My Professional Productivity System

Strategies and tools to manage my work day

• 10 min read

Tags: productivity career leadership

Generated by GPT-5

I've spent the better part of the past decade as a technology professional, moving up and across multiple roles of software engineering and leadership. Through the years, I've built up and refined a personal set of organizational tools and processes that I feel has grown with me through my career and continues to drive consistent, positive outcomes for me.

Core Strategies

My professional organizational system is founded in a few core tools that are used in specific processes for highly targeted objectives.

  • Low friction in and out of the system (i.e add an item to the todo and identify what to do next)
  • Quick setup and zero maintenance
  • Maximizing delegation of mental load

These objectives weren't something I started the process with, rather they naturally emerged as I built my processes around the core things I found necessary to be successful and scale my productivity as my scope of responsibility grew.

Tools

The shortlist of tools and processes that I will expand on below goes as follows:

  • TODO List that is synced across all devices with low friction in and out and basic additions like scheduled task recurrence and "follow-up" statuses
  • Email flagging for follow-up action
  • Slack chat reminders and TODO list integration
  • Written Notes
  • Visual Notes
  • Calendar

TODO List

Let's start with the backbone of my productivity system. If it's not on the todo list, there's no guarantee it's getting done. I've managed to build a pretty strong habit of putting things into my todo list the moment a task becomes my responsibility, no matter how insignificant or quick I feel it might be. If you're ever having a conversation with me and an action item hits my plate, it's very common for me to pause and vocalize as I add an item to my todo list before continuing the conversation. The top priority "features" of my todo list include:

  • Quick accessibility to the task inbox anywhere anytime so I can document tasks as they come to me in a single action (Alt-tab to another window and hotkey press or two taps on my phone)
  • Automatic syncing across all my commonly used devices (primarily my work laptop and personal phone)
  • Option to add notes and subtasks on entries (sometimes the task needs additional context to effectively recall and act on)
  • Option to mark a task as needing a "follow-up" and filter on those tasks (In the case that I'm waiting on a dependency or delegated it to someone else but am still accountable for it)
  • Ability to have tasks that repeat, on a weekly or monthly basis
  • Ability to set priority order and deadlines for tasks

Email

Moving on to what some might consider the necessary evil that I've had to wrangle into my process. While many organizations might have shirked off email as a primary means of asynchronous communication, it remains a core necessity for smooth cross functional communication for my work. The volume of emails I receive daily has increased linearly with my scope of responsibility while the percentage of emails I actually need to spend focused time on reading or responding to has steadily shrunk. I'm also a stickler of maintaining my inbox at zero unreads. This leaves me in a scenario where I'm able to scan through my unread emails in a fairly short amount of time but I need to set aside a small subset of emails for later action.

I leverage the "flag email" function as a way to mark these emails that I have read and identified as requiring a follow-up of some kind. Filtering on these marked emails presents me with another neatly organized todo list of sorts where the default order of priority is in reverse chronological order. I typically don't let this list of flagged emails grow to more than a handful of entries and generally I like to close out actions for flagged emails within the same work week.

Slack

Working remotely, a majority of my communications and related organization happens via my primary, asynchronous chat software: Slack. Luckily for me, there is a growing suite of productivity tools that integrate easily within Slack. I find myself spending more time in the software and looking for every opportunity to consolidate another one of my productivity tools into it. This, like email and my calendar, is primarily driven by the network effect that most of my coworkers are also on Slack.

Like my email inbox, I aim to have zero unread messages in Slack to a fault. This necessitates a couple of techniques to ensure that something I read that requires an action doesn't get forgotten. First and simplest is the Reminder. I most commonly will use the "remind me in 3 hours" feature if I can't get to a reply immediately but expect I could later that day. If someone can wait till tomorrow or the following week, I set the reminder with the conveniently available options accordingly. In the case that I need to review all the items I've set reminders for, I just go to the "Later" tab in my Slack sidebar as another list of todos to review as needed. For scenarios where the follow-up action might be more complex or take more focused time, I use the "Send to List" feature where the list in question is my TODO list mentioned above.

Written Notes

My private written notes are, for the most part, a minimally organized spread of markdown documents that I author and index via my current note-taking app of choice: Obsidian (coincidentally it is where I'm writing this post, as it is also my primary tool for digital writing).

This is the part of my productivity system that I've spent the least amount of time refining since its usually where I spend the least amount of time focusing or referring back to during my work week. This might be a side-effect of my working style being relatively shallow in its day-to-day cadence, focused mainly on information and decision making I'm able to manage mentally or via delegation. Yet without the repository of critical information available for quick additions and recall, there would be a significant gap in my overall system and would add enough mental overhead to cause other parts of my system to begin to fall short.

Most of my notes live at the root level of my Obsidian vault. There are only a few top-level folders I use with no secondary level of organization to any of them:

  • 1 on 1s: A single note per individual I have recurring 1 on 1s with. These get used most with my direct reports and reporting manager, with whom I meet at least once a week
  • Weekly status updates: dated entries with aggregated and summarized updates from all the teams and projects I manage
  • Recurring meeting agendas: for tracking topics of discussion for meetings I have on a weekly or monthly cadence

For public note taking, I have been increasing my use of Slack Canvases for written documents that serve a more collaborate purpose. It similarly supports native markdown syntax and integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Slack ecosystem of features. The lack of any sort of hierarchy or grouping function hints at the limited scalability of this feature over long periods of time. I am weary that the process of exporting notes out of a set of Canvases will probably be frictionful, so I try to keep evergreen notes that I expect to refer back to in the long term in Obsidian and isolate Slack Canvas notes to only those who's purpose is primarily for sharing and asynchronous collaboration.

Visual Notes

In some cases, visual notetaking is a better fit for the topic I'm trying to articulate for myself or share with others. I'm a big proponent of the "boxes and arrows" method to translate a concept that is best captured visually rather than in spoken or written words.

I maintain a single "public whiteboard canvas" in Miro split up into multiple, independent, simply-titled Frames where the content of each frame is analogous to a moment where I might have grabbed a marker and scribbled an aforementioned set of boxes and arrows on a whiteboard. The main difference and sometimes advantage of this exercise happening in an easily sharable and digitized space first is that I don't have to worry about taking a poorly lit smartphone picture of the whiteboard at the conclusion of the discussion where the only shareable artifact is the photo, then copied and pasted ad-hoc when needing to be recalled.

I also have a private version of this infinite canvas where I can do similar exercises but for scenarios where the topic might be private only to me or sharable to a select set of individuals.

I'm trying to find a method to effectively index all of these individual whiteboard frames and bring them into the quickly searchable context of my other written notes which I can already fuzzy search through via Obsidian's command pallet in a few keystrokes. I'm aware of Obsidian's Canvas feature which might serve the purpose but I need to explore further to determine how the use case of sharing with coworkers would work.

Calendar

My calendar is primarily used to determine when my time is occupied with meetings as an opposite tool to my todo list. My days are generally organized into either "meeting time" or "task time" which I further subdivide into periods of long focused work, short task time, or breaks depending how my day or week is playing out. I haven't found much value in scheduling my day further than with respect to the time that I explicitly need to coordinate a meeting with one or more other people, most commonly my coworkers.

If I'm scheduling meeting time with my coworkers, which is the majority of my scheduled meeting time, then it falls to my trusty Outlook calendar, which I've used for years for no other reason than it's what my coworkers are using. If the meeting time has something to do with my personal life, then I'm reaching for my Google calendar.

The day is usually peppered with enough unexpected interruptions or meetings that extend past scheduled time to where this ability to flex the rough edges of the schedule naturally became one of the things I needed the other parts of my process to accommodate for. If I have a block of time that isn't for a meeting, I can simply switch over to one of my todo lists and pick off whatever task is highest priority that I judge I can complete or make significant progress in the time I have. If nothing jumps out from the todo list or my brain is simply indicating that this time would be better spent not doing anything specifically productive, then its time for a break.

What's Next

I've become comfortable with the reality that everything I've mentioned above is far from some "ultimate" productivity system I'd see myself using for the rest of my career and life. This is a snapshot of what is working for me today, and with it I have a few things I would still like to make a bit smoother in my process to serve my core objectives.

  • (As mentioned above) Indexing and cataloging my visual notes so they are easily searchable in a single context along with my other written notes
  • Moving my todo list into a native text-based format with basic automation to support the critical integrations and features critical to my process integration (todo.txt is an interesting foundation for this idea)
  • Bringing my private and public written notes into a single system without sacrificing the outcomes of frictionless collaboration and continued easy indexing
  • Explore ways to integrate LLMs into the corpus of all these tools and begin to create more advanced automations to continue to offload menial mental load to the system and free up brain space for higher order thinking