4 Roadblocks to avoid in starting your journey with productivity

Be Positive, Flexible and Open — you will have a amazing ride!

How do I started? Pure curiosity!

Let me tell you, that is more than enough.

A confession as well, I am more of a thinking person and working on to be a combination of thoughts & actions! still a way to go.

It is true for every situation that we think too much before we start and some time or manier times, we go thru the entire situation before even starting out.

To help you out, I have tried to put my thoughts together in terms of my experience and roadblocks in the journey of ‘Productivity Space’

those 4 are the big ones, for me at least!

1. You need to have a system

This one is truly the biggest block of the road — with the constant inflow of the information, templates and ideal workflows from the internet, it is really difficult to start from a scratch.

I happen to try and still working on the idea of:

BUILD YOUR OWN SYSTEM

‘Nobody knows you better than you and only you can design and build your own system’

Surely it is going to take more time, efforts and money but the end result is just amazing and fulfilling. Initially be flexible with your system and workflow, allow space for changes and fine tune your system with periodic review.

Do not look for the solution, just look for the best possible options and a little bit of inspiration and start with a blank page.

2. Follow a fixed method or system or app from day one

This one is little tricky and when I have started building my own system — workflow, I had made many mistakes of going with the apps, systems and methods which actually do not suits my requirements but they are recommended and used by many.

What I learned over the time is, explore a couple of good options in each category like note-taking, task manager, project management, calendar etc for apps and for methods like GTD or PARA and play around for a while, see if that is in line with your present workflow or not.

Gradually you will find or develop the one which is YOURS.

3. Invest money or opt for Pro plans

This has cost me a lot, really a lot! Spending money just on exploring the apps is too much but we all feel excited with the promise of additional features offered in Pro plans.

And I am a victim of this but as we all know — experience is an expensive teacher and so be it.

Happen to try ‘Pro’ plans for majority of the apps from the universe of note-taking, project management, task manager and tried it at least for a couple of months but end of the story is if you are not working daily on it, it is not for you.

Go with the free plans!

4. Only use one tool, app for your entire workflow

This is exciting and in general each one of us has tried, sure of it.

The truth is ‘there is no fit for all solution, stop looking for something which do not exist’

I have tried and spend good amount of time in building my entire workflow in a single app, system but the end result is not so encouraging. On the contrary, make use of the best of apps, system which are good at specific domain and area.

Combination of apps and tools is a good way to start and work on ‘Build Your Own System’

Give yourself and system to evolve over the period of time. Be patient with yourself and your workflow.

In a nutshell,

Sit with yourself with an open mind, explore couple of good options from your area of interest, spend quality time and play around for a while and start ‘Building Your Own System’ — you will enjoy your journey.

Let me know if I can be of any help in this too!

Thank you for reading.

Keep reading, keep sharing.

Astu.