How to do a productivity reset | Part 1 — Kill the bloat

Anyone who wants to be productive will train themselves to do two things — Capture everything and organise it well. It is therefore inevitable that your ‘productivity system’ will become bloated. Some ways of organising your work will suffer this far more than others — worth noting this. Therefore, it will become necessary to develop a process to deal with this problem. So, let’s consider how to do a productivity reset | Part 1 — Kill the bloat.

Before we actually think the about the system itself, we need to to start with all those things we have captured and organised into our systems.

Projects

I have just completed a review of my project list. Current, active, future and someday/hopeful. What I found is that many of these ‘projects’ didn’t need to be there. It is likely that the same is true for you as well so go through the list. Look for the following:

1. Projects that you no longer care about
2. Projects that aren’t really projects at all — they are basically just big tasks or a process to follow.
3. Projects that are not defined as projects. One of mine was ‘Study History’. This is not well defined enough to be of any use.
4. Projects that are basically complete or have been super-ceded by other…