Tag: toggl

3 simple steps to being more productive in your life

“I’ll get to it next time.”

“Why are they so much better than me?”

“I really need to read some books.”

“This time, I’ll really save some money!”

Guessing you’ve probably said this at one point, right? I have…for years. ?

But it’s human nature for us to push things back—some fault lies on us, some because we have higher priorities. Either way, it happens and you shouldn’t feel guilty and stop.

So, here are 5 simple steps on being more productive in life and helping live a life that fulfills your goals.

Step #1: Prioritize your goals

First step, you’ll need to prioritize your goals. What makes you happy, sad, excited, depressed, and so on.

Surprisingly, we don’t spend enough time on ourselves to ask why we do what we do. Rather, we’ve been trained to do as we’re told.

In your job, you have a manager and that manager gives you tasks. They pay you in exchange for your services.

Well, it’s really easy to prioritize this because we’re getting paid. The hard thing is to do the stuff when no one is looking around, while you’re at home and when there’s no immediate incentive.

So, prioritize your goals by taking the following actions:

  1. List out a matrix in a word document with the columns:
    • What makes me happy
    • What makes me sad
    • What would I regret if I didn’t do this
  2. You’ll need a system to track and measure your goals
    • I recommend Clickup—a free productivity tool to track your goals, tasks, and so much more
    • You can learn more about how to set up your board in my last post here.
  3. Add your goals to Clickup using their Goals function to remind you of your goals.

Step #2: Create your productivity schedule

It’s not enough to write a bunch of goals and tasks; you’ll need to also create your schedule to become more productive.

The way to achieve this is review your goals and prepare a plan (doesn’t have to be detailed) on how you want to achieve those goals for the year.

Most of us struggle to achieve goals because we’re either exhausted, don’t see immediate results or things change. Whatever the reasons may be, creating a schedule like that of on a calendar can remind you why you’re doing what you’re doing.

In my case, it’s learning Mandarin Chinese. My wife and my in-laws are Chinese, but I’m Korean. Rather saying I’m not going to learn, I made it a priority to learn so that I can communicate effectively with my in-laws.

Because listing Mandarin Chinese as a priority, punching it in in Clickup and creating a schedule, my Chinese has improved dramatically.

Now when I speak to my in-laws, the communications are much more effective. 有意思!

Step #3: Track and measure your productivity

Now that we’ve covered steps #1 and #2, it’s time to track and measure to ensure we’re being productive and achieving our goals.

Otherwise, we go back to bad habits, lose sight of what’s important and fall back into our slump.

Well guess what, we ain’t letting that happen. ☺

To measure yourself, I recommend a tool called Toggl—a simple time tracking app that has a beautiful interface with charts, tags and more.

Within Toggl, you can create clients and projects to associate with your goals and projects. This could include things like reading, working out, building a side hustle, etc.

Whatever it may be, you can create in Toggl. Here’s an example from me tracking my reading below:

Create a new client

Create new project called “Reading”

Track your performance

March was a rough month given the whole coronavirus. ?

To recap everything

To recap, you’ll need 3 steps in order to achieving productivity and living the life you want. Here it is below:

  1. Prioritize your goals
  2. Create your productivity calendar
  3. Track and measure your productivity

That’s it.

By listing out everything and really questioning why you want what you want, you’ll have a much better understanding of your goals and priorities. It gives purpose and a reason to work on your goals.

But remember, goals are hard. Life is hard.

But if you set out to live a life you want to live, you’ll be happier, more productive and more satisfied in the long run.

As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions. Enjoy and stay safe!

Being intentional and more productive with your time

There’s 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, and 8,760 in a year.

If we think about it, we spend most of our time either sleeping or working, with the rest of it spent on frivolous things like video games or watching tv. Not much productivity there.

After my backpacking trip in 2017, I wanted to be more intentional with my time, specifically around accomplishing goals. And not just any goals, but goals I’ve had for years (as far as back as college even).

So what did that mean?

I needed a system, something to hold me accountable, and something I could measure with data.

There’s two tools I use today and everyday to track my goals and tasks. They help me measure whether or not I’m doing the things I need to do to get to my goals, to live the life I want to and to be extremely intentional with my time.

They are: Clickup and Toggl.

With Clickup, I set up my goals under the goals tab in addition to creating a folder like this:

This system has allowed me to constantly review and track what I’m doing to ensure I’m getting a) the most out of my time and b) getting me closer to the life I want.

With Toggl, I’m able to integrate time tracking directly with Clickup and measure how long each tasks takes. Take a look below:

So to wrap it up, being intentional with your time is extremely crucial in being able to accomplish your goals, being more productive, and living the life you want.

Tools like Clickup and Toggl help us to hold us accountable and measure our progress.

We’re in 2019, and it’s already October. Still time left to set out your goals and accomplish them. ?