Matthew Lang

In the last 18 months, I’ve moved from using a task manager application to using pen and notebook and a technique called bullet journaling. The transition to this method hasn’t been without its challenges, but there’s one thing that it provides that I don’t get with any task manager application that I've used. And that is constraints.

Task management applications like to sell lots of benefits like being able to go with me wherever I go, work wherever I am and manage anything I throw at it. That last advantage is quite interesting because it’s here that I find that task management applications work quite well for me for a while, but I usually end up over-committing with a crazy list of tasks sometimes running into hundreds.

Thanks to improvements in technology, we have these little portable devices in our pockets that can potentially hold thousands (perhaps even millions) of tasks. These same devices also make it simple to add more tasks with the ability to type, speak or automate the process of creating new tasks. There are very few constraints in creating new tasks other than perhaps losing the wi-fi signal or running out of battery. These are not big constraints given that the world is more connected than ever and we have portable chargers to keep our devices topped up.

I keep all my tasks together at the back of my notebook. Written by hand and double-spaced. Sounds labourious right? Bear with me.

With each new task added, I often find myself questioning the value of the task and whether it is even worth writing down. I also look at the number of tasks I have decided if I need to focus on those first before adding anything else.

When it comes to moving tasks from one page to another, again I question the value of the task and whether it is worth moving.

My master list of tasks is usually about three pages long. Take into account that the notebook is smaller than A4 and my writing is double-spaced, that’s not a lot of tasks to do. The constraints of time to write a task and the effort in maintaining it when using paper mean that my complete list of tasks is manageable.

You can enforce these constraints on your favourite task management application, but I’ve often found that this is difficult to do given how easy to use these types of applications are.

Now, I’m not saying that bullet journaling is the silver bullet solution to all productivity hacks; it isn’t. However, the constraints of notebooks are why I find that bullet journaling works so well. It allows me to manage a smaller and more focused list of tasks and that in turns stops me from over-committing.

With a rising interest in newsletters, I started one last year. I tried to publish one long-form post a month as well as a collection of links at the end.

I intended to keep this newsletter going through the year, but after a few months, I decided that a newsletter of this kind wouldn’t be of any additional value that my blog couldn’t already provide.

Now I’m also blogging on a daily basis, so there’s no need for such a newsletter, and most likely I’ll never publish a newsletter of this kind again.

The newsletter experiment did not succeed in the way I thought it would, but although I closed the newsletter down, I learned something valuable from the newsletter.

Newsletters themselves are great, but the real value of a newsletter is the niche the newsletter caters to. This niche could be an interest, a topic, a market or anything like that.

This year I’m starting a small side project to build a newsletter aimed at a specific type of organisation who are looking to make more effective use of their digital presence and other tools to help those organisations.

I’m sending out a few invites to sign up for some local organisations that meet this criterion. I’ll then run the newsletter for a few months, collecting feedback on the first few editions. If the feedback is positive, I’ll keep going. If it's terrible, I’ll adjust the content to either suit the feedback or close the newsletter down.

I’ve already got a landing page up and running and I just need to dig into how to send a welcome email to each new sign up. Once done, I’ll be ready to accept sign-ups as they come. I’m not going to market this though until I decide that it has any lasting value as a product.

There are a few added benefits from this experiment.

I get some hands-on experience with running a newsletter using MailChimp. TinyLetter was an ideal service for my previous newsletter, but for this newsletter, I need a few more features like more options for formatting emails and their content.

I can spend a bit of time researching and writing content for the newsletter. I’m budgeting a fixed number of hours a month for this, and in that time I need to have the material ready to send and handle any replies or feedback. A test of time management and improving my writing.

The final benefit is that this is a testbed to a more significant opportunity. I’m using the newsletter to gauge the interest in a range of services that could help a particular market. This newsletter will be the on-ramp to that range of products and services and will determine if there’s any value in them.

I think I’ve found a niche market with this newsletter but only time will tell. I do believe that this will have a better chance of success than my previous attempt at a newsletter, but the only indication of this is whether organisations that sign up for this and find it useful.

I've already written about how I use habits rather than resolutions for the year. Resolutions are doomed to fail, but practices can be iteratively built on over the year and eventually form a set of good habits.

How do you stay focused on these habits though?

Well, one way I've been able to build on these habits over the last couple of years is using Chris Brogan's three words. It's a simple idea.

You pick three words for that will guide your actions through the year. Through the course of the year, your efforts should align with these three words so that anything that you do is working towards them. The words themselves are goals, but not specific ones. Just parts of your life that you want to make better.

Last year my words were habit, health and hustle. I'm chuffed to say that at the end of 2017 I had lost a bit of weight and I'm now more active through the work week to stop myself getting any more back pain.

This year's words are less of a focus on health and work and more about content and delivery.

Bootstrap - For too long I've had a little email product running that has been running quietly in the background. It's time to bring it to the masses and bootstrap it from being merely just a product that people use to one that people rave about. Of course, I'm talking about DailyMuse. I want to expand this product so that it becomes more of a featured revenue stream than something I merely allow to run. DailyMuse isn't the only product in the pipeline though. I'm intrigued about a numberless analytics idea, and I'm interested in exploring a niche market for my web development skills that could help end the feast and famine cycle that is always at the back of my mind as a freelancer.

Blog - I remember the great days of blogging every day. It didn't matter what day it was. I punted something out anyway. This single word over the last two weeks has prompted me to write and publish more often already this month and look set to complete one week with a post a day.

Budget - When it comes to time, we only have so much of it. For 2018 I want to budget my time and energy through the week so that I'm not idling away my time in front of the television or on my phone. This isn't a call to budget every minute of every day. Scheduling my day in this way doesn't work for me. The plan is to spread my time, focus and energy over the week, rather than blitz everything in the one day. One way of doing this is to theme each day around a particular product or project.

I wouldn't say that 2017 was a significant success using this technique, but I did make some gains. I'm aiming to do better with my three words for 2018.