Spending time wisely

I have been doing some self-reflection recently, and I have found a really critical issue with my productivity. I was working incredibly hard—pushing myself to the extreme—but I didn't spend enough time understanding what the most valuable thing to work on actually was.

It’s easy to fall into doing unnecessary work just because we are more comfortable with it than the actual important task. But you know what? I think I'm usually able to sense which one must be done, but avoiding it is just so easy. It’s dangerous, because at the end of the day, everything gets blocked and all I'm left with is unfinished work. So the correction is to trust my gut more and stop delaying the work that I know I must do.

The problem was, I didn't know how I could pick the right things. It felt like a chicken-and-egg problem for me. So, I made a small tweak in my decision-making flow to help increase my confidence in each action. Before deciding to work on something, I now take a short pause to consider all the related knowledge and possibilities I can think of. If my initial decision still seems like the best one, despite the uncertainty, then I have to move forward with it. For me, most of my early decisions felt absolutely wrong, but I could feel my confidence compounding each time I tried.

I have tested many ways to prioritize my personal tasks, from complicated Notion templates to task management software like Linear, Trello, etc. Those worked in some ways, but they created a lot of overhead and complexity when I just wanted to mark things as done.

For me, the best and fanciest system is just a note and a few bullet points that I can jot down, jamming anytime in free form. What’s most important isn't the system or tool I use, but the discipline of narrowing down my priority list to just two or three lines. This helps me avoid context overload and stay focused.

Knowing how to spend time wisely for me is the most effective and essential skill to go forward. It’s of course difficult most of the time, but even small, constant improvements over the course of years will be compounded into something really big.