My top productivity tools and tricks for managing my daily workflow (2022 edition)

The boy

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Once I have coffee in hand, I navigate the puppy's tower defense strategy for the morning, trying not to get my toes bit, spill my coffee, or step on one of his well-chewed stuffed animal friends. Eventually, I reach the couch, flip on my couch-side monitor, and once again check my email.

At this point, I tend to take note of what's in my inbox, but I neither process it, nor respond to it. I want to let the coffee take hold.

I also take a quick look at my calendar and my to-do list to make sure I know what's on deck for the day.

Daily must-reads with Pocket

Next up, I hit my daily most-reads. Of course, this starts with ZDNet, then usually Drudgeand Techmeme. I do a quick headline scan and anything that seems worth reading, I right-click and save to Pocket.

Because I've already selected the articles from my top sources, I can open up Pocket and start reading. I like this a lot, because I now have all my content in one location.

What's particularly nice about Pocket is that it runs on not only my couch-side web browser and on Chrome, but there are versions of Pocket for iOS and Android. As a result, I can read articles anywhere -- even in the necessarium or when I'm out and about.

Part of my morning flow is posting to the social networks. Unfortunately, this has changed. It used to be that whenever I found an article that was interesting in my Pocket collection, I tapped the Share icon in Pocket and then selected Buffer. Buffer then took the article, scheduled it, and posted it to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Two clicks and I used to be able shared something interesting.

But Facebook broke that. Facebook no longer allows tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to to post to personal Facebook pages. I've spent years building up my personal Facebook page following and don't want to start a corporate page (or orphan all my followers), so when Facebook broke auto-posting, it hurt. Now, I hand post to Twitter and then do it again on Facebook. LinkedIn gets a lot less attention, and, frankly, I post less frequently.

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Another aspect of my morning reading that's changed is I no longer save articles to Evernote. I used to save off articles that would serve me for either projects I'm working on or general research resources. While I use Evernote to write articles, I no longer use Evernote as my hub of everything. Pocket handles archived articles just fine. And Notion (more on that later) handles notes.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

I'm relatively holistic about my morning reading process. I do it until I'm bored or hungry, or feel like switching gears and moving on to managing my email and schedule.

The key point to all of this is that ever since I moved to this Pocket-read-post-archive cycle for my daily reading, my productivity and flexibility has gone up tremendously. I'm getting more done, and the quality of the process is far more pleasant. I'm no longer tied to my desktop browser, because all of these tools work on all my devices.

Connecting and scheduling

Assuming there's nothing on fire that I've had to handle first thing, at some point during the morning, I'll switch from reading to communicating. I'll switch out of Pocket and into Gmail and work my way through my email.

Gmail does a great job of filtering out spam, but I'll go through the Updates and Promotions tabs and delete or mark-as-spam anything that's not necessary. This is usually a pretty fast cleanup.

Sometimes, there's something in my Updates section that indicates there's an action item. For example, if one of my websites has pushed out a security warning, depending on the severity I'll either go right to work fixing the problem or sending the email to Todoist as a to-do item.

This is where the integration of Todoist

I just think of those users like more of my students. If any questions show up in my inbox, I go into the ticketing system and answer questions. I'm not assigning users letter grades, but otherwise the process is pretty much the same.

By the way, this is also a great way to think about users, which I initially was a bit unhappy about adding to my daily workload. But the reframe is this: I'm an educator and these are more people in need of assistance while they're learning to use these plugins. So, rather than thinking about providing user support as an added workload, I think of the users as more of my students and their questions as simply more teaching opportunities. It's also a great way to keep up on what people are doing out there, and gives me a much more "on the street" dialog with users, which is invaluable as a tech journalist.

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Here's another little trick I use: I get a lot of feature requests (which I call "cool feature ideas") from the plugin users. The go into the bug tracking system I manage in Notion.

To-doing my to-do list

By this point, I'm usually most of the way through the morning. My email has been processed and actions have been moved to my to-do list and schedule items to my calendar. I've done a considerable amount of reading, and I'm up to speed on the various issues I'm responsible for following. I've graded students and supported users (and added any bugs or key follow-up items to my to-do list).

Now, it's time to tackle the to-do items. Like Pocket and Gmail, Todoist runs on my phone, my tablets, and on my desktop in a browser window. It even runs on my Apple Watch. So I can organize and manage my to-do items from anywhere.

The very first thing I do is go down the list and move items around. Some items are no longer a today priority, while some have increased in priority. I have some repeating tasks (like grading students for each of my sections) that pop up when they need to.

Before I go on to the rest of my day, which is doing my to-do tasks and slowly migrating into project time, I'll tell you my newest secret weapon for managing to-do items: Notion. I used to use Trello to do this, but hit a couple of walls. Notion, which is a bit new and a bit weird, has a whole pile of possibilities.

Also: Notion app review: Why (and how) I rely on this powerful productivity tool

Notion solves a classic to-do list problem: Too many items on the to-do lists. We all suffer from this practice, where anything that might have to be done, even someday items and "I'll get to it when I can" items, future project ideas, and all the rest all wind up on the to-do list as low-priority items that fill the list to the brim.

Some days are spent merely taking all those items that were previously scheduled for the, say, 15th of next month, and moving them to the following month once again.

I gave this problem a lot of thought and realized there are items I need to do, that are actionable in the near term, and items that just need to be on a list somewhere, that have no specific priority.

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I've also set up Notion pages for each 3D printer, and for managing and tracking my reviews and video projects. It's great as a catch-all for lots of details, but unlike previous catch-alls like Evernote, Notion allows you to assign some structure and layout to the stuff you're working with.

Blocking out time for my projects

I use Notion for managing the details of my projects, but I visualize them using Google Calendar. I have three special calendars I set up: DG Planner, Planner Tentative, and Project Due.

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