How do you stay focused and prioritize?
Indie Hackers usually juggles many things - sometimes it's hard to prioritize. Truth is small systems, if applied, give great results over time.
I'm making this post to share what I've been using and get more insights into simple things others leverage that helps them.
For me, the key is to keep it simple so you know you’ll actually follow through.
I came across a simple focusing tactic Jack Dorsey used to build two +$10bn businesses and it has been helping me a lot.
On a Startup School speech in 2013, the Twitter founder went over books that inspired him.
From “The Score Takes Care of Itself”, Jack took this simple lesson: make lists.
The book itself is structured like that: a series of lists of what to do, and what not to do.
During the speech, he asks the audience to bring out their phones and create a note called “Daily”. There, you’d write the word “Do” and the word “Don’t”.
Every single day, you’ll wake up to this note, check it throughout the day and before you go to sleep.
In it, you’ll put:
Do: what you want to do every single day
Don’t: what you see yourself having the impulse to, but don’t want to do daily.
The best part of the speech is when Jack reads what’s on his list. I put it on the cover picture so you can see what he actually sees.
As he said, “having this allows you to ignore all noise and focus on what’s important". This can be applied not only for our personal life, but also as a team.
Outlining those give us clarity and allows us to make the most of time.
What is your system to stay focused throughout the day/week? Any tips, apps, habits...
I love this, thanks for sharing.
For a long time, I used bullet journaling in a physical notebook to keep track of all the things and stay focused.
Over time, I adapted that process into digital form using the markdown app Bear. For the most part now, I keep a single "Log" note that I update each day with an entry like this:
5/11/W
I move one item from Later into Now at a time. When interruptions pop up (as they often do), it's easy for me to remember what I was trying to get done before moving onto the next thing. And once that thing is done, I reprioritize the Later list and move the next most important thing into Now. If anything is left in Later at the end of the day, it gets moved into the next day's entry or deleted.
That's interesting! Do you feel any difference between keeping things online X on a physical notebook? Or same level of productivity? I guess there's something about writing physically that a lot of people like.
For me, much more productivity after moving things online.
I liked the physical notebook (stuck with it for ~4 years), but the advantages I've experienced since switching are:
It's been ~6 years since I made the switch to digital and I haven't looked back 🙂
Got it! Been using Notion for most things, but I keep a notebook on my side just to write stuff in an unstructured way.