As a reader of many productivity systems, and one who has adopted and modified much of what Cal Newport suggests, I go into 2021 with a plan for the Spring semester (detailed below) instead of a quarterly plan as I’m both a PhD student and an Instructional Designer at a tier 1 research university. My planning is broken into academic semester for larger goals, weekly plans for the most immediate or important work, and daily plans using Cal’s time block planner. My capture is done mainly in the time block planner. I’ve moved configure back to a combo of Evernote and Trello for configure as I found I was more productive with these than with the integrated approach of Notion.
In addition to those, and things like Google Drive and the Microsoft Office suite, I also use a monthly paper calendar and yearly dry erase calendar on my wall for specific items. The paper calendar I’m current using is a desktop calendar that I take down once a month and fill in definite scheduled items (such as my running and workout schedule, church small group meetings, household items like changing filters, and any deadlines for work or school related items). I also write down each book I finish on the day it’s completed. The four lines per box make it easy to control things at a slightly bigger picture while integrating both personal and professional seamlessly.
My yearly calendar is the Jon Acuff Finish Calendar. I chose the dry erase version to adjust more easily as goals/plans change. This gets used primarily to record anything longer term (like the nights I have to stay up late to attend Zoom class with my PhD cohort in Hawaii), large scale fitness goal dates, work projects beyond the current month, car and house care, etc) while also capturing things like the distance ran on my jogging days and books read to give me an overview of what’s been accomplished during the year. I prefer this calendar largely because the months aren’t separated, but they flow into each other so that in 2021 the days of March 31 and April 1 are right next to each other instead of being separated into different month boxes.
I even use a color coding scheme across both calendars to differentiate specific areas.
- Black = PhD/Hawaii
- Blue = Books
- Red = Fitness
- Green = Personal
- Pink = Work
Deep Reset – Spring 2021 Objectives & Strategies
As many do, I make plans according to the academic calendar (roughly) instead of quarterly since it’s what almost all of my personal and professional life revolve around. I use the idea of Objectives and Strategies that Cal lays out in Deep Work, where once the objectives are determined then specific strategies to accomplish them are chosen. Over the past year I’ve chosen five key areas to focus on, and developed both annual and semester goals for each, with strategies to accomplish them and metrics to track. For Spring 2021, here are the objectives and strategies I have for Spiritual, Fitness, Writing, Reading, and Finance.
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