Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity
A new journaling tactic that immediately kills procrastination and boosts creative insights.
Here’s the basic idea: instead of tracking your work with a to-do list, track your work with a journal.
For this tactic, journaling in Evernote or Notepad is fine. A paper journal would be fine too. The difference is going to come down to taste — the journal option that you find more enjoyable is the one you’re more likely to keep using.
During your day, journal every time you transition from one work project to another. Write a few sentences in your journal about what you just did, and then a few more sentences about what you’re about to do.
A project transition is when you make a switch: from checking email, to preparing a presentation, to attending a project status meeting, and then back to checking email. Each of these is a project in your day, and the times between them are interstitial moments when you should write in a journal.
For example:
9:37am.
Finished email to Nik about writing another article for us. I probably don’t need to follow up. Also, part of my mind is still wondering if I should have suggested a topic to him.Now, switching over to writing an article. What’s my next action? Oh. Just open Medium. The article is going to flow easily once I get the intro down. I should steel myself for having to rewrite that intro a few dozen times.
Damn. That’s a lot more work than just checking off a checkbox in my Wunderlist:
Here’s the quick pitch for what Interstitial Journaling does for your productivity, procrastination, and creativity.
We weren’t built for multi-tasking, so transitions between projects are very tough. We end up getting lost in procrastination. Even when we manage to transition quickly into our next project, our brain is still thinking about the last project.
