The Path to Productivity

5 minute read

It might interest you to know that I moved this article three times. It was on the top of Monday’s to-do list (written on Friday), got moved to Tuesday and then appeared at the top of Wednesday’s list in red pen. When the coloured pens come out, you know I mean business.

Many of us have struggled with productivity over the last year and a half. Learning how to work from home while also managing the distraction of children/pets/constant deliveries was hard and meant that a lot of people were working in fits and starts.

The biggest enemy to my productivity is my phone. I have developed something akin to a tick where if I stop typing for even a second my hand reaches for it in some sort of terrifying involuntary move. Just leave it in another room you stupid woman, I hear you cry, which I have of course tried, but then I just spend time worrying if I’ve missed a call (I mean from who, another robotic spammer?), or a delivery or an important work message.

Travel Instagrammer and tech whizz Stephanie Barry (@stephmylife) was the first person to get me thinking about using apps to help my productivity. She and her husband live as digital nomads, working and travelling the world and she’s a big fan of the Pomodoro technique to keep her workdays on track so that she can enjoy travel days. They’re currently in Mexico and having a ball by the way.

The Pomodoro technique breaks your day up into manageable segments so that you know you just have to do X before you get a break.

You need a to-do list and a timer – there are lots of pomodoro type apps that will do this for you – then you break up your tasks into 25-minute slots and work on a single task until your timer bleeps at you. You can cross out that task or Pomodoro and take a five-minute break. After every four Pomodoros you can take a longer fifteen-to-thirty-minute break for a proper rest. It’s a technique that works because it makes even the longest to-do list seem less daunting.

Similar to Pomodoro is Forest which is a great app for people like me who have a hard time putting down their phone. Whenever you really need to focus you open the app and plant a tree. The tree will grow for as long as you’re not touching your phone but, if you exit the app before your task is finished, your tree will die. It’s a kind of depressing way to make you knuckle down.

There are lots of tech and apps to help you organise your day and work smarter like Trello boards, Evernote and Todoist. And lots of companies are eschewing good old-fashioned email in favour of platforms like Teams and Slack to help keep track of messaging and projects, but I’ll admit I can’t warm to many, if any of them.

I asked some busy women that I thought would be much more tech-inclined than me, what apps they use to manage their workday and was floored when they all came back singing the praises of good old fashioned pen and paper.

Niamh O’Donoghue @niamh_not_neeme, is a writer and the Social Editor of @drest, the world’s first luxury fashion styling game.

“Despite me being a ‘techy’ person, I’m truly an analogue lady at heart. Yes, I’ve used all of the apps (Evernote, Be Focused (really good when you need to get the head down for a 20-min blast)), but ultimately, I love the simplicity of a gorgeous, hand-written list. Ticking a virtual box on an app doesn’t scratch my itch the way a scribble with a real ballpoint pen does. It’s also a nice way to keep in tune with handwriting - which, let’s face it, is a dying art form. Paper ’til I die!”

Ellen Kavanagh Jones @waxpertsellen is an entrepreneur and founder of Waxperts Wax and she too has paper on hand.

“I’m definitely old school with lists for home and a calendar with all the bits filled in for everyone to know what’s happening. Then for my personal and work stuff I’m a notebook and pen gal. If it’s not written down, it’s not happening. But we love using Asana in the office that’s brilliant for managing work stuff. “

Sooby Lynch @standingbythewall, is a social media manager, stylist, content creator and runs the Mutiny Theatre space. She is proactively trying to become more productive.

“I’m a three notebooks, two calendars, notes on my iPhone kind of person. My notebooks are colour coded but when things get busy any sort of order goes out the window. Any apps I have ever tried haven’t worked for me. I’m on my phone pretty much all the time with the three different companies which is a pain, but I have JUST started to take weekends off.

“One thing I’ve started doing recently is dividing the different jobs into time. So, I do all the replies to DMs to the three different companies at one time of the day, all emails at another and creative things at night because that’s when I do that best. When I used to try manage the three companies and my own stuff with no order all throughout the day, I definitely got less done.”

Sooby also thinks that self-employed people need to think a little bit more about becoming organised, something me and my three separate to-do lists agree with.

“I think the thing with self-employed people is that we’re often self-employed because we don’t like the structure of working for other people, but structure is sort of needed to be productive.”

Maybe it’s because I’m on my phone and laptop so much that I love a handwritten list, maybe it’s something to do with my age and spending hours rewriting my Leaving Cert study schedule or maybe being physically able to cross something out is the action my brain needs to feel success.

This week I’ve already killed some virtual trees, missed the first genuine phone call I’ve had in weeks and used the wrong marker on my whiteboard all in the name of productivity. Everything gets done, eventually, and I think I should just be grateful for that.

Jennifer Stevens, November 2021