Productivity & my old SatNav…or don’t do things for the sake of it!

Let me tell you about my old SatNav. At times in the past I used to find myself often driving north on the A1 in England. If you don’t know it that A1 goes right up the spine of the country connecting London with Edinburgh. There comes a point where you can come off the A1 headed north and drive west on the M18. My old SatNav used to tell me to do just that. It would tell me to come off the A1, drive 6.1 miles west on the M18, come off it, round a roundabout and then drive 6.1 miles east back on the M18, to the exact point I left the A1, to rejoin the A1 and continue my journey north. So, what can we learn about productivity & my old SatNav? Don’t do things just for the sake of it!

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

It is very easy for your productivity, organisation and information management system to become bloated. VERY easy. All of that bloat is in fact a complete waste of time. Worse, it actually makes organising yourself far more unwieldy, slows you down and will increase the stress of maintaining your system.

Let me give you some personal examples.

Example 1 — Task Management

I once used an app called Nirvana to manage my tasks. Nirvana is an excellent application in so many ways and if you follow GTD in a more pure sense then it is definitely one to look at —…