From Chaos to Control: How to Get Stuff Done in a Distracted World

One of my good friends was asking, "I am struggling with planning and scheduling and getting shit done. On one hand, there's you with everything documented and figured out and scheduled. Then there's this other guy with the phone always on and random texts and messages. My urge is to follow a Sokol path but life is asking me to be more like this other guy.

Any suggestions?"

I personally felt my advice was something that could help a lot of other people, so here is what I told them:

"In general, the first step would be to get everything out of your head and into one single project management system. Trello, Monday, ClickUp, anything.

Anything and everything that needs to be done needs to end up in that system. And that system is what needs to be where you go to find out what work to do.

At the ground level, a great place to start is to have your phone live in Do Not Disturb mode. And then only allow the most important people to actually text/ring through. For me, unless you are Kiah, my mom/dad, or one of my two best friends in the entire world, you can wait.

Keeping one's inbox clean and self-organizing is a big discipline to develop as well. The only things that should hit your inbox are things that actually warrant your attention.

And it should only warrant your attention once. When you open an email, you need to quickly get good at making the decision whether or not the email:

* Needs a reply (but not necessarily now).

* Needs you to do something (but not necessarily now).

* Should not have hit your inbox in the first place.

If it needs a reply/todo, flag it as either (or both) and move to the next thread. If it should NOT have shown up in your inbox in the first place, get in the habit to quickly build a new filter/rule to get those messages automatically into some label/folder and out of your inbox.

Then, reply to emails in batches. And move things to do into your project management tool in batches. Unless you can complete the task in less than 2 mins, it needs to go into your project management tool.

Lastly, for right now anyway, become a master of having the minimum number of programs and browser windows open at any time. Not only does having a bunch of shit open bog down your machine, it also bogs down your own mental RAM.

Close all those programs. Close all those browser tabs. Get really good at only having the things open that truly need to be open for the task at hand. And become a master at closing things when you are done.

As far as follow up, like your email, there needs to be a system. For example, with Slack, you need to get good at quickly picking through unread stuff, being able to quickly respond, and moving action items into your project management tool ASAP. If you need to, Pin action items as they show up and get in the Habit of going through your pins often to move things out of the noise and into a meaningful system.

Deep links are also your best friend. Bookmark as far down the URL path as you can. Are you in a FB conversation with someone about some action item? Deep link to that thread directly from your project management tool listing for that action item.

Do you have regular places you need to check? Bookmark as far down the URL path as you can go and open the whole folder of bookmarks to sweep things in batches.

Shortcut keys are also your best friend. The more your hands can stay in one place, the faster you can move."

What do you think?