The State of Personal Productivity in 2025
What my key takeaways have been so far from spending 20 years trying to be productive.
With personal productivity, the one thing I know for sure is that there is no single magic solution.
Everyone wants to be productive, or at least aspirationally so, but human nature tends to deter us, especially when faced with modern distractions.
I’ve spent the better part of the past 20 years searching for systems to maximize productivity and spending years building software in hopes of having a one-size-fits-all system to manage and incentivize all the right things.
Needless to say, I’ve thought A LOT (perhaps too much) about how to get things done rather than, you know, just getting things done. So what I’d like to do is share my perspective on the hard-fought lessons I’ve learned and how I’m adapting my approach to getting shit done in 2025 and beyond.
The best To-Do list is the one on Paper
Yes, literal paper. I have fought against this time & again, but nothing digital beats the ease of just jotting something down, and nothing digital beats the satisfaction of checking a box or scribbling off a completed item.
Earlier this year I bought some hard cover spiral bound graph paper notebooks, and I currently use one page for each week. On Sunday Night I draft up the new page, carry over any outstanding tasks from the prior week, and jot down anything I can think of for the coming week.
It’s easy, and while it grates against my compulsive need to quantify things (sadly there is no graph of tasks completed by week), the ease wins out, and it pushes me to “just do things” rather than sit there drag-and-drop prioritizing my tasks as a way to procrastinate while still feeling productive.
You Must Track the Habits You Want to Build
Habits though, in my opinion, do need a digital checklist. You can track them on paper (the aforementioned graph paper is good for this), but it should still get recorded somewhere digitally.
The reason why it needs to be recorded is that habits are far too easy to “cheat” on. You can take any example, say, “I want to go to the gym 3 days a week.” You do that for the first couple weeks, great.
Well, then you have a work trip or go on vacation, and you fall off, maybe you only go once. “Well, that’s fine, I have an excuse…” you think. But that is a slippery slope, and excuses will naturally expand to cover “I was sick” or “I just wasn’t feeling it” or who knows what, and eventually you are right back to whatever you were doing naturally before you set the goal.
Tracking habits long-term solves this. You don’t have to be perfect, but keeping an honest record gives you an honest sense of where you are and can kickstart you back into a habit that you tend to fall out of.
Case-in-point: here is my “Read before bed” habit (tracked in Forward) where I candidly always struggle to maintain, even though I enjoy it and it definitely helps my sleep vs. staring at a phone:
As you can see, I’ve gone through various spurts on this (thankfully back on it at the moment). And a big key is that I don’t have to do it every single day to be successful: my current target is 4x per week, and if I want to keep a streak going, I can drop my goal to 0 for a couple weeks (as I did when we were on vacation last March) and it’ll be fine.
Variable targets combined with tracking both positive AND negative streaks (consecutive weeks missed), ensure you always have an incentive to maintain a habit or pick a lost habit back up. Both aspects are essential.
Create Project Velocity
While Habits and Tasks cover the majority of day-to-day stuff, the goal in life is obviously not to just be a machine clearing out an inbox each day.
What I’ve done that is new this year is consider any effort outside of that to be a “project”, which is broadly something/anything that’ll take a couple hours or more. Each blog post I make is a project, a vacation is a project (yeah, I know that sounds depressing), various builds I’m doing at work are projects, as are various housing, finance, and side project-type efforts.
This is a new setup, and I’m still evolving it a bit, but I am tracking these things in Notion and using a Kanban-style approach to prioritize and move things along. If I have an idea for something I should do, it starts in “Backlog”, before getting moved to “Priority” when I want to get it scoped out, “Planning” if I’m actually planning out how to do said project, and “Live” if it’s actively being worked on.
To some, including my lovely wife, this seems like far too much overhead as compared to a “just do it” approach. I understand that perspective, but I do believe planning and prioritization are necessary when you have a lot of different balls in the air. But to counteract the “productive procrastination” effect mentioned earlier, my goal behind all this is “project velocity” or basically how many projects I can get done in a given week/month, et cetera.
So to track this of sorts, I am adding a “complete date” to every project when it completes, which I can aggregate into a chart:
So my belief is that this approach will balance planning with a push for “getting shit done”, but we’ll see how it plays out!
Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good
This expression has rung more and more true with me over the years, and I think I’ve finally internalized it enough to avoid the pitfall the mindset presents.
Case-in-point: I had a project slated for “Subscription Cleanup” that I aspirationally was like “I should update a Notion page with all of the subscriptions I have and keep that up-to-date so I always know what subscriptions are being paid for.
But, that presents an extra unnecessary lift from what really needed done: I knew I had 4-5 subscriptions that I should cancel, so I went in, canceled those, and then checked my credit card statement to find a few others and canceled them. Boom, project complete!
A “Subscription tracking” project can go on the backlog but setting that up was an unnecessary mental hurdle to getting a “good” effort completed.
Struggling? Just step away for a bit!
This is one lesson that I need to do better with, but it’s best to just step away from trying to be productive for a time rather than struggle through feeling demotivated.
Simply put: don’t bang your head on the wall of trying to be productive non-stop. Few people can actually be non-stop, and it probably doesn’t include you. Go watch TV, go for a walk or run, read a book, et cetera. Just go do something for a bit and come back to being productive later.
This needs to be done to avoid getting demoralized by your perceived lack of productivity, which can easily end up derailing you for much longer than a day or two.
Planning = Define the Scope = Huge Value
One of the things I’ve noticed of myself is that projects that are ill-defined used to end up sticking around for a while, which clogs up and confuses my work. It’s just a lot easier to focus when there are 3 active projects rather than 8, where 5 of those 8 are ill-defined such that you get distracted by “what am I even doing here?”
As such, keeping projects in a “Planning” state until they have a well-defined scope is critical. Any live project should have a clear goal/objective. If it doesn’t, well, you are probably going to waste a lot of time staring at it instead of getting stuff done!
By leaving things in “Planning” they can hang around, and then you can take a step back at a time and figure out “what exactly do I want to get out of these projects?” but batch that work rather than confuse it with “I need to get stuff done” time.
Use the Mode You Are In
I broadly have four modes that I’ve found myself in:
Strategic - wanting to plan things at a high-level, brainstorm new things to do/try
Tactical - wanting to outline specific steps or the how of a given project or projects
Get Shit Done - wanting to clear a bunch of work/to-do’s off of my plate
Lazy - mentally tired not wanting to do any of the above
My general mindset is just to try to use the mode you are in. Don’t try to fight it too much, at least. There’s plenty of time in a day or a week to have stretches of each and as long as you use them effectively, you’ll end up doing pretty well.
Specifically, I often feel like I should be in the “Get Shit Done” mode more often. But time spent in each of the other 3 modes actually helps ensure that your “Get Shit Done” time is effective.
So that is what I’m focused on from a productivity standpoint in 2025. I’m particularly excited about how the project setup and focus on actually getting projects through to completion is looking and how it provides the right incentives for me.
But what about you? I’d love to hear what your methods are in 2025 or what lessons you’ve learned, so leave a comment below!