You ask any startup Entrepreneur about the biggest problem in his life, and more often than not the immediate response will be ’time’, we have all but 24 hours a day, which simply isn’t enough time to process the overwhelming number of stuff you need to do- writing code for Augment, attending meetings, responding to emails, address customer queries, research, firefight… so on! Theres no template, theres no formula that will help.
I realized, to help me process through this ridiculous amount of executables I had to plan more, be more structured… in short be way more aware of my productivity. What follows are my experiments and the frustration that came along.
1. First things first – embracing the GTD philosophy:
My day typically begins with a hot cup of coffee, my notebook and a pen. Sipping on my cup I would start noting pointers, to-dos, sub-pointers and notes etc on a fresh page, ah a new start to the day. Ya, this method sufficed for the ‘capture everything’ part of the GTD code and may be a wee bit about step2 of ‘clarification’ – but because of the very nature of the pen-paper medium I would lose out on organize, reflect and engage. Enter Todoist & Anydo. Beautiful softwares I’d say. I preferred Todoist a little more than Anydo primarily because of its better labeling system thus better organizing capability, now I could tackle ‘Clarification’ in detail, organize my stuff and yeah, reflect and engage. Life was good, but then I started to get the punches! Well, I’d miss updating my to-do lists till we got Augment ready for use, organizing became increasingly difficult because now that I could organize suddenly I was overwhelmed with possibilities and instead of simplifying my life, the amount of time I spent on planning and deliberating on todos went up from just a coffee-cup-time to well I don’t know how much. Yup, how much is the key, I thought. I need measurability.
2. ‘If you cant measure it, you can’t improve it’ - Gray MacKenzie:
I’m an engineer, measuring things is like a basic instinct. Initially the karma points of Todoist seemed to do the trick, quick task check off and the kick you get out of seeing your score count up. May be its just me, but soon my basic motivation to get a to-do checked off was not getting it done but rather getting that little dope of a higher karma points, gamification rocks! I’d check off the low hanging fruits first and sometimes leave the more important ones for..well..next thing to do – recipe for disaster.
Stupid me, that didn’t work out, Todoist treats a product roll-out with equal importance to that of buying milk. I needed something that will give me a much wider view of my activities, and thus my brush with Rescuetime. The first time I started using it I was like awed with the kind of data I started to get – my productivity index was flourishing at 90-92, the breakup showed a lot of time spent on business application category, I was happy. After a couple of days I opened rescue time and was shocked to see my productivity index dwindling at a 66, WHAT!! A straight drop from 98 to 66?? I can’t recollect working less. I started to dig deep into the breakups of where I’ve spent time I realized the first day’s score was heavily biased by the amount of time I spent on Todoist, Rescuetime itself, THEY ARE the business applications. #facepalm.
Over the next few days I was more busy on interacting with Augment’s awesome users, hence the drop in my productivity, Rescuetime somehow was treating my gmail usage as the category ‘neutral’. Yes of course I could edit activities and mark time spent on email as productive, but the truth is its not black and white, some mails are productive while others are not, some FB posts are productive, while some are pure waste of time! Who decides that? How do I even begin to automate these mundane processes, adding tasks, notes, to-dos to my ‘business applications’ and actually use this time to work!
3. Automation
I started to evaluate IFTTT and Zapier, preferred IFTTT, not sure why, just loved it. Finally my life was simple, just a Recipe and forget, could it be any better? But heres where I got the next kick!! The number of recipes I needed to tackle the possibilities of the dynamic nature of my life was, well lets just put it this way, INSANE!! And I can say for sure, most entrepreneurs or independent consultants who wear multiple hats would face this problem. Our lives are simply NOT linear! Ok! I give up! ‘Productivity Awareness’ has hit me below the belt! Now I was using 4 odd application to manage my life other than gmail and calendar, losing it even more than before, getting notified to death by all of them, spending more time and psychological cost in setting them up, maintaining them, monitoring, tackling one thing at a time and losing the larger perspective! Yet again, thats like a capital offense as an Entrepreneur.
So heres my life now!
To simplify things, now I’m back to my coffee-time-to-dos on pen and paper, I’m back to checking things off my to-do list etc. My IFTTT recipes still run and from time to time prove to be handy, we use Trello extensively at our workplace, so that becomes my list for professional to-dos and executables, and yes, email! I’m more into email than ever before! Its like trying to quit one addiction and ending up getting addicted to a few more!!
What do I need??
I need to be productive without being productivity aware. I need someone to tell me WHAT I need to know WHEN I need it, not before that, not after that. I need to get access to the right information without searching, I am ok to search but thats a choice not a mandate! Well, I need context aware information, yup thats what I need.
And that’s why, I know this for a fact that I need to build Augment for myself, it needs to solve my problem and hopefully we’ll do a good enough job to help others like me.
NOTE: This article was originally published in the Augment blog.