Personal Productivity

The science-backed method that helps solopreneurs start (and finish) their hardest tasks

They say it takes about 20 minutes to refocus every time you switch tasks.I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 20 minutes to waste every time I switch between the tasks on my list. My time is limited. So I created a way to skip that 20 minute hazy moment where you’re faffing around…

The life-changing method I created to manage work that was waiting on me, get back to people faster, and create more space to do my best work.

My foolproof weekly planning routine that takes me about 10 minutes every week and keeps me organised across my work, my creator business & my whole life.

Lately I’ve been struggling with my process for getting big creative projects done. They feel like they are taking forever to finish. Each step feels big so I put it off thinking I need a bigger chunk of time to deal with it.

I am a master procrastinator. Not because I don't know what I should do or because I'm not motivated - but because most of the time I just don't have the headspace to get stuff done.

I was listening to an Instagram reel the other day from Sahil Bloom talking about finite v infinite games. If you're not familiar with the concept...

Yesterday I searched Google for the phrase 'How To Stop'I couldn't exactly articulate what I was trying to find, but basically, I wanted some advice on what it looks like to slow down, stop, & rest. I assumed I'd find some advice on this exact thing. Except I didn't.

I love this time between Christmas and New Year. It's always so full of hope. It's quiet and gives me time to think, plan & dream for the new year. And like everyone I'm thinking about goals I want to accomplish, creating concrete plans of reaching those goals.

Daily planners are not a new thing. It's literally the simplest & most powerful way to plan the day. Take a sheet of paper (or screen), put the date at the top & start organising your day. I remember getting my first Filofax and then going on to design my first paper (then digital) planner pages.

Despite what it looks like, I'm not one for complicated systems.And while I admire all the people who can put their head down for days and go through long yearly reviews & planning rituals, that is not for me.

Unpopular Opinion: Procrastination has nothing to do with your motivation (or discipline) levels. I constantly defer tasks on my list to tomorrow. So much so that I created a list in my daily planner called 'All The Thing I'm Putting Off Till Tomorrow.' At first, it was a joke, but it's become a key way of noticing patterns in my behaviour.

We all Need More Headspace. You know - time & space to think & make better decisions. More time & space to be creative at a deeper level. A magical place where you can achieve more with less effort.

I'm always better with a plan. Planning gets a bad wrap from hustle culture - as if it's some kind of procrastination for weak people who can't just get in and get work done.

I'm not usually a goal setter, but yesterday I found myself jotting down some goals on my daily walk. Goals are a weird thing. Some are big, some are small. Some are intentional others are off-handed. But every goal has focus, energy, time & attention attached to it. So if you're going to set a goal, you need to make sure it's worthy of those things.

Deep Work. It's all the rage. Spend four hours of your day in deep work without distractions & get your best work done.If only the real world was like that.

I have 10k unread emails in my inbox & I couldn't be less stressed or anxious about it. I was a strict inbox-zero girl for over 10 years until a conversation with a friend made me completely abandon it. One day I looked at his phone and saw 500 unread messages. So I asked the inevitable question. How could you have so many unread messages without having an anxiety attack?

I know this is going to come as a shock, but some days I am a terrible procrastinator. I sit staring at my task list, re-arranging, and talking myself out of doing things. I let myself be distracted and I get to the end of the day not having accomplished anything important.

Open loops are one of the biggest productivity and money drains in any organisation. I started my career as a receptionist and executive assistant. Early on there was one time when my boss drove an hour to an appointment that I had failed to confirm. And no one was at home 😱. Rookie mistake.

I both love & hate Slack at the same time. A few weeks ago I tweeted out in a mad rage about how everyone should learn to use shift+enter in Slack messages. To my surprise, so many people just had no idea you could do that. And actually thanked me.

I am the worst for putting things off. Even easy things that I know won't take long and that I've probably done a thousand times before. Like last week when I was trying to write some landing page copy. I wasn't even writing from scratch, we had done this event multiple times before.

I'm lazy. There I said it. Most people look at me and think Woah, she's super organised! And it might look that way at first glance. But if something isn't immediately easy, I'm very unlikely to do it. Or continue doing it. Instead of beating myself up over it, I lean into it and build systems to make the things I want to do easier.

Today is day 7 of the #75hard challenge for me. This is the second time I've done the challenge. The last time was WAY back in 2019. And no matter how many times you do it before, it's still HARD!

18 months ago I was done with business planning. We had tried ALL the things. Quarterly planning days, 90 Day Years, Yearly planning retreats. Nothing worked. We would start off gung-ho and ultimately fizzle out and accomplish very little.

I spend a disproportionate amount of my time thinking about How I Work. Productivity gets kind of a bad wrap these days. And I struggle most of the time to describe what I write about because I don't want to be seen to feed into 'productivity culture.' I started calling it Anti-Productivity, but the truth is I'm not anti-productivity.

Due dates are useless for most people. I haven't set a due date for a task in years. I work in the context of weeks. Most of my tasks can be done within that date range. We set due dates because task managers make us. But this means we either make up an imaginary date & procrastinate because we know it's not really due. Or we totally leave it to the last possible day and end up trying to cram it in at the last minute.

In a perfect world we know we shouldn't task switch, but we don't live in a perfect world. Have you ever experienced this scenario? You're working on a project but have to close down on a Friday afternoon. You shut your computer down, go enjoy a beautiful weekend and when you log back on Monday you can't exactly remember where you left off.

Can I get my brain to work on command? This morning I had a pretty big presentation to work on. It had been a roadblock all week. It was going to take some serious deep work time to complete it.

Hi, I'm Ev & I'm a procrastinator. Yeah, I know, you thought I was superwoman and couldn't possibly have an unproductive day in my life. But it's been a few days, maybe a week that I've been slowly putting tasks off and I know something is up.

Some days just don't go to plan. Like today. There's nothing like waking up on a Monday morning ready to start a fresh week and instead be greeted at 6:30am with a message from a coworker informing me their Facebook Account had been hacked. And now our business manager was hacked, and all of the ad accounts of our clients were now hacked.

Why do we always think we can do more than we can? We try to cram all sorts of things into our days and weeks, telling ourselves that today will be different and we'll really get through all the to-do list items.

People often tell me I make things look easy. While shipping every day is far from easy, the reason it looks easy is because I spend a disproportionate amount of time on the planning and preparation.

What's in a name? Turns out everything. Interestingly I've had so many conversations this week about why naming things is so important. It all started with Danny Hatcher last weekend when we were talking about using plan language to describe the notes he was taking.

Notion will not save you. Neither will Roam. Or Obsidian. Or Asana. Or [insert other shiny new tool here]. Technology isn't a magic fix. Technology will only amplify your system.

In culinary kitchens around the world, you'll find chefs everywhere live and die by the three principles of Mise En Place: Preparation, Process & Presence. Preparation helps me to feel like I've got things under control (even if I don't) and that I'm bringing my best to everything that I do.

The thing that distinguishes Nobel prize winners above everyone else is NOT that they can relentlessly focus. It’s that they know the KIND of focus they need at a specific time and task. Study by Oshin Vartanian. There is a lot of talk these days about deep work. Long stretches of uninterrupted time for us to get chunky work done. Deep work requires a tight focus. It requires we turn off distractions and narrow our focus to just one thing.

I've experimented with A LOT of ways to manage my time. Traditionally I would think about how long a task would take me to complete and then use time blocking to schedule it into my day. But some days I would smash through some pretty big tasks and still be fresh at the end and other days I could hardly complete one relatively small task.

I hate goals. There I said it. I don't have a 10-year plan. I hardly even have a 1-year plan. Sure, goals can be good aligning you to your future and giving you the motivation to get there. But for me they make me feel boxed in, locked into a future I'm not even sure I'll like.

Most people fail at planning their week because they have too much freedom and not enough constraints. I recently wrote about how I have split my weeks into maker and manager time. But between maker and manager, I also have to juggle different roles in my work - and I suspect most of us are the same. Whether you're an employee or an entrepreneur, there are always different types of work you can be doing on any given day.

In any professional kitchen you'll find the three main values of Mis En Place in action: Preparation, Process & Presence. And they work beyond the kitchen too in life and work. But what I find in many productivity circles is that there is a heavy focus on preparation and process, but very little on presence.