Talking about productivity and organization sets off all my dopamine receptors, so I’m excited to introduce today’s blog post, which is all about the tools I use to keep my life together.
Time management and productivity are tricky, because everyone has a unique working style, so everyone needs a unique way to organize it. However, I think learning about other people’s methods can be useful for discovering small ways you can improve your own process.
Calendar
I’ve tried out a few different online calendars, but my favorite is the iCloud calendar on my MacBook. I have different calendars color-coded to make it easy to visualize my day. Currently, I work with three different calendar labels: Personal, School, and Theta (my sorority). I generally keep it on the weekly view, and the corresponding widget on my phone gives me a look at my daily schedule without even having to open the app. It’s a system that really works for me.
TeuxDeux
TeuxDeux is my daily planner. It’s a beautiful and simple interface that I’ve been using for a year and a half, and I would not be able to survive without it. It syncs seamlessly with the mobile app, and I pretty much never exit out of the tab on my laptop.
It’s exactly what I need from a daily planning system. I find an issue with systems that require a lot of upkeep. With TeuxDeux, you just have to type in the task. You are able to set up recurring To-Do items, so I have my class schedule programmed in, which is nice. I also like being able to drag tasks from column to column, because I can plan out multiple days in advance. I highly recommend trying out TeuxDeux here. And they also have a super cute productivity blog!
Notion
You either love Notion or you hate Notion. I personally love Notion. I appreciate that it’s hyper-customizable but also very minimalistic. I’m the type of person that’s motivated by space, and that includes my digital space. Being able to embed cute Pinterest quotes and pictures like a mini dream board is really fun. I change up the cohesive aesthetic of my home page often. Notion is my personal database; I keep pretty much everything from my life– School, work, Apostrophe S, and more– organized in Notion. I could go on for hours about every little page I’ve set up in Notion, but I’ll leave it at this.
So those three tools together create the basis of my planning and organization system. College marked a transition from paper planning to digital, so it’s taken a couple years to perfect and fine tune my method. I definitely find I prefer digital planning to paper planning because of the time I save. I love bullet journaling, but it takes a while to set up. And paper planning doesn’t allow for adjustment after you’ve written things down, which is something I value from my digital planning system.
Thanks for reading!
