How to build your productivity system

A proven method to increase your creativity and bring out your full potential

Jun 09, 2024

🏷️ Categories: Time management, Mental models, Zettelkasten

Hello! How are you?

In this chapter of the Zettelkasten guide we will see how to integrate our Zettelkasten into a complete productivity system.

You may be asking yourself, “Why do I need to do something like this?” Well, the reason is simple: to save time and effort and be able to spend the remaining time on what you are passionate about. You will free your brain from stress and you will be more efficient.

Is there anyone who doesn't want to make their life easier?

The system has 3 levels (Organize, Capture, Create), see.

Level 1: Organize

Let's see how to organize tasks, documents, time and automate processes.

1. Calendar

You need a digital calendar.

There are many options: Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Morguen (very complete PC and mobile app with free and paid version), among others.

I have been organizing my time with a calendar for one year and it is essential because it takes away the work of organizing schedules, meetings, appointments, visits, tasks... If a friend proposes to meet him, I know instantly when I could. Easy.

You will save time and avoid forgetting things.
You will set times of the day for personal projects and create positive habits.

For example, I write for 1 hour in the morning, I have that timebox set. If one morning I can't write, I move that timebox to another time or day. It's great because you have total control over the time you invest. This makes me write much faster, I tell you about it here in detail, in case you are interested.

Controlling time is a superpower.

2. E-mail

I wasn't aware of the time wasted here until I stopped wasting it.

1-time-per-mail mentality: If you open an email, resolve it in one go to avoid the attentional cost. Let me explain: when we get distracted we do not instantly return to concentration, this takes time, the more times you change your focus, the less productive you are (Gonzalez & Mark, 2004; Stothart et al., 2015). It is more than proven that office workers could get their work done in much less time if they were not doing everything at once. Love yourself and do things 1 at a time.
Filters: Sometimes we don't take advantage of all the features of applications. Whatever your mail application is, there should be a mail filter. Let's take advantage of this feature:
- Filtering by folder: I have 3 folders: Work, Substack and General. Everything that contains the word “substack” goes in the “Substack” folder. If it contains certain email addresses or keywords for me, it goes to the “Work” folder. What doesn't contain anything special goes to general. This saves time, since only the “Work” folder has notifications. I don't get distracted, I deal with my priorities quickly and I sort the emails automatically. Think about your case, I'm sure you can do something similar.
Scheduled actions: Take inspiration from these examples
- Scheduled emails: If every month you organize a meeting at the same time and with the same people, schedule a reminder so that the day before all email addresses receive the monthly meeting reminder.
- Scheduled replies: If an email is sent to my inbox after hours, I automatically reply that I am not available and will respond as soon as possible.
- Scheduled forwards: If you receive emails that are of interest to someone, you can have them automatically forwarded to other people when they contain certain words or email addresses.

3. Task lists

These lists are vital to help your working memory.

Working memory is the number of things we can have on our minds at one time. The more things, the more likely to forget some of them. Don't beat yourself up like this and use an app that does it for you.

When you have a new task, write it down in your application. Depending on your case, you can create different to-do lists: “Work”, “Home”, “Personal projects”... I'll inspire you, I have one called “Idea warehouse”, where I add things I would like to do: skiing, scuba diving, running the New York marathon... they have no date, but they are no longer dreams that you end up forgetting, they are tangible goals.

The key here is to create the habit of writing in the application all the tasks, without missing a single one. Otherwise you'll be always going around in your head wondering if you forgot something. For me, if something is not on the list, it doesn't exist.

I don't have to worry about anything.

4. File management

Your files can't get lost.

You can use a cloud storage system such as Google Drive, so it doesn't matter if your computer is stolen or breaks. In addition, you will have your information accessible at any time and with any device. Or you can use an external hard drive and make backups, as I do.

Whichever option you choose, you will never lose anything, everything is safe.

At this point we have already passed level 1, we have:

A calendar for effortless time squaring.
An e-mail that works for us and not us for it.
To-do lists to know what things to do and not forget a single one.
A secure way to store our files so we don't lose them.

We can stay here or we can keep leveling it up.

From here, we can add more levels to our system if we consume a lot of information (books, videos, podcasts) and want to save everything that resonates with us for later use.

This is for those who after reading books and listening to podcasts have inspiring ideas that could change their life, but because they don't write them down, they forget them weeks later. This is the crux of level 2 of the productivity system.

Level 2: Capture

1. Read and annotate:

Consume information, save what is valuable.

It doesn't matter if it's physical or digital with a Kindle or similar. When you read, get used to highlight everything that inspires you. This information will be forever accessible and will provide us with an increasingly valuable knowledge base.

Now we will see how to take advantage of this with the Zettelkasten.

2. “In queue” list

Separate the act of consuming information from the act of finding information.

I realized that it was a mistake not to separate the two when I searched Wikipedia. I knew exactly what I was going for, but I would come across other 20 interesting things and in the end the search that was going to take 5 minutes turned into 3 hours.

When you come across something or someone recommends it to you, don't leave what you are doing, save it in “In queue”. You will eventually consume it, but now is not the time or place. This is powerful because it allows you to prioritize what you consume, I save books, youtube videos, museum visits, podcasts....

📌 Note: “Queued” can be a folder in your Obsidian, Logseq or the app you use for your Zettelkasten, it can be a note on your PC or a to-do list we talked about earlier. The point is to save comfortably what we want to see later.

The only resource we will never produce is time, we can only spend it, so let's at least learn to spend it on what we really want.

3. Fleeting and literature notes

If you have already read the Introduction to the Zettelkasten method you know what I am talking about.

Everything you have written down from books, videos and so on will now be transferred to your Zettelkasten. If it was a quick note while you were on the bus or something like that, you may have fleeting notes that you must transfer to literature ones. If not, directly make literature notes of what you highlighted.

Again, take a look at the Introduction to the method if you don’t understand.

Level 3: Create

I will be brief.

If you have completed level 1 and 2, you have organized your day-to-day life and you have a comfortable way to capture information that brings you value. Now it's time to create and express yourself.

Having my own Zettelkasten has been a radical change. This system has triggered my creativity and allows me to make sense of all that valuable information that I used to forget in the past because I didn't write it down or I did it in a chaotic way.

This is what my 4000+ linked notes look like in Obsidian.

It reminds me of constellations on a starry night.

Do you see the permanent notes? They are the biggest dots, the ones that connect many, many literary notes around them. This is an idea factory

By following the steps in this guide, you'll get rid of the stress of having to remember irrelevant things and save time for what really matters: Thinking and creating.

As always, if you have any questions about how to implement the method, leave them in comments or contact me directly if you prefer:

S. García

. I will be happy to help you.

Take care, see you next time! 👋

González, V. M., & Mark, G. (2004). «Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness». ACM Digital Library. https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985707
Stothart, C., Mitchum, A., & Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal Of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception And Performance, 41(4), 893-897. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100