Mike Sturm

Getting More Out of It

The system isn’t perfect. No system built by a single person is. But it’s worked well for me and continues to, and a handful of practices have made the difference. These are worth reading once you’ve run the card for a couple of weeks and it’s started to feel routine.

Name tasks with Verb | Noun | Details

Your card each day is only as good as the items you put on it. It’s not just which projects you’re working on, or the order you put them in — though those matter. A sneaky element that can make or break how effective you are is how those items are worded.

The formula: start with a verb, apply it to a noun, then add the details.

Analyze the margin report to find issues and email them to the group

Notice how actionable that is. It tells you what to do, so it’s clear how to start and clear when you’re done. Contrast it with:

Margin report

I knew what I meant when I wrote it. But knee-deep in the day, it becomes much less clear. “Margin report” might even be what I wrote because I don’t yet know what needs doing about the margin report — which spells trouble for getting it done, and trouble for getting the points.

Use time-blocking to break through stuck items

If an item keeps going on your card and you keep failing to do it, it’s easy to get frustrated and want to give up. You’re taking half points, or zero, day after day.

This is where time-blocking helps. Instead of the task, put the time on the card: spend at least 45 minutes on the rough draft. That’s easy to hit, so you get the points. And in most cases, once you’ve actually spent that time on something, you’re much further along than you expected to be — which motivates you to keep going.

Keep a lifetime score

The daily and weekly scores are the core of the system. The daily score keeps you motivated to put in the effort today. Watching how daily scores roll up into the week keeps you improving week over week.

But the strongest motivator, for me, is the lifetime score: the running total of every point earned divided by every point possible, across all the days you’ve used the system. The scorekeeping sheet calculates it for you.

The thought of nudging that one number a little higher makes me both choose more wisely what goes on the card and work harder to finish it. Mine has gone up and down over the years — after a dip, bringing it back to .750 became its own small project.

Don’t skip the reflection

Beyond the lists of what you still have to do, keeping track of your daily and weekly score is only useful if you actually look at it. Each day, enter your score and ask: how did it go? What happened? How do I feel about this, and what is it telling me about tomorrow?

At the end of each week, calculate the cumulative score, compare it to last week, and ask three questions:

  • How did the week go in general?
  • What contributed to my change in score versus last week?
  • What do I need to focus on in the coming week to sustain my score or improve it?

Don’t underestimate this step, or fail to allocate time for it. If you’re going to get better at anything, reflection is a necessary part of the journey. Reflect on how things went, why they went that way, and what you’ll do differently. Without that, a productivity system isn’t quite complete.

Give each project a Log, a Plan, and Notes

For projects that are more involved and require many different actions, it helps to keep three things alongside the project itself, whatever you track projects in:

  • Log — a record of what’s happened. When you had a meeting about it, when you hit a milestone. Date each entry.
  • Plan — free space to think in words and develop your tentative future actions, before they become next actions on your S3 list.
  • Notes — everything else worth keeping with the project.

The Log in particular earns its keep. Months later, it’s the difference between remembering why a project stalled and guessing.

Plug it into whatever you already use

Everyone has their own productivity journey, and most include adopting some system along the way. The Today System is built so you can plug it into almost any of them.

If you’re running GTD, add the practice of tagging projects #G or #NG depending on whether they serve your goals, and make that tagging part of your weekly review. Focus on the #G projects, and see whether the #NG ones can move to someday/maybe or go away entirely.

If you’re running a Bullet Journal, keep your monthly, future, and daily logs as they are. Hashtag tasks where they sit in the daily log, and add them to the S3 list based on when you think you’ll get to them — today, the next few days, this week, or next week and later. Then use the card and the scoring system to track how well you’re doing against whatever your journal captured.

I’ve kept tinkering with what I’ve scaffolded around the card, the S3 list, and the scorekeeping sheet. At the moment I combine elements of GTD — projects, the incubator, the weekly review — with elements of the Bullet Journal Method, in particular future logging and daily logging. All of it exists to feed the card each day.