Planning for Productivity in 2023

2022 was a pretty good year for me. I accomplished a number of my goals (such as finishing my MS requirements!), and I improved in a number of personal and professional areas. However, organization and planning has always been a slightly weaker point for me, and I’m working to remedy that this year by investing in a number of productivity tools and systems that I’m hoping will help me to accomplish my goals for 2023! This article is as much for myself as others as I trial what does and doesn’t work for me in an effort to build systems that will allow me to be more productive, grounded, and centered than I’ve ever been!

Daily Habits

Daily habits form the foundation of long-term goals. In an effort to build better daily habits, I am using the Streaks App. What I love most about the app is its simplicity. It allows you to set daily goals and tracks basic statistics on your accomplishment of those goals on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. I also love that the app is available as a one-time $5 purchase rather than as an indefinite subscription. The app caps you at 24 habits, which is honestly a good thing. In the past, I’ve tried to set far too many daily habits simultaneously, which has led to inconsistency and poor long-term habit adoption. I currently have only 12 daily habits set, 4 of which are passive (e.g. don’t drink coffee). I’m hoping to pare down the remaining 8 habits to the 4 or 5 most essential and only begin to add more once I’ve consistently adhered to those.

Fiction and Nonfiction Reading

As usual, I plan to track my reading progress on my Goodreads. I’ve set a goal to read 30 books this year, about 50% more ambitious than the 19 books I managed to read last year.

Writing

I plan to use Scrivener to help me accomplish my daily writing goals. As I’m working on a novel, Scrivener allows me to set daily word count writing targets as well as global project targets. This year I’m setting a daily word count target of 1,000 words and a project target of 100,000 words. I also am targeting writing at least one blog post per week, although that may be difficult to accomplish on top of my other writing-related goals.

Academic Literature and Notetaking

I’m using Notion to track academic papers and articles that I’d like to read, as well as to take notes about said articles. I also hope to use it as a miscellaneous tracker for Youtube videos, webpages, and other educational content that I’d like to consume.

Strava

As always, I will be using Strava to track my running, biking, weight training, and yoga activities.

Letterboxd

I’m hoping to make a habit of consuming more meaningful content in 2023. This means watching meaningful films rather than mindless TV series. I will be tracking the films I’ve watched (and want to watch) on Letterboxd.