I Read A Lot Of Productivity Books, And These Are The Three Best

My fourth grade teacher, Ms. Skinner, was a strong advocate of “organization.” Within the first week of the school year, she noticed my over-stuffed backpack, the vast assortment of unidentifiable miscellany falling out of my desk, and the papers spilling out of my three-ring binder. Ms. Skinner decided that I needed to get organized. It took me about twenty years to realize that she was right.

I don’t remember the details of Ms. Skinner’s system, but I do know that I didn’t like it one bit. In fact, I rebelled against it so strongly that I refused to even consider a systematic approach to stuff-management until decades later. As a kid, it was easy to be functional while messy; as an adult, I realized that being a slob creates way more stress than it avoids.

Even in the pre-internet era, there was no shortage of advice about how to be more organized and productive. The problem is that most of the advice is of the, “this is what worked for me” variety, consisting of systems that some individual developed over time, but are so complex that for someone else to adopt them is unsustainable. I would put Franklin Covey’s time-management system, and the modern trend of “bullet journaling” in this category. They look simple and elegant, and they obviously work for some people, but I find them so counter-intuitive to learn and cumbersome to maintain that they just add another set of obligations to an already over-filled list of chores. Call me crazy, but shouldn’t a system for…