daily tasks

Notion to stay organized

I mainly use google calendar and notion for my productivity. I think the biggest thing I do is plan weekly, monthly, and yearly. This makes it significantly easier to keep up to date and know what I'm tackling next. My biggest hack is making time for these planning sessions. Otherwise, they never get done.

With notion, I make it clear what I'm testing the next week and month, so I have a central goal to accomplish. Then I dump all my ideas and thoughts so I don't have to memorize them.

Building a routine helped me a lot from week to week when it came to managing my tasks and health. I'm working on building a tool now that helps founders overcome procrastination (avoid burnout , make time for planning, get sleep, etc.). Check it out here

scattermind.co

I made a product for this and use it quite a bit: https://focusdiner.io . It has a pomodoro timer, relaxing background sounds to focus, task manager and quick notes. It's mainly thought for small projects. For bigger projects I use trello and at work we use jira.

As a remote worker with a tendency to get sidetracked, I use 3 tools to stay on track.

1. focusmate: to feel social pressure and hold myself accountable (and to have some company),
2. Unimind: to jot down goals, make post-it notes, and quickly access my most used websites,
3. blocksite : to block social media sites.

Last but least, I found that programming work (focus setting on mac) to start automatically works as a commitment device.

Hope I helped!

I've been using a tool which I've just launched, it's called SamePage. It makes it really easy to do, especially of you have lots of projects going on at once as it focuses on a simple hashtagging system. If you're looking for something I'd love to have sign up!

Here's a 4 minute Loom, if interested: https://www.loom.com/share/5a7023a522344d9dae1f184b6a26d337

URL: https://www.samepage.tech/

What works better than the tool is mobile apps. Mobile Apps provide various features that give more reliable results and productivity and easy to track your data and can have access to data anytime anywhere. I personally use Timoney for time management and notion for notes data. I would suggest you can check out this list of best apps for productivity under various categories like notes, time management, tracking, etc. Here is the resource:
https://www.appshive.co/apps/productivity

Do check this out : https://smallwins.gumroad.com/l/lgmjm

I fail to see how one would need anything more than Google Calendar.

Trello (free tier) has been pretty awesome for me. I can translate my mental maps of task on a ToDo column, add as much detail as needed to each card, and chug along to in-progress and done columns. For "big picture" kind of thinking I just open a Google Doc per idea/project, including a link to the Trello board, GitHub repo, etc.

I'm dogfooding my own tool Vikunja. I have lists for the different projects I'm working on and put everything in a task - either a new one or a comment to an existing one. Some lists are mostly to collect stuff I'll get to eventually (random ideas where I think "hey I should do this some time". I write those down to not forget them.
Once there are things I have to do at some point I put a due date on them and add one (or more) reminders to it based on when the thing needs to be done and my availability.

Everything that has more of a "project" character I use the kanban board with at least to-do - doing - done lists.

The calendar app I built https://reschedule.app has weekly/monthly views for tasks. It also encourages time-blocking for tasks. You might find it useful.

I used a lot of things and I like some aspects of lunatask or lunatasks.

We're using Notion for all the documentation and planning.

For small projects, it's simple, sorted by priority, single to-to list. For more complex projects it's usually a kanban board which also lives as default notion component.

I don't use any time tracking or pomodoro tools, I just try to work when I'm feeling productive in that particular day. What actually helps is taking long walks in nature.

I don't use any. I usually just write down in a message on Telegram what I need to do and do it when I can.

I match tasks with the notion of how long they will take, then I schedule the equivalent time in my calendar to complete this task.
I also believe in the notion of the physical todo list: I use post it notes on my wall, and love picking one up and throwing it away when complete.

I've just recently started using Notion for organizing, prioritizing and tracking my tasks and so far I love it. You can find plenty of free templates to start and they're highly customizable. And if you need any help with Notion set-up, you can check out Thomas Frank on YouTube.

For us, we plan everything on Notion. It help us keep everything centralized and easy to access since as time goes by we want to make sure that we're on the right track and not deviating from the goals, objectives & tasks we've set for ourselves at the beginning of the month.

And for my daily tasks, I just stick to a simple sticky note with the to-dos of the day (Which are based on the notion workspace).

I use a mix of time blocking and site blocking for planning and doing deep work. I wrote an article about it too.

I track everything on my own productivity app,Sidekick. Feel free to give it a try!

I use Todoist to organize my tasks. I sort them by day and inside each day I sort them by priority (High, Medium, and Low).

It also allows the tasks to be organized into projects and move them around like a Kanban board.

Through 2022 I used a process that I simplified into a checklist in Evernote and added the name, date due, estimated time to complete, and priority level for each checklist item.

Each week I set a minimum number of tasks to complete on each priority level. I'd review the tasks completed to make sure they lined up with my minimum assumptions. If I overachieved I gave myself a reward (watching movies, eating out, etc). I also totaled how many tasks weren't completed then moved those tasks to a list for the next week that had daily tasks.

After using this system for about 9 months I moved it over to airtable so that reviewing the week and longer term historical data would take less time. Then over the holidays I no coded a glide app so I could review my daily tasks more easily on the go.

In summary, I recommend: Evernote, airtable, or Todoist (this one was great when I was in college as it's super quick to create tasks and has a lot of features to help you prioritize tasks, setup recurring tasks, and review past data)