Hi everyone, the other day I was chatting with a friend regarding productivity and how I organize myself, and he said it would be cool to post this, so here I am. In this post I’m going to talk to you about some productivity tips that have been working fine for me for more than a year, so I can have a more relaxed life.
2025 was a very important year for me because I became a dad, with that, new responsibilities came and I knew I needed to organize my time in a better way, also technology with AI evolved like crazy. Anyway, since 2024 I felt I was wasting a lot of time on social media.
The original goal was to reduce any distraction as much as possible during work hours so I can stay focused during that period, hence spend more time with my family and personal projects. During this time of AI, although it helps me deliver my tasks faster, I still consider that staying focused is a very important trait.
So after one year, I will share how it’s been for me.
Doomscrolling, the #1 enemy
You can’t manage what you can’t measure, is a phrase that I use on a daily basis at work, when troubleshooting an issue, budgeting, etc. We need data to know what is going on, in my case time. Fortunately smartphones (Android/iOS) can tell you how much time you spent on each application and (surprise surprise) I was wasting a lot of time on social networks, e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube, doomscrolling to death. And some other time on streaming platforms Netflix, HBO, Disney+, etc.
Once I knew where I was wasting most of my time, I took action: I uninstalled all those apps, simple as that!.
The first month after I did that, my screen time reduced abruptly and I felt I had more time (way more time).
Of course sometimes my wife and friends might send me links to Instagram or TikTok, of course I open them and watch them (it won’t take more than a minute). The good thing about that is that I don’t fall into the doomscrolling anymore, how? All these platforms have a mobile web version, useful enough to watch the video, but useless and ugly enough to prevent you from staying. My browser is not logged into any of these platforms (except YouTube). Most links they send me are public, hence no session is required, and for the ones that are not public, I just ignore them.
From time to time, I login to the mobile web version in an anonymous tab to catch up during the week, but it does not really take a lot of my time.
In addition, smartphones allow you to limit how much time you spend on specific sites (this can be overridden but you get my point), so I tried to reduce it as much as possible.
I felt more relieved after I did that, like when you finally leave that job you hate so much and feel freedom. This time I got free from the distraction that was killing me the most.
There are other social networks I did not uninstall, as they have content that really interests me (text mainly) such as Reddit and X. I don’t really waste a lot of my time on those, I read what really interests me, so no doomscrolling on those.
Some cons of this approach: some people that write to me on those social networks might get a delayed response or none whatsoever. For some public pages I manage, I feel I left them behind so still need to figure that out (AI could help me here).
Chatting
This one was a tricky one, because on one side you might have work-related chats, and on the other, personal chats, groups, etc.
Personal Chats
My main chatting app is Whatsapp as many of us at least in Latin America, and initially I thought I wasted a lot of time chatting, but it was just me stressing out mainly because I was in a lot of groups and received a lot of messages (mainly from groups), some of those groups I needed to be in but I don’t really participate actively, others that were totally pointless, and others that were actually important. After checking in more detail, I don’t really chat as much as I thought. My most frequent chats are with my wife, close friends, family and co-workers. My second chatting app is Telegram where I participate in groups that really interest me, so nothing on the Telegram side to fix, I actually enjoy it.
The real pain for me was looking at those green bubbles with the number of unread messages, as if they were telling me you should read them. And the truth is, I didn’t want to, I didn’t have to and no one would die if I didn’t read them, but the fact that they were still visible there (even though they were archived) was killing me.
So I found that I can lock chats like they were secret chats that I don’t want anybody to see, the truth is I didn’t want them to see them either so that’s what I did, most of those groups, instead of being archived, were locked. That way no more green bubbles other than the ones I really care about.
After doing that, my chat screen was so clean that it felt magical.
Work related
This one was similar to the previous one (sort of), at work it’s common to have a lot of chats, but how many of those chats are really important? Having a lot of messages can be stressful and overwhelming, but are all those messages really important or require a quick response?
Almost a year ago, I read this blog post “Organize your Slack channels by how often not what”. I really recommend it, as it really helped me solve that issue, and it does not apply to Slack only, you can use the same approach on Teams, Google Chat, etc.
I decided to give it a try for some weeks, and I am still using it today.
The idea is to organize your chats in sections of how often you should read those chats. This is the way I organize mine (the emojis are the ones I actually use 😂):
- 🔥 Read Now
- 🟢 Read Hourly
- 🟡 Read Daily
- 🕳️ Whenever
After the first weeks I felt a change. I was doing my work, I was still responding to chat messages (none left behind or ignored), but most importantly I didn’t feel overwhelmed.
One more thing not to worry about.
Making it boring
With what I mentioned so far, you might have noticed already that I tried to get rid of any sort of distraction from my smartphone. And I like it that way, because when I use my smartphone, it is only to take pictures, check emails, read blog posts, important communication and from time to time watch YouTube videos. But that’s it, it is a boring device now and I love it.
Remembering some tips from one of my favorite books “Atomic Habits”, in order to get rid of a bad habit, you need to make it unattractive, in my case, make it boring. So as an additional extra to my boring device, I configured it so that it sets into “Work Mode” at specific times during the day, so I only receive work-related notifications, I can accept calls, and from time to time I read my personal chats, but I don’t get those notifications.
Finally with the Automations tool I also made the screen grayscale during work hours. What could be more boring than that? 😂
My memory is weak, Trello to my rescue
With more responsibilities, I needed to remember a lot of things and my short term memory is not very good. That’s why I have a personal Trello project named “My day to day stuff” (pretty creative name isn’t it?). In this project I create a ticket for pretty much anything I have to do, some items might be redundant with work, but it works pretty good for me.
The columns I have are:
- Backlog: for things I have to do but do not have an ETA
- TODO: For the things that need to be done soon
- Waiting: Things I started but I need to wait for them, a confirmation or something
- Doing: In progress
- Done: After I finished something.
Here I add items such as “Write this blog post about productivity” and others that might sound more trivial like: Pay bills, buy flight tickets, check-in, buy groceries, dentist appointment, birthdays, etc.
Pretty much anything I need to do is here. So I don’t have to think about something I might be forgetting or not, everything is on my Trello board.
There is this add-on to create repeated tasks that I use for tasks I need to do that are repetitive, like weekly, monthly, yearly.
Something doing the job of reminding me what I have to do is a total win for me. One more thing that I don’t have to worry about. Although this has been working for more than a year, I still need to consider worst case scenarios, like what if the board is suddenly gone. Of course my life should not stop if that happens, but I need to have a plan B, you never know what could happen.
Final thoughts
With the points mentioned above, I really feel that I improved on how I manage my time to finish all my tasks, so I maximize the time I spend with my loved ones and personal projects, and most importantly have a relaxed life. I was able to finish personal projects, even small wins such as reading my open tabs, they are not piling up anymore. It might not be the silver bullet for productivity, but it really helped me a lot, and if it helps you, I would be really happy.