One major thing I do when I’m trying to ‘kick it into the next gear’ is to mess around with the spreadsheet I use to track every aspect of my life that I care about.

Not all of my productivity improvements have been occasioned by spreadsheet improvements, but most have! For instance, my last major boost in productivity came about two years ago as a result of two fairly significant spreadsheet changes.

Right now, I set daily goals for myself in terms of: a) reading time; and b) writing time. And I’ve been very good at achieving both of those goals. What I am thinking about doing is creating two more categories: c) revision time; and d) other task time (time allocated to work on some other task that I’ll also determine beforehand).

Not entirely sure if this will work. It might end up being too much to track. The benefit, as I see it, is that I can write one project and revise something else, and, thus, eliminate the conflict between the two priorities. Additionally, I’ll finally be able to formally make room in my schedule for all the freelance / consulting work that I do which otherwise gets neglected.

The first step in carrying this out was to divide the daily log on my spreadsheet into two separate sheets. The first I call my “Project Log” and the second is my “Lifestyle Log.” On the second, I track all the things I measure which don’t require any time commitment on my part (i.e. what I eat, whether I write a blog post, whether I’ve hit snooze today). And on the progress log, I’m going to track the four items above (i.e. my four big time expenditures on any given day). Still not sure exactly how this will work in practice, but we’ll see!